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 [...]

On The Rumpus, author Steve Almond explains why he recently decided to self-publish a book of short stories and essays, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey–and it’s probably not for the reasons you’d think:
If this were a traditional publishing endeavor, the next question would be how to get the book a “bigger platform,” meaning [...]

I am not a patient person. People who do slow, meticulous things like needlepoint and whittling amaze and bewilder me. This impatience applies to my reading habits, too: when immersed in a book I love, I can’t stop myself from reading faster and faster, eager to see the whole picture, to wolf the [...]

Entries are now being accepted for the 2010 Asian American Short Story Contest–the only national, pan-Asian American writing competition of its kind.
The contest’s sponsors are two of the leading promoters of Asian American literary arts: Hyphen magazine is a non-profit news and culture magazine and blog that focuses on exploring Asian American identity, and the [...]

Most of Leni Zumas’s stories in her exceptional (and stylistically exciting) debut, Farewell Navigator (Open City, 2008), are compact studies of paralysis in the tradition of Beckett and Ioensco. Sherwood Anderson could have been describing Zumas’s characters as they, too, are “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts.” In “Farewell Navigator,” one character envies a group of blind schoolchildren for having teachers “to pull them. Nobody expects them to know where to go.” And in “Leopard Arms”—a story told from the perspective of a gargoyle—a father fears “of doing nothing they’ll remember him for. Not a single footprint—film, book, record, madcap stunt—to prove he was here. Am I actually here? he sometimes mutters into his hand.”

Most of the talk about e-readers centers on full-length books. But The Atlantic has recently worked out a deal to publish a series of Kindle-only short stories, each retailing for $3.99. It’s the literary equivalent of a pop single.
Six stories have been published so far, by authors such as Jennifer Haigh, Curtis Sittenfeld, [...]

Every six to eight weeks Granta highlights new fiction by an emerging writer exclusively on their website. The New Voices Project has featured work by such writers as Jessica Soffer, Laura Fellowes, Soumya Bhattacharya, Hannah Gersen, Erin McMillan, Evan James Roskos, Lana Asfour, Evie Wyld, and P.D. Mallamo. In addition to original work, each feature [...]

NPR has just announced its third Three-Minute Fiction Contest. This year, the judge will be writer and critic Alan Cheuse.
The challenge? Write a story about this photo that can be read out loud in under three minutes–that’s about 600 words.
Cheuse compares a good short story to a lyric poem [...]

Fiction writer and Penn State Erie lecturer Eugene Cross has won the 2009 Dzanc Prize. The $5,000 prize is based on a manuscript-in-progress as well as a proposal for a writing-related community service project. Dzanc writes:
Cross was selected from more than 100 applicants for both the quality of his fiction writing, as well [...]

This year’s finalists for The Story Prize have been announced, and the competition is, as usual, staggering:

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)
Drift by Victoria Patterson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Even more remarkable, as Story Prize director Larry Dark points out, these are [...]