Alas, it’s May 31, so this concludes your Short Story Month 2012 coverage here at Fiction Writers Review! Miss a post—or need something to carry you over until we do it again next year? Here’s a mini-index:
Reviews:
This Will Be Difficult to Explain, by Johanna Skibsrud: “Although the book feels light in the hand, [...]
In the illuminating introduction to her Selected Stories, Alice Munro considers the recurring setting of her fiction: “The reason I write so often about the country to the east of Lake Huron is just that I love it.”
She goes on to describe how memories of particular images from that geography will motivate her [...]
Back when I worked for The Southeast Review, we ran an online feature called, “The Cult of George Singleton,” where we asked writers to weigh-in on his larger than life personality. Katie Burgess, his old student from the Greenville Fine Arts Center, told one of my favorite stories, “One day George… hit a snake with [...]
Suspense-laden opening sentences are only the beginning of the pleasures found in Tania James’s wide-ranging new collection.
Laura Maylene Walter talks about writing her IPPY-winning debut collection, Living Arrangements, using awkward high school photos to promote it, and honoring those who helped inspire it.
I read Elizabeth Jonsson’s “The Silver Sky” in a Reader’s Digest anthology, and, judging by a search on Amazon and Google Books, that may be the only place it can now be found. And I would not laud the story as a perfect gem, either, because for most of its seven pages, I felt confused [...]
It’s high time for some heartbreak: Urban Waite describes how love’s power to heal or destroy animates Rajesh Parameswaran’s debut story collection.
Every story that I write feels like a kind of experiment. The challenge in crafting a story is how to engage a reader emotionally, intellectually, experientially. I’m always looking for some kind of challenge, some kind of structural or narrative constraint to try and figure out. [...] I mean, the story “Orientation” is a gimmick. [...]
On June 9, 1992 I turned seventeen years old and my father gave me a single gift: a book that contained a short story that changed my life. The book was Septuagenarian Stew by Charles Bukowski and the short story was the first in the collection: “Son of Satan.”
It’s a simple story, really, just six [...]
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, [...]
