Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

Reviews |

A Little Bone of Crazy, or This is Your Brain On Snowbroth: Leni Zumas’s Farewell Navigator

Most of Leni Zumas’s stories in her exceptional (and stylistically exciting) debut, Farewell Navigator (Open City, 2008), are compact studies of paralysis in the tradition of Beckett and Ioensco. Sherwood Anderson could have been describing Zumas’s characters as they, too, are “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts.” In “Farewell Navigator,” one character envies a group of blind schoolchildren for having teachers “to pull them. Nobody expects them to know where to go.” And in “Leopard Arms”—a story told from the perspective of a gargoyle—a father fears “of doing nothing they’ll remember him for. Not a single footprint—film, book, record, madcap stunt—to prove he was here. Am I actually here? he sometimes mutters into his hand.”


Shop Talk |

Single-serve Short Stories on Kindle

by Celeste Ng

Most of the talk about e-readers centers on full-length books. But The Atlantic has recently worked out a deal to publish a series of Kindle-only short stories, each retailing for $3.99. It’s the literary equivalent of a pop single. Six stories have been published so far, by authors such as Jennifer Haigh, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Paul Theroux. Here’s a description of Patricia Engel’s story “The Bridge”: Available exclusive to the Kindle, “The Bridge,” by Patricia Engel, is the story of Carlito and Reina, a brother and sister from Miami. When he was a boy, Carlito was thrown from a bridge […]


Shop Talk |

Granta's New Voices Series

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Every six to eight weeks Granta highlights new fiction by an emerging writer exclusively on their website. The New Voices Project has featured work by such writers as Jessica Soffer, Laura Fellowes, Soumya Bhattacharya, Hannah Gersen, Erin McMillan, Evan James Roskos, Lana Asfour, Evie Wyld, and P.D. Mallamo. In addition to original work, each feature also includes an interview with the author. For details of how to submit your story, please see Granta’s submissions guidelines. The most recent writer to be featured as part of this project is Kenyan author Billy Kahora. Below is the opening to his story “The […]


Shop Talk |

NPR's Three-Minute Fiction Contest

by Celeste Ng

NPR has just announced its third Three-Minute Fiction Contest. This year, the judge will be writer and critic Alan Cheuse. The challenge? Write a story about this photo that can be read out loud in under three minutes–that’s about 600 words. Cheuse compares a good short story to a lyric poem — both forms pack the biggest emotional punch and the most information into the smallest possible space. “It’s a love affair, rather than a marriage,” he says. “Or maybe even a one-night stand compared to a love affair.” He’ll be looking for entertainment as well as emotion in the […]


Shop Talk |

Eugene Cross wins 2009 Dzanc Prize

by Celeste Ng

Fiction writer and Penn State Erie lecturer Eugene Cross has won the 2009 Dzanc Prize. The $5,000 prize is based on a manuscript-in-progress as well as a proposal for a writing-related community service project. Dzanc writes: Cross was selected from more than 100 applicants for both the quality of his fiction writing, as well as his proposal to set up and run a progressive series of creative workshops for refugees from Nepal, Sudan and Bhutan, in Erie. For his community service, Cross will conduct three 4-month workshops in concurrence with an ESL class currently being taught. We at Dzanc found […]


Shop Talk |

Story Prize Finalists Announced

by Celeste Ng

This year’s finalists for The Story Prize have been announced, and the competition is, as usual, staggering: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton) Drift by Victoria Patterson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) Even more remarkable, as Story Prize director Larry Dark points out, these are all books by emerging authors: What’s particularly exciting is that all three are debuts–a first for The Story Prize. In fact, in the previous five years of the award, only 2 of 15 finalists were the authors’ first books: 2004/05 finalist The Circus […]


Interviews |

The Rebel from Helena: An Interview with Maile Meloy

by Joshua Bodwell

Through prose that is concise, confident, and empathetic, Malie Meloy evokes what David Foster Wallace called the “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions” of life, and treats them with “reverence and conviction.” Joshua Bodwell talked with Meloy about her newest collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, the craft of writing short fiction, and the art of finding the right voice for a story.


Reviews |

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy

by Celeste Ng

In Malie Meloy’s most recent collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, there are no clear lines, no obvious right answers. Meloy’s characters are caught between two choices that are both right—or both wrong—and that’s what makes their decisions so difficult, and makes these stories so compelling. In reading them, you feel, as the author puts it, “both the threat of disorder and the steady, thrumming promise of having everything [you] wanted, all at once.”




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