Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

Shop Talk |

The Origins of Short Story Month: a guest post by Dan Wickett

by The Editors

Editor’s note: As part of our celebration of Short Story Month, we’re delighted to re-publish a 2011 guest post by Dan Wickett, founder and editor of the Emerging Writers Network, co-founder of Dzanc Books, and creator of Short Story Month. In early April of 2007, I was celebrating National Poetry Month at the Emerging Writers Network blog by taking a look at the poems of the day being posted by the Writers In The Schools (WITS) program of Houston, which had been written by 4th graders. It was a fun project, but readers of the EWN know that fiction is […]


Shop Talk |

"The loose change in the treasury of fiction"

by Celeste Ng

Why do we need a Short Story Month? The things we designate particular months or days to celebrate are the things we tend to overlook: mothers, ve terans, black history, flags. And indeed, the short story is often overlooked or dismissed in favor of its bigger, flashier, more prominent cousin, the novel. Think about it: how many short story collections can you name? Unless you’re a fiction writer—and maybe even if you are—the answer is probably in the single digits. How many novels can you name? You see my point. So why is the short story given such short shrift? […]


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Stories We Love: "Dog Song"

by Lee Thomas

I’ve been wary of dog yarns ever since my mother sobbed through the final chapters of Where the Red Fern Grows, and I didn’t discover until years later the real fate of Old Dan. It was affecting – perhaps too much so – but I also felt cheated somehow, that an emotion so universally felt was a writer’s cheap shot. Some stories come like a revelation. Ann Pancake’s “Dog Song”—twenty-one pages of alchemical genius, pure voice, and indescribable originality—changed my mind about the dogs, and made me an evangelist. Evan Rehill has been championing this story, and gave it to […]


Interviews |

Bringing the News: An Interview with Richard Ford

In this lively conversation, Travis Holland and author Richard Ford discuss the genesis of Ford’s most famous fictional character, Frank Bascombe, the importance of always remembering the reader, greeting cards, what could well be one of the greatest short stories of the 20th century, and why place in fiction means nothing.


Interviews |

Secrets and Revelations: An Interview with Danielle Evans

by Melissa Scholes Young

In her debut collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, Danielle Evans’s characters, like most of us, struggle to belong. Their loyalties to place, to family, and to self are often divided. Melissa Scholes Young interviews the author to find out how the identities we claim or deny often define the people we become.


Reviews |

Volt, by Alan Heathcock

by Tyler McMahon

Tyler McMahon loves short stories but worries that collections might be the worst thing to have happened to the genre. However, books like Alan Heathcock’s Volt renew his faith in the collection as an art form of its own, one that makes its stories inseparable from one another—greater even than the sum of their parts.


Shop Talk |

Anthony Doerr wins 2010 Story Prize

by Celeste Ng

On Wednesday, Anthony Doerr was awarded the 2010 Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall. The ceremony also honored two finalists, Yiyun Li and Suzanne Rivecca. Reports the Story Prize’s blog: Anthony Doerr, for instance, in answer to a question about the preponderance of older women in Memory Wall, talked about how his grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s disease, came to live with his family when he was in high school and how, in his teenage self-absorption, he had been somewhat oblivious to her condition. Yiyun Li discussed how her characters stubbornly resist being swept along by the tide of history—even […]


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Thursday morning candy: Storyglossia

by Lee Thomas

In honor of the online literary community, which we discussed this week in Celeste’s blog post about Virtual Book Tours and my interview with flash fiction maven Meg Pokrass, we’d like to feature online literary journal Storyglossia this Thursday morning. “Storyglossia” is a term coined by Editor Steven J. McDermott, with an impressive etymological explanation on the Storyglossia site, which you can read here. Their first online issue debuted in March 2003, and since then 41 issues of the journal have gone up – every one of which you can peruse on their easily-navigable site. In addition to Meg Pokrass, […]


Shop Talk |

Best American Short Fiction from Storyville

by Lee Thomas

Many of you blog readers may recall Michael’s great post about the launch of Storyville – the mobile short story magazine that sends a short story to your iPhone or iPad every week for $4.99 / 6 month subscription. Quite a steal. Starting today, and for the next two Tuesdays, Storyville will feature one story from each of the three collections that are Finalists for The Story Prize, the largest cash prize – $20,000 – for best story collection published the previous year. The stories will be drawn from the three finalist collections: Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr (Scribners), Death […]




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