this week in short fiction

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    This week (or month) in short fiction (and poetry), it’s National Translation Month! Each September, the National Translation Month (NTM) initiative, started in 2013, celebrates literary works in translation and promotes cross-cultural readership with offerings of exciting new translations on…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    Just over a year ago, Alexandra Kleeman’s much-praised debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine was published and hailed as a new kind of feminist post-modernism, merging surreal elements with incisive commentary on the culture of womanhood…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    For a story in a different medium this week, check out Amber Sparks’s “Thirteen Ways to Destroy a Painting” from this year’s The Unfinished World—adapted to a radio play. It’s brought to your ears by NPR’s truly excellent storytelling podcast Snap Judgment…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    Granta’s summer issue is themed “The Legacies of Love,” and in a new story from the online issue, Glasgow-based writer Sophie Mackintosh strips love back to its animal bones in a story that is less rom-com and more Hunger Games,…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    When The Bennington Review re-launched this past April after thirty years, its first issue packed a table of contents studded with prize-winning authors and exciting emerging voices. This week, to our good fortune, the biannual print publication has made several…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    Rion Amilcar Scott’s debut collection Insurrections—our July Rumpus Book Club pick—comes out from University Press of Kentucky on Tuesday and is a timely and vital look into the daily struggles of individuals in the mostly black community of Cross River, Maryland, a…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    Irish author Danielle McLaughlin didn’t start writing fiction until 2010, but in the years since she has amassed an impressive collection of writing awards, including the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Competition, and has twice placed stories in the New Yorker.…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    The summer issue of Asymptote was published this week with a gorgeous spread of short fiction in translation from Spanish, Croatian, Persian, and more. If you’re not already familiar the journal, it publishes English translations of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    It’s July, and the summer issues of literary magazines are rolling off both the physical and cyber presses, including Virginia Quarterly Review, which this week shared a story from its summer print issue online. In “Dixon” by Bret Anthony Johnston,…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    This week, Guernica has a new story from author and veteran Odie Lindsey, whose debut story collection about soldiers coming home from war, We Come to Our Senses, will be published by W.W. Norton later this month. Included in the…