A recent discussion on the community blog Metafilter asked, “Please tell me one book you think everyone should read and why. Fiction or nonfiction, doesn’t matter. I’m not so interested in hearing about your favorite book or your desert island book, but a book you think everyone would benefit from reading.”
In a matter of [...]
We don’t usually think of Halloween as a “reading” kind of day, but I can think of at least a couple of Halloween-related stories.
In Lorrie Moore’s classic short story “You’re Ugly, Too,” a history professor escapes her life by visiting her sister over Halloween weekend–to attend what may be the most painfully awkward [...]
I don’t mind admitting that I get stuck as a writer—occasionally. Well, pretty often. Okay, I mean constantly. And I’m not talking about jamming up over a flowery paragraph or a pivotal scene. I’m saying that I’ll be four pages into a new story (on what I’ve come to imagine on my worst days as [...]
What is the difference between art and life, between the writer and the writing? In this essay on the late, great Andre Dubus, we learn how Dubus recognized “transformative moments” as authors Richard Ford and Anne Beattie, among others, weigh in on his talents, and his legacy.
The stories in PANK epitomize their founders’ spirit of innovation, and it’s this spirit that has quickly helped build the journal a loyal community. Read on to learn more about how the journal provides inspiration for writers and readers alike.
(Editor’s note: “Stories We Love” made its debut as part of Fiction Writers Review’s Short Story Month celebration. But we love short stories year-round. So here’s another installment, courtesy of FWR contributor Tyler McMahon.)
As an undergraduate, I took my first fiction-writing workshop around 1997. It didn’t go well. My peers were entrenched in [...]
Editor’s note: What? Isn’t Short Story Month over? Yes, it is—but that doesn’t mean we stop loving short stories. So here’s an encore round of “Stories We Love.”
In “Map of the City,” a story from her new collection Separate Kingdoms, Valerie Laken portrays the life of an American college student in perostroika-era [...]
Is SSM really almost over?!
Thankfully we can read stories year round, but I still feel the urge (while they’re center stage) to list two recommendations this week. They both come from Narrative magazine, which does require (free) registration. But I promise, these stories are so good, it’s worth filling out a quick form to read [...]
When I first read William Faulkner, in high school, it felt less like reading a book and more like an archeological find—unearthing something long dormant that I’d always known. His cadence, and that humid, repetitious, biblical world of the South, tapped into something in my bones.
The first time I read David Foster Wallace’s “Incarnations [...]
I use “Tiny, Smiling Daddy,” from Mary Gaitskill’s collection Because They Wanted To, to help fiction students understand the value of stories that lack epiphanies, or any clear transformation in their characters. In Gaitskill’s story, a father who has long struggled with his only child’s sexuality finds that his daughter has published an essay about [...]
