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 [...]

Some stories feel found, not written, their lines etched on the walls of ancient Lemuria, or coded into the seams of certain carbon isotopes, no more the product of fallible modern humanity than the laws of arithmetic or the curve of the Milky Way. The opening chapters of The Great Gatsby, for instance, possess this [...]

Editor’s note: As part of our Short Story Month celebrations, we’re delighted to present this guest post by agent Julie Barer of Barer Literary.

I once dated a man who shared my taste in fiction almost completely. Diehard fan of the often overlooked Canadian writer Robertson Davies? Check. Particularly drawn to novels that played with genre [...]

More than any single story I can think of, this is the story that’s had the most radical impact on my writing. Reading it for the first time was one of those mind-shattering “You can do that in fiction?!” moments.
It’s a very un-Alice-Munro-like Alice Munro story. Told in the first person, [...]

Short Story Month wouldn’t be complete without some first-rate flash fiction. This morning, enjoy the following selections by Tara L. Masih, editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and author of the excellent collection Where the Dog Star Never Glows (Press 53, 2010) and the flash fiction chapbooks Fragile Skins [...]

I have a big heart when it comes to short stories. There is a handful that I press onto friends with the pimply-faced intensity I had as a seventh-grader for Appetite for Destruction—as in, like this story as much and in the same way as I do or risk ending our friendship. There’s another [...]