this week in short fiction
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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…
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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…
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This Week in Short Fiction
A girl writing the alphabet on cement using a watering pot. The worn-through knee of a pair of jeans stitched up with pink, sequined thread. The ritual clipping of coupons, carefully cut with scissors that squeak at the joint. These…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Some fiction leaves you sad, some happy; some draws out a bittersweet tear or makes your heart pump faster with thrills. But the best stories are often the ones that leave you conflicted, that complicate your feelings and perspectives on…
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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…
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This Week in Short Fiction
There are moments when time slows, when awareness is heightened, when every sound and smell and shadow holds a painful kind of beauty. It happens when you know an irrevocable change is coming. It happens during grief. Meghan Lamb’s new…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Valentine’s Day, the annual celebration of romance, named after a martyred saint who doesn’t have anything to do with love, is almost here. In recognition of the holiday, The Cut is providing a refreshing counterpoint to the flowers-and-chocolates narrative with…
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This Week in Short Fiction
When you think of romance, you probably think Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, Gone With the Wind, Wuthering Heights—or anything by Nicholas Sparks if you’re into more modern fare. These famous love stories, spread across centuries, have one thing…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, we have two stories of time machines and space stations, but mostly of people who clean up messes. Amber Sparks’s second collection of short stories, The Unfinished World, published on Monday by Liveright, is a vivid and imaginative…
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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…
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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,…
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This Week in Short Fiction
It’s December, that magical time of year when newspapers and websites across the globe unveil their “Best of the Year” lists. Valeria Luiselli has been all over them with her innovative novel The Story of my Teeth, and lucky for…