Suspend Your Disbelief

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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 […]


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 […]


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 […]


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 […]


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 […]


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 […]


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 […]


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, […]


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!


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 […]


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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