short fiction
-
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Jensen Beach
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Jensen Beach about his short story collection Swallowed by the Cold, suburbia in Sweden, quiet racism, and writing a series of connected short stories.
-
This Week in Short Fiction
In a darkly humorous new story at n+1, Jen George questions the qualifications of being “adult,” gives thirty-somethings across the world nightmares, and packs in plenty of social criticism while she’s at it. The story, “Guidance/The Party,” follows a single,…
-
Writer’s Writers Writing
At Electric Literature, Amber Sparks writes about the short story as the critically darling but commercially nonviable art form it is—and how we need to stop telling short story writers to write novels.
-
This Week in Short Fiction: Goodnight, Beautiful Women by Anna Noyes
[Noyes’s] stories are nuanced and unapologetic, revealing the shadow sides of women and girls in all their wild and terrible glory.
-
“Seven People Dancing”
The New Yorker hosted a discussion about a previously unpublished Langston Hughes short story with Arnold Rampersand, who wrote a two-volume biography of the Harlem Renaissance poet, and first discovered the unpublished story thirty years ago. The story, “Seven People Dancing,”…
-
Sleeping with Monsters
Late the next night a noise roused me from my sleep—wailing and cursing and then banging, more banging than ever, both fists full-force against the plaster. Filtered through the sleep haze, I couldn’t make sense of the commotion. Rion Amilcar…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
Thomas Pierce made a name for himself as a talented spinner of strange stories with his debut collection Hall of Small Mammals, and in a new story at The Masters Review, Pierce crafts another weird and wonderful tale—and this time…
-
Rumpus Original Fiction: On Documentation
What is it like to be you? he was always asking, in his way, and it seemed a stupid question then. I didn’t know. I could lie better than I could tell the truth. I hadn’t left yet.
-
The Comma Splice: A Popular Short Story Blunder
At Electric Literature, Kelly Luce reflects on the patterns she noticed after reading for The O. Henry Prize Stories anthology. Her observations range from recent literary magazine innovations to her frustrations with the “inordinate number” of comma splices in first…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
This was the trouble with bringing a gun to work: you couldn’t stop thinking about it. This understatement comes from “Rutting Season,” a story by Mandeliene Smith in this week’s new issue of Guernica that flirts with every office worker’s…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
British author Mark Haddon is best known for his smash hit of a first novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but he’s far from a one-hit wonder. He’s penned two other novels, numerous youth titles, a…
-
Rumpus Original Fiction: Service Area
Even though the summer customers were the worst, always impatient on their way west to the places of her dreams, she envied them.