May is Short Story Month – 2020 Edition
by The Editors
Join us for our twelfth-annual celebration of the short story, as we dedicate the month of May to short fiction.
Join us for our twelfth-annual celebration of the short story, as we dedicate the month of May to short fiction.
“All these distractions and barriers have softened my writing discipline and made it less like bone, more like water—it flows into any shape it’s given.” Steven Wingate talks about how parenthood, contrary to popular wisdom, can be the best thing for your creativity.
“What is the end of the world to us? Is it the end of a marriage? The end of our families as we know them? Is it the splintering of a relationship with a loved one? Or is it the literal Rapture?”
Joshua Bodwell on the stories we tell, literary coincidences, and a correction to Best American Short Stories of the Century (with footnotes).
“Today, when I skim that first baker’s dozen I made a decade ago, my heart begins to race at the mere sight of some of the titles”: Joshua Bodwell offers his favorite reads during 2019 on the ten-year anniversary of his original “Baker’s Dozen” list.
“I love ‘The Great Silence’ because it is the odd bird out, or, to double down and use another cliché, the canary in the literary coal mine of the collection that warns us that we might all be doomed if we don’t listen.”
In commemoration of the recent death of a brilliant experimental fictionist, we revisit this 2009 meditation by Steven Wingate on the words of his mentor Steve Katz.
“What I love is the defamiliarization.” Kent Kosack appreciates the aesthetic openness of Catherine Lacey’s short story “The Healing Center.”
“The truth is that a blank page makes beginners of us all.” Bryan Furuness asks five writers for advice on the perennial problem of getting started.
“That moment when we realize our parents are people, regular people, with flaws and separate lives we have no access to. Brought home, made palpable for the reader, in that little clattering spoon”: Kent Kosack on Lucia Berlin’s coming-of-age story “Itinerary.”
“Soon matters take an even darker turn.” Jacob M. Appel on Shirley Jackson’s most unsettling short story.
