American Short Fiction
-
In the Spirit of Curiosity: Talking with Jamel Brinkley
Jamel Brinkley discusses his debut story collection, A LUCKY MAN.
-
Jets and Sharks of the Midwest
I may be a sixteen-year-old German-Irish girl living in flat Ohio, but West Side Story is a chute I slide down, and every day I’m a little more Marisol, working in a west-side dress shop and kissing Pepe on the…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 80s and 90s? These were the ones in which you, yes you, the reader, were the protagonist of the story. You made the decision to go into the mysterious cave or…
-
Treatment and Healing
Treatment sometimes looks like hospitalization in an overcrowded psych ward and medication that can dissolve personality. Over at American Short Fiction, Jenna Kahn writes about the depiction of mental illness in literature—as found particularly in “The Depressed Person” by David…
-
In Conversation with Sara Majka
If you’re delicate with people, if you listen to them just right and give them the space you think they need and are always kind to them, then that’s not closeness, not intimacy. But I can’t help it, I want…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
This week, we have two stories of time machines and space stations, but mostly of people who clean up messes. Amber Sparks’s second collection of short stories, The Unfinished World, published on Monday by Liveright, is a vivid and imaginative…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
This week, Okey-Pankey treated us to not one, but two flash fiction stories from Padgett Powell, whose third collection of short stories, Cries for Help, Various, is forthcoming this September as the first title from the new Electric Literature/Black Balloon…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
Monday marked Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce’s 732-page day-in-a-book, Ulysses. While this is hardly short fiction, Joyce is also often credited as one of the earliest practitioners of the epiphany, a technique that still burns bright in short…
-
New Fiction Confab on 4/13
Texas readers, this year’s New Fiction Confab in Austin looks completely irresistible. There will be talks with writers like Sam Lipsyte, Susan Steinberg, and Rumpus Book Club author Manuel Gonzales; creative-writing workshops for writers of all ages; and a lit fair…
-
A Virtual Tour of Austin Publishing
The Austin Chronicle has a nice roundup of the Austin publishing scene, from speculative-fiction journal Unstuck to a small press run by an ex-military spoken-word poet, to A Strange Object, the phoenix currently poised to rise from the ashes of American Short Fiction. It’s…
-
A Strange Object Is Born
Callie Collins and Jill Meyers, formerly of American Short Fiction, are starting a new project together: “A Strange Object is an independent press based in Austin, Texas, dedicated to publishing surprising, heartbreaking fiction in strange packages. We’re talking about fiction…
-
A Necessarily Incomplete But Hopefully Helpful List That Proves The Slush Pile Has a Pulse
A couple of weeks ago, I ranted against a Wall Street Journal article that proclaimed “The Slush Pile is Dead.” The slush pile, for those who are unfamiliar, is the name for the large amount of unsolicited writing that’s submitted…