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 [...]
Editor’s note: As part of our ongoing Short Story Month Celebration, we are delighted to present the following guest post by Stacie M. Williams of Boswell Book Company.
A fellow bookseller, when inclined to discuss my fiction reading habits, described my taste simply and accurately as “dark and twisty.” This, fortunately or unfortunately, is all [...]
It may have been written before I was born, but Lorrie Moore’s debut collection Self-Help holds a special place on my bookshelf. Maybe it’s because it was Moore’s MFA thesis from Cornell, or maybe it’s her complete disregard for standard writing rules, but the collection brought me into a world I didn’t want to leave. [...]
In her pithy introduction to the recent Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, Anne Enright waltzes around the question that all anthology editors seem obligated to address: what makes a short story a short story? And, in the case of this anthology, what makes the Irish short story exceptional?
Enright considers, rejects, [...]
I’ve fought close to a dozen fights.
I’ve fought my brother, two best friends, five or so drunks in college, and a few New Years Eves ago, a group of six with one Australian and two Samoans at my side. It was the broad-shouldered Australian who began things by tapping my shoulder and informing me, [...]
Flaubert, best known for his part in fathering the modern novel, also wrote wonderful short fiction. This Saturday morning, I recommend curling up with “A Simple Heart.” A tribute to George Sand, this story was first published in 1877 as part of Flaubert’s final finished work, Three Tales; almost 100 years later it inspired [...]
So there we were. Full count, bases loaded, two out. Championship game. A score of 1 – 0. The whole season narrowing down to a single pitch.
Cue the slow-motion. Cue the Hollywood score: soaring strings, a drumbeat to match the rhythm of our hearts. We’ve seen this moment before. What we’ve not seen is the [...]
Editor’s note: As part of our continuing celebration of Short Story Month, we’re delighted to present a guest post by Matt Bell, editor at Dzanc Books and of the literary magazine The Collagist.
here’s so much good fiction online that writing about only a few of the magazines out there seems an incredibly unfair task: During [...]
I adore all of The Pale of Settlement (2007), a collection of linked stories by Margot Singer that won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. I’ve reread the entire book. But the story that I’ve returned to most often—many times—is [...]
