short fiction
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This Week in Short Fiction
With Halloween a scant three days away, it’s the perfect time to curl up with some spooky fiction and get yourself delightfully creeped out. But this week’s story doesn’t rely on your standard witches and vampires and werewolves, all easily dismissed…
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Rumpus Original Fiction: How to Become a Tiger
Tigers are bigger than my comprehension. That’s what I want. I want to be bigger than I am, so big I can’t even imagine it, so real I can’t ever be misinterpreted.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jonathan Corcoran
Jonathan Corcoran discusses his debut collection The Rope Swing, Appalachian writing communities, getting disowned by his family for coming out, and his father’s death.
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This Week in Short Fiction
Sometimes, literary magazines fold. It happens all the time because of funding, or manpower, or editorial differences. Usually, print back issues remain for sale and online content is preserved indefinitely, or at least until someone forgets to renew the domain.…
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Short Story vs. Novel
Over at The Story Prize blog, Lynne Stegner, whose new collection, For All the Obvious Reasons, came out with Arcade Publishing in June 2016, has an apt description of narrative compression and the exquisite burden of the short story form: So…
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This Week in Short Fiction
What would you give to be happy, fun, anxiety-free? Would you give your soul? This is the question Deirdre Coyle asks in her story “Fun Person,” up at Hobart this week. The story opens with the narrator vomiting on the…
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The Rumpus Interview with Brian Booker
Brian Booker discusses his debut collection Are You Here For What I’m Here For?, giving characters strange and unusual names, and sleeping sickness.
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The Rumpus Interview with Abigail Ulman
Abigail Ulman talks about her debut collection Hot Little Hands, the limitations of the cultural narrative, her paralyzing pre-publication fears, and why she loves adolescent narrators.
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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…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, we all need a story with heart and teeth, a story that celebrates the glittering intelligence of women and the power of female friendship and dismantles the patriarchy while also being laugh-out-loud funny, a story with a happy…
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A Weird and Wonderful World
In a New York Times book review of Alexandra Kleeman’s short story collection, Intimations, Hermione Hoby writes: Like an alien intent on some meticulous anthropological mission on Earth, Alexandra Kleeman seems always to be encountering the world for the first…
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Don’t #Hate Me Bro
When it feels as though the whole world is out to get you, sometimes you have to sit back and let the absurdity wash over. In this satirical story by Tanner McSwain over at In Shades magazine, a bank teller…