Suspend Your Disbelief

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Stories We Love: “Some Other, Better Otto”

by Daniel Wallace

Some stories feel found, not written, their lines etched on the walls of ancient Lemuria, or coded into the seams of certain carbon isotopes, no more the product of fallible modern humanity than the laws of arithmetic or the curve of the Milky Way. The opening chapters of The Great Gatsby, for instance, possess this kind of inevitability, as does Deborah Eisenberg’s short story “Some Other, Better Otto,” from her 2006 collection, Twilight of the Superheroes. Eisenberg’s Otto is a man who transmutes every conversation, philosophical conjecture, and family gathering into material for his own mental processes, seeking in the […]


Reviews |

Dzanc Duo: Aaron Burch and Matt Bell

by V. Jo Hsu

Two recent releases from Dzanc imprint Keyhole Press expand the scope of literary fiction. How to Predict the Weather by Aaron Burch and How They Were Found by Matt Bell create provocative new worlds in their debut collections of short stories. Consistent with this press’s production of thought-provoking fiction, Burch and Bell unravel beautiful and unsettling tales with exquisite prose.


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Yes, Virginia, Some Agents DO Love Short Stories: a guest post by Julie Barer

by Celeste Ng

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 like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell? Another check. Books that seemed written for young adults but read just as well for grownups, like Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games Trilogy? Triple points. As you can imagine, this […]


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Stories We Love: "Meneseteung"

by Celeste Ng

More than any single story I can think of, this is the story that’s had the most radical impact on my writing. Reading it for the first time was one of those mind-shattering “You can do that in fiction?!” moments. It’s a very un-Alice-Munro-like Alice Munro story. Told in the first person, in numbered sections, it recounts the narrator’s attempt to reconstruct the life of an obscure Victorian poet, Almeda Roth, through newspaper clippings, book excerpts, and historical records. The story itself is well told, as you’d expect anything by Munro to be, with layer upon layer of detail. Each […]


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Get Writing: Resurrecting Elvis

by Celeste Ng

This week’s challenge: take a tabloid headline—the wackier, the better—and write a short story taking the headline completely seriously. For example, you might check the Weekly World News‘s website or search for images of its front page (as it’s sadly no longer being printed). Or you might sift through the News of the Weird or the pages of the National Enquirer for inspiration, or spend some quality time perusing publications in the grocery-store checkout line. (Hey, it’s research!) Here are a couple more to get you started: But remember, your story should treat the headline seriously. Often, tabloid stories get […]


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Curl Up with Some Good Flash Fiction: Stories by Tara L. Masih

by Anne Stameshkin

Short Story Month wouldn’t be complete without some first-rate flash fiction. This morning, enjoy the following selections by Tara L. Masih, editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and author of the excellent collection Where the Dog Star Never Glows (Press 53, 2010) and the flash fiction chapbooks Fragile Skins and Tall Grasses. Below are first-line teasers; click on each story title to read (or listen to) the rest. “Dodging Frogs on Blackbird Road,” via Electric Flash (page 25 of the PDF) Never mind hindsight . . . after stretching and straining our bodies in […]


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This Week in Shorts

by Celeste Ng

Here’s another helping of short-story related news for this week: Listen: BookCourt in Brooklyn presents two reading from new collections: Monday, May 16th, at 7:00 pm: Danzy Senna, from You Are Free Tuesday, May 17th, at 7:00 pm: Donald Moss David Abrahms of The Quivering Pen will be doing daily giveaways of short story collections the week of May 16—i.e., this coming week. He writes: “Along with the giveaways, I’ve invited each of the authors to contribute their thoughts about the short story–why they matter, why they’ll survive, and why readers should never dismiss them with a wave of the […]


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Stories that Scare: "The Diver"

by Forrest Anderson

I have a big heart when it comes to short stories. There is a handful that I press onto friends with the pimply-faced intensity I had as a seventh-grader for Appetite for Destruction—as in, like this story as much and in the same way as I do or risk ending our friendship. There’s another handful that I love, dozens more that I adore, and bushels for which I have warm feelings. I can only think of three, though, that scare the living daylights out of me. The first is “The Paperhanger” by William Gay. The opening sentence does it to […]


Interviews |

On Mystery and Drafting: An Interview with Robert Boswell

by Michael Hinken

The Half-Known World, Robert Boswell’s collection of essays on the craft of fiction writing, is also driving-idea behind his conversation with Michael Hinken. In it Boswell discusses the power of writing better sentences, characterization as jazz, the narrative brain versus the linear brain, the value of writing fifty drafts and other mysteries and wonders of the half-known world.


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Stories We Love: "Mollusks"

by Christopher Mohar

“Trying to be weird and strange isn’t as interesting as coming up with a reason for it,” Arthur Bradford says of his 2001 short story collection, Dogwalker, in an interview with Robert Birnbaum. Labeling Bradford’s work “weird” may be a bit of an understatement, given stories that include a woman giving birth to a glowing frog, a family of cat-faced carnival workers, a human/canine love affair, and all manner of mutant dogs: talking, three-legged, Siamese triplets, born with furry flippers instead of legs, etc. But Bradford makes the strange seem not only usual, but welcome and beautiful. Bradford’s weirdness is […]




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