Nick Ostdick talks with Katey Schultz about her debut collection, Flashes of War, the choice of flash fiction as a form, and what makes a story worth telling.

J.T. Bushnell on Amy Tan’s “Rules of the Game,” a “quintessentially American story, one that has roots in a literary tradition that dates back to Flaubert and Chekhov.”

In her latest collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf), Russell traffics in her now-trademark wit. In eight tightly drawn stories, she imagines fantastical worlds that stem from the bleakest realities.

The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (Ecco), Ethan Rutherford’s fine debut collection, is part realism, part satire, part historical reclamation, and part dystopian prophecy. Of the eight stories in this collection, half tread in domestic realism, while half, give or take, are tales of survival.

Sarah Gerkensmeyer discusses the junction between the domestic and the weird in her debut collection of stories, What You are Now Enjoying, which was recently long-listed for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Danielle LaVaque-Monty talks with Jeanne Sirotkin about the relationship between poetry and fiction, the “awareness of the marvelous,” and the role of epiphany in her work.

In Part II of Shawn Andrew Mitchell’s interview with Charles Yu, the two writers continue their conversation by discussing the management of time in and out of fiction, Realism, and human-to-robot consciousness transfer.

Shawn Andrew Mitchell beams in from the future of a quiet Sunday morning in South Korea to chat with Charles Yu on a quiet Saturday evening in Los Angeles. In Part I of their conversation the two writers discuss the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, consensual grammar, favorite gadgets, and more.

Real Monsters: B.J. Hollars talks to Nick Ostdick about arrested development, stories hiding secret novels, and the uneasy relationship between fact and fiction.

Over the course of these stories, a conviction emerges: faith and lust are not unalike.