Congratulations to this year’s winners of The Collection Giveaway Project! Earlier today we held four separate drawings to determine the recipients of our free story collections, and here are the results:

Shannon for Laura van den Berg’s collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
Pete for Joshua Furst’s collection Short People
Barrett [...]

As the month winds to a close over Memorial Day weekend and summer officially begins, we’ll also be wrapping up our celebration of May as Short Story Month. Inspired by The Emerging Writers Network and their unparalleled coverage off all things story-related each May, as well as The Poetry Book Giveaway For National [...]

Here, triangulated between the grit and hardship of necessity, the loneliness of nature and a reverence for it, and the migrations of good and decent hearts—or, at least, hearts that strive in clumsy, sometimes self-defeating ways to be so—through a world that feels cold or, worse, actively hostile to their concerns, Bonnie Jo Campbell has located and renewed the rural ache.

We all had one. It’s one of those universals of human experience, more constant than love or rage or betrayal or grace. I’m talking about a childhood. Still, it’s impressively difficult to capture on the page, pitch the right tone, allow the perfect amount of insight and innocence, or describe the overblown drama of what [...]

I frequently happen upon Selected Shorts on NPR midway through a story and go through a predictable course of thinking: I’ve missed the first part of the story. I should just download the podcast and hear it from the top. Wow, that sentence was brilliant. What the heck is going on here? And then I [...]

At Fiction Writers Review, a key part of our mission is to support emerging writers—and hey, we’re emerging writers, too. So I’m especially pleased to report that the current issue of Glimmer Train (Issue 75) contains stories by not one, but TWO of the FWR staff: our Associate Editor, Jeremiah Chamberlin, and our site’s [...]

I am often skeptical of reviews by people who know the author: sometimes they’re a bit too chummy, like Sarah Palin praising Glenn Beck. (Ew. Just—ew.) So let me start off by saying that I do know Skip Horack, but only slightly. We met at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in [...]

If Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (HarperPerennial, 2009) were a child, it would be the kind who held your hand until you reached the road and then insisted—slapping at your grasping fingers without taking his eyes off the road—on crossing the street without help. If Kevin Wilson’s debut collection were a car, it would be the kind of bubble-topped, shark-finned future-car that you see on footage of old World’s Fairs, but you would see it out in the world, cruising the miracle mile. If this book were a friend, it would be the kind who goes with you to the bar and doodles on napkins all night while everyone pounds beers and then, when everyone has forgotten about her, comes out with a one-liner that brings the house down.

May is Short Story Month, and what better way to celebrate than by reading some short fiction by emerging writers? But I don’t have time, you say. National Public Radio has the answer: three-minute fiction. These stories can all be read aloud in under three minutes—little gems to surprise and delight you [...]

The Millions alerted us to this contest for sports-themed short fiction, sponsored by—of all people—ESPN.
Now, I love my Red Sox and my Cavaliers, but I would never call myself a sports girl. So I was skeptical of the whole idea of “sports fiction.” But I recently served on the admissions board for [...]