Last month we announced the Harvard Book Store’s short short story contest. In honor of the shortest month of the year, the store was seeking submissions that were both short in length (less than 500 words) and written during a brief period of time (between February 1-17). The results have now been posted, and we [...]
Author of the recently published short story collection Elephants in Our Bedroom, Michael Czyzniejewski grew up in the Chicago suburb of Calumet City, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1995 with a degree in rhetoric, and two years later, he received an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University.
The flash-fiction / short-short-short trend continues…
For Round II of this contest, NPR invites writers to submit an original work that begins with this sentence:
“The nurse left work at five o’clock.”
Instructions, via the site:
One entry per person, and no more than 600 words, please. Stories must be received by 11:59 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Aug. [...]
Anne Stameshkin, Greg Schutz, Celeste Ng, Natalie Bakopoulos, and Jeremiah Chamberlin lead a series of discussions on critic James Wood’s latest collection of essays, How Fiction Works.
I’m thrilled to announce that Colson Whitehead has joined our discussion review. Well, OK, not quite…but he did pen a rib-tickling pastiche of How Fiction Works–“Wow, Fiction Works!”– in Harper’s (digested-read style). Fellow Wood readers (and really anyone), enjoy.
Here’s a taste:
Of the “perfect” sentence The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, Whitehead-as-Wood [...]
I’ve been trying to read Muriel Barbery’s critically acclaimed novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and while I’m relishing many of the author’s ideas, they feel to me like just that–the author’s ideas, not ones that belong to the book’s characters; a wealthy pre-teen and middle-aged concierge spend at least the first section of Hedgehog [...]
