If description is the art of distillation, what’s the ideal potato-to-vodka ratio? Sit down and stay awhile: things are about to get metaphysical.

The prolific Richard Bausch on fear as fuel, naïvité as strength, and keeping the writing fresh year after year.

“I think the best stories start from something tiny. [...] A short story can easily destroy itself through metastasis. I think if you start a story with more than two scenes in mind, you may be doomed. At least you have a hell of a lot of work ahead of you. If I start [...]

“With short stories, you never really expect the World at Large to care one way or the other. It’s a labor of love, and no one disputes that, and I think the purity of that endeavor is very liberating.”
~ Valerie Laken

Further Reading:

Read more about Valerie Laken on Fiction Writers Review
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Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (1908) is one of those stories—paralleled by certain films—that I always return to with an odd yearning. Each time, despite myself, I hope that the story (or film) will somehow end differently. That Connie won’t leave with Arnold Friend. That Christopher Reeve won’t discover that penny from 1979. Or, [...]

Though written in English, Luana Monteiro’s debut collection is firmly rooted in Brazilian culture — carnaval to Coetzee, Candomblé to Christianity.

Beneath an unassuming demeanor, Pushcart Prize-winning Robert Garner McBrearty writes stories of the revolution. The former dishwasher on the mythologies of the American West, the bravery of small presses, Colonel William B. Travis, and why he feels solidarity with scrappy underlings.

TV, greed, comfort, surprise: but a few of the reasons sequels bewitch us. Why we love more – more story, more character. How sequels draw us in, why we crave them, and which ones we’d pay a million bucks to see in print.

His debut collection features sentimental Vikings, hungover moose-hunters, and fuming stepsons, among other luckless men. Wells Tower talks jokes, beauty, and painful, teeth-gnashing revision with Rebecca Scherm.

Nicole Louise Reid’s So There! is a book of harrowing and darkly funny short stories about original, compelling characters refusing easy answers, seeking out lives that share a property line—maybe even a driveway—with Death.