Some of the students loved words like “denial” and “dysfunction.” Characters in fiction “had issues.” It was the early 90s and people talked like this.
I’d just gotten a flyer in my mailbox announcing the World’s Best Short Short Story contest sponsored by Florida State University and the late Jerome Stern. I made copies of the 1991 winner, “Baby, [...]
Last week we featured Lucia Perillo’s collection Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain, and we’re pleased to announce the winners:
Dana (@danadilly)
Rachel Farrell (@rachelfarrell)
Connor Ferguson (@csferguson)
Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:
winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com
If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” [...]
It just kept nosing its way into my own novel—“A&P” by John Updike. I’d first read it when teaching lit classes years before, and now, as I finished my third novel, my characters kept making references to it: a girl’s mind “just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar” or the way [...]
“[T]he value of a short story is the same as the value of all literature—that it allows a person to confront the world in a new way, that at its best it has the power to act as a transformative experience, and to leave the reader changed—smarter and more empathetic. I think there’s something especially [...]
I’ll be totally honest: I really did not expect to like Frankie Thomas’s “The Showrunner” at all. It starts off at a casting session for a fictional Disney-esque tween series, and not only am I biased against stories that saturate themselves in current pop culture—I tend to like a little patina on my cultural [...]
“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 [...]
Desire is the writer’s best friend. When you know what your main character wants, you have your entire story. When someone wants something–badly–he or she will get up off the couch and try to attain it. The object of desire might be a new winter coat (”The Overcoat” by Gogol), a boy (”City of Boys” [...]
Most stories we read, hear, even tell — we forget. A scant few haunt us across years. The best ones never leave.
I still remember the first time I read One Story issue #141 on the F train. Early November in New York, when wet, bare branches foreshadow winter. It begins:
Freda weighed eighteen pounds when she [...]
“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
Looking for something to read? Check [...]
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, [...]
