The longlist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award has just come out, and here at FWR, we’re thrilled to have featured many of the writers on it in interviews, reviews, and essays, including:
Anthony Doerr, for Memory Wall
Danielle Evans, for Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
Siobhan Fallon, for You Know When the Men [...]
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 [...]
Pioneer High School students Carlina Duan and Allison Kennedy sit down with famed Ann Arbor writing teacher and teen center director Jeff Kass to discuss his recent story collection, Knuckleheads. Kass discusses knuckleheadedness as a state of being, why being an outsider is important, the influence of Springsteen on his fiction, and the reason he wrote this book—in part—for his students. Bonus Track: an original off-the-top-of-the-dome list poem by Kass on “happiness.”
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 [...]
Jess Row’s second collection of stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, is an examination of some of our most intense impulses, and the debates, quandaries, and mysteries in these seven stories will stay with you. Charlotte Boulay talks to Jess Row about the intersection between compassion and extremism.
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. [...]
Siobhan Fallon’s debut story collection You Know When the Men Are Gone lets readers into a secret world of military families. Behind perfectly manicured lawns and Family Readiness Groups, Fallon’s stories reveal the stress of repeated deployment, wounded service members, and the difficulties of homecoming. Beth Garland, herself a military spouse, reviews a collection infused with “grief, heroism, and bitter disappointment.”
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 [...]
This week’s featured title is Josh Weil’s story collection The New Valley. Weil was born in Roanoke, Virginia, to a family of would-be “back-to-the-landers.” With an agronomist father and a mother “deeply attuned” to nature, it comes as no surprise that Weil pays such careful attention to the natural world in his writing. The New [...]
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 [...]
