short fiction
-
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…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
As the stump speeches and primary dates continue to roll on and thousands of Americans develop stress ulcers, Darcey Steinke delivers a humorous and terrifying vision of our dystopian future should Donald Trump win the presidential election. “The Blue Toes,”…
-
Short Revolution
Great novels also experiment and innovate, but a short story can make a never-before-seen formal leap and then peace out, before you’re even sure what’s happened. At Electric Literature, Rebecca Schiff introduces us to the authors who have revolutionized the…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
If you’re not yet aware of the online magazine Storychord, take this chance to get acquainted. Each issue features a short story, a piece of visual art, and a musical composition, which combine to make a sort of multimedia storytelling…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
The grief story: it’s sympathetic, moving, and even cathartic when done well. It’s also a trap for clichés, overwrought metaphors, sticky sentimentality, and hyperbole. Add that to the ubiquity of the grief story, and you get a subject that can…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
One of this year’s highly anticipated new novels is Jesse Ball’s How to Set a Fire and Why, forthcoming from Pantheon in July, about an intelligent and troubled teenage girl who takes an interest in arson. A standalone excerpt in…
-
Rumpus Original Fiction: As Soon as I Stop
I feel dizzy, but I’ve got the donkey’s tail in my hand and if I pin it just right, my whole life could change.
-
This Week in Short Fiction
This is supposed to be a story. This is the first sentence of “The Alive Sister,” a powerful new work of flash fiction by Megan Giddings published at The Offing on Monday. In it, two little black girls are playing…
-
Technology Gets Literary
Technology website CNET did something rather unexpected last week: it published fiction. “The Last Taco Truck in Silicon Valley” is the site’s first foray into literary fiction, part of a monthly series that editors hope will attract new readers to…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
What’s a witch? Green skin, warts, and broomsticks? A hag bent over a foul, steaming cauldron? A cold-blooded queen in a wardrobe? One thing’s for certain: witches are feared and powerful. And they’re women. Maybe being a witch isn’t so…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
On Tuesday, London-based journal The White Review dropped its third annual translation issue, which features a truly global range of voices from Israel to Indonesia, South Africa to Russia. Among them is a fascinating new story by Bolivian writer Liliana…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
The first books of 2016 are rolling off the presses this week, and among them is Samantha Hunt’s third novel, Mr. Splitfoot, which is already earning buzz for its prize-winning potential. It’s a modern gothic ghost story involving meteor craters,…