Posts by author
Claire Burgess
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This Week in Short Fiction
After ten long years without a new story collection from Joy Williams, we are finally rewarded this week with The Visiting Privilege, containing thirteen new stories and thirty-three stories collected from across Williams’s career. Williams is a writer’s writer, a storysmith of the…
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This Week in Short Fiction
If you’re a woman over the age of 25, you are familiar with the pressure to procreate. The parental inquiries of when you’ll be settling down, when you’ll give them grandkids. The friends on Facebook popping out babies like clockwork.…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Editing. It’s the most reviled step of the writing process. It’s where we do the backbreaking work of word-weeding, where we must dissociate from ourselves enough to see our work objectively, where we’re forced to kill our darlings. It’s the…
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This Week in Short Fiction
The last few weeks have been all about celebrating female masters of the short story. Earlier this month, we saw collections by Clarice Lispector and Shirley Jackson making waves in the literary swimming pool, and this week Lucia Berlin enters with…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, two underappreciated masters of the weird and uncanny are finally getting their due attention. That’s right, we’re talking about Clarice Lispector and Shirley Jackson, two literary powerhouses who wrote contemporaneously in different styles, different languages, even different hemispheres,…
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This Week in Short Fiction
When literary magazines publish “Women’s Issues,” they can run the danger of making women into a theme. As if fiction by and about women is a curiosity, something to enjoy for a moment, in one issue a year, before returning…
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This Week in Short Fiction
There is a common rule in fiction writing that you should never write about dreams. It’s engraved in stone right next to “burn all adverbs.” Dreams are a lazy way to show action that doesn’t happen, or even worse, to…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Revise your summer reading lists, ladies and gentlemen, because this week brought us new issues of Guernica and Asymptote to bump to the top of the pile. Asymptote delivers more of its consistently stunning literature in translation, including a haunting…
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This Week in Short Fiction
There are countless metaphors for love: a rose, a flame, a garden, a loaded gun, a battlefield. We’ve heard them all—or so we thought. This week at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Joyland editor Lisa Locascio recommended Amelia Gray’s story, “The…
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This Week in Short Fiction
If you’re looking for something to read over the Fourth of July weekend, you’re in luck. This week gave us brand-new issues of Virginia Quarterly Review and PANK to peruse in the beer-buzzed downtime between barbecues and fireworks. VQR’s summer issue…
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This Week in Short Fiction
In the wake of the Charleston church shooting last week and with Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev back in the news, the world seems full of nothing but hate and intolerance, violence, and terror. But as families of the Charleston…
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This Week in Short Fiction
On Tuesday, Knopf released In the Country, the much-anticipated first book by Mia Alvar. The story collection follows characters uprooted by the Filipino diaspora trying to find homes elsewhere or trying to come home again. Born in the Philippines and…