this week in short fiction
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, Canadian-British author Alison MacLeod mixes fiction with fact and memoir with metaphysics in a short story about a visit to Sylvia Plath’s grave. At Lit Hub, “Sylvia Wears Pink in the Underworld” takes what could otherwise be an item…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, the art and literature magazine Paper Darts has a short story about the expectations and invasions of walking through the world in a female body. Not the obvious, more aggressive ones, the catcalling or man-spreading; instead, “Personal Space”…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week’s story is one of breathtaking imagination and emotional depth, a tale of borders and visas, dreams and language, captivity and liberation. At The Offing, Sofia Samatar’s “An Account of the Land of the Witches” takes us from an…
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This Week in Short Fiction
At the PEN America awards ceremony on Monday evening, writer Amy Sauber received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers for her short story “State Facts for the New Age,” a Rumpus Original Fiction piece published in September…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, a woman mysteriously becomes pregnant with a lizard egg in a short story at Guernica that is weird, funny, and surprisingly sweet. By Benjamin Schaefer, Prose Editor of Fairy Tale Review, “Lizard-Baby” explores themes of motherhood, difference, and…
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This Week in Short Fiction
At Catapult, Arielle Robbins writes a powerful story of coping with the legacy of sexual abuse. “From the Abuse Survivor’s Workbook” delivers the story, as the title suggests, in segments from the guided-journaling workbook sometimes prescribed as part of therapy, offering…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, a short story collection written by an author in North Korea and smuggled across its borders is reaching readers in North America. The Accusation is the first known story collection written by an author still living inside the…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, the bimonthly magazine of international literature World Literature Today released its March 2017 issue, with the timely theme “Dystopian Visions.” The issue features thirteen writers’ dark speculations on the future, crossing the globe from Cuba to Japan. In…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, Joyland has a new story from poet and fiction writer Joanna C. Valente about gender, sexual intercourse, and sexual violence. Their story, “You’re Gonna Scream When You Die,” opens with a scene that immediately backs up the dire…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, C Pam Zhang has a flash fiction story at The Offing that is maybe about vampires but probably about girls, Chinese girls in particular. “Are They Vampires, or Are They Just Chinese?” is written in five brief paragraphs…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Well, it’s been one week under the Trump administration, and already we are living in a land of “alternative facts.” After Kellyanne Conway used the term to defend Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s falsehoods regarding the inauguration crowd size on Sunday,…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, a new Maggie Shipstead story at Virginia Quarterly Review explores love, infidelity, and the ways life can slip from under your feet like an avalanche. Bonus: there is also a literal avalanche. The story, “Backcountry,” follows a twenty-five-year-old…