Suspend Your Disbelief

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Stories We Love: "The Lottery"

by Sarah Van Arsdale

I don’t remember the first time I read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. It seems I’ve been haunted by that story forever: the dusty June center of town where the annual lottery is held, in my imagination a composition of all the Vermont towns I’ve lived in, and the blind cruelty of the populace a reflection of blind cruelty everywhere. The idea of “The Lottery” is that people can turn on one another for no reason other than that it’s what everyone else is doing, that we follow the crowd even when the request or demand that’s being made is […]


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Video games: the next writing prompt?

As part of our ongoing Short Story Month celebrations, we’re delighted to present the following guest post by Drake Misek, an intern at Fiction Writers Review through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) at the University of Michigan. The next game to come out of Rockstar—who you probably know for Grand Theft Auto and might know for last year’s acclaimed Red Dead Redemption—will be L.A. Noire. True to its name, it’ll be a sort of detective adventure in a recreated 1940s L.A. There’s been a lot of hype for the game, fueled by its publisher, premise, and some great features, […]


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Book of the Week Winners: Binocular Vision, by Edith Pearlman

by Lee Thomas

Last week we featured Edith Pearlman’s story collection Binocular Vision as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Susan Ashley Michael, Mimi Asnes, and Christine Ha. Congratulations! To claim your signed copy of this collection, please email us at the following address: winners@fictionwritersreview.com To anyone who’d like to be eligible for our future drawings, visit our Facebook Page and “like” us. No catch, no gimmicks–just a great way to promote books we love. To everyone who’s already a fan, big thanks!


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Stories We Love: Impossible Things

by Charlotte Boulay

A short story collection I re-read at least once a year is Connie Willis’s Impossible Things. It begins with the obligatory Lewis Carroll epigraph, but then adds another from Auden: “Nothing can save us that is possible.” One of Connie Willis’s overarching themes is communication: what do we say to each other and, of those conversations, what do we actually understand? One story follows a NASA negotiator and a woman renting him a few square feet in a Japanese apartment as they try to figure out if the friendly aliens who’ve just arrived at Earth are trying to set up […]


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Choosing the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories: a guest post by Laura Furman

by Celeste Ng

Editor’s note: As part of our continuing celebration of Short Story Month, we’re delighted to present a guest post by Laura Furman, editor of the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Each year, I choose the twenty stories to be included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Once I’ve gathered them in a manuscript without attribution of authorship or publication, I send the stories to the three jurors of the year. They in turn read them and, without consulting either me or each other, pick an individual favorite and write about it. The emphasis in this part of the book’s life is […]


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Get Writing: Beautiful Sentences

by Charlotte Boulay

Whether I’m reading poetry or fiction, I’m always looking for beautiful sentences, the kinds that make the hair on my arms stand up at their deftness, their grace. Take these three examples: For a moment she stared at the darkness as though it were the surface of a pond into which someone she loved had disappeared, head to heels. — Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner’s Luck The simile in this sentence is apt enough: darkness figured as the surface of a pond, but it’s the last three little words that make it beautiful. How else would someone dive? And diving is […]


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Curl Up with a Good Story: “The Old Economy Husband,” by Lesley Dormen

by Anne Stameshkin

I first read “The Old Economy Husband” in the Atlantic Monthly, back when they published fiction every month and I subscribed. But I’d been thinking about canceling; I was an editorial assistant in Manhattan, and I was in no mood for what I called “stories about rich people.” It was two months after 9/11. I didn’t sit down on the subway because I felt safer near the door. This story about rich people–which wasn’t, it turned out, about rich people–made me miss my stop and renew my subscription. Here’s an excerpt: It was that summer, the summer we were fifty […]


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Participating in Short Story Month? Join the Conversation!

by Celeste Ng

Are you tweeting or posting on Facebook about Short Story Month? Here’s how to connect with others doing the same: On Twitter, use the hashtag #ssm2011 On Facebook, join the Facebook Event SSM 2011 Thanks to Matt Bell for the great idea. Let us know: what stories have you been reading? Writing? Sharing? And stay tuned to FWR in the coming weeks for more great story-related content, including a guest post by the aforementioned Matt Bell.


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Stories We Love: "A View of the Woods"

by Michael Shilling

While Flannery O’Connor combined humor and sadism in ways as mysterious as they are effective, to me, the way she was able to render horrific actions in people and still somehow make me sympathetic is her greatest achievement—even more so when she breaks out of the highly symbolic framings of tales such as “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People.” While these are incredible stories, less-known ones, in which characters transcend her desire to make them mere chess pieces and instead achieve a full humanity, are where she truly scorches. “A View of the Woods” is […]




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