Recommended Reading
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, in a story by Akhil Sharma that will leave you devastated, an Indian woman in an arranged marriage wakes one day to discover that she loves her husband. “If You Sing Like That for Me,” originally published in…
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This Week in Short Fiction
The PEN America World Voices Festival, a weeklong international literary festival that focuses on human rights, is ongoing in New York City this week, and this year’s theme of gender and power seems more pertinent and urgent than ever. While…
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This Week in Short Fiction
In a political climate in which undocumented immigrants are painted as criminals and rapists and half the country is crying for deportation, this week’s story reminds us that immigrants are fathers who love their daughters, who work hard and send…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week at Recommended Reading, PEN America offers an excerpt from Brazilian author Noemi Jaffe’s novel Írisz: as orquídeas, which is remarkable for many reasons, one of them being that this is so far the only opportunity to read part of…
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This Week of Short Fiction
New motherhood: it’s common but totally strange, completely natural yet weirdly alien, a beautiful miracle and absolutely disgusting. It can also have some strong effects on a woman’s perception of self and identity, as Helen Phillips (The Beautiful Bureaucrat) explores…
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The 200 Club
Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading has put out its 200th issue, and to celebrate, they’re watching television. Or, thinking about watching television by revisiting the 200th episodes of classic sitcoms: J. Robert Lennon on The Cosby Show, Rob McCleary on The Love Boat, Morgan…
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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
You can count on One Story as a sort of literary sieve, distilling story-sized servings of up-and-coming writers we should know, and soon enough will know, if we don’t know them already. Next week, One Story will host its annual Literary…
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Peter Orner at Recommended Reading
She’d been ready to do her part for the war effort. Out of appreciation and gratitude and patriotism. All those hours on that terrible ship. Now what Seymour wanted was love, and she couldn’t possibly give that to him. For…
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The Rumpus Interview with Halimah Marcus and Benjamin Samuel
Halimah Marcus and Benjamin Samuel, the co-editors of Recommended Reading, discuss the ins and outs of editing an ambitious literary project.
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“Our Education”
I think that most of us believe that time doesn’t really exist outside of the school. Or at least we act like it does not. This is to say, we know that in theory there was life before the school…
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Clarice Lispector
“But what if there were no one around with whom to reach an agreement about the meaning of a word? What if the thing you’re trying to express can’t really be understood by anyone else?” Sarah Gerard looks at Wittgenstein,…