short story
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Fire, Magic, and Flash Fiction
At WhiskeyPaper, Linda Niehoff writes briefly and beautifully about fire and magic, hinting at post-apocalyptic worlds with lines like, “We’d spent long evenings sewing together old bedsheets and nightgowns, the last pillowcase.” “Elsewhere” brings to mind Ray Bradbury and autumn…
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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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A “Girl” and Her Mother
At The Millions, Naa Baako Ako-Adjei discusses reading Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” through the lens of her relationship with her own mother growing up, and her new understanding of the story fifteen years later: In my rereading of “Girl,” I also…
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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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Rumpus Original Fiction: State Facts for the New Age
“I’m a shock absorber for tragedy,” I say, not really knowing what I mean. “Maybe I should just move to Hawaii. I hear that’s a happy place to live.”
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Fiction Fitness
In Palmetto Landing, the men’s bodies existed in inverse proportion to those of their wives. Ahead of the publication of her much anticipated collection Difficult Women, out in January 2017, you can read Roxane Gay’s new short story “Group Fitness” over at Oxford…
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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.
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A Wife and a Challenger
Over at Catapult, read Patrick Ryan’s new short story “Go Fever,” about aerospace engineering, an attempted murder, and the Challenger’s explosion.
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A Room of Father’s Own
Every young’un thinks they’re a rebel. But we can only build what we know, and from the space we have. Lincoln Michel writes about family and spaces in a great new short story over at Catapult.
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Fifty and Bored
I’m going to eat my breakfast, then I’m going to go write up my murder report on two beefs, and then I’m going to fill out my usual nothing-happened-this-week report and send it to the state of Wyoming to be…
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Short Story Long
Over at the Guardian, Chris Powers tackles David Foster Wallace’s short stories, and their place within his body of work.