“It’s these aetherial worlds referred to in the title, these never-existing possibilities that Tolstaya explores through her writing. Texts, stories, are the essences that construct our lives. Whether consciously or unconsciously, whether intentionally fabricating or telling our version of the truth, we’re creating, with language, a narrative.”
“What’s a good fabulist to do when every day the world offers as reality, posits as entirely normal, the surreal images of our nightmares?”: Hasanthika Sirisena reviews Ramona Ausubel’s latest collection, Awayland, out now from Riverhead Books.
Venita Blackburn and Malinda McCollum talk about dangerous women in short fiction, loss as a narrative catalyst, the stories of ZZ Packer and David Foster Wallace, and their own recently published collections.
“She captures so beautifully the isolation that many feel in an increasingly cloistered Midwest, the desperation we all experience in our teeter-totter of needs and wants”: Mike Ferro appreciates Laura Hulthen Thomas’s “Sole Suspect” in this Stories We Love essay.
“Driscoll was a poet before turning to fiction. Poetic language is dreamlike, and therefore suited to close narration. And Driscoll’s elegant language anchors the reader in the haunting dream.”
“They thrive under repeated analysis”: Jennifer Audette grapples with the twelve stories that make up Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut collection, Heads of the Colored People, out now from 37ink/Atria.
“Can one really learn by copying?”: Michael Noll discusses borrowing moves from great writers.
“This is the last gift of King’s story—her decision to allow happiness to have the last word, to make the ephemeral feeling permanent, if only in fiction”: Lillian Li on Lily King’s One Story story.
“The strongest characters in this book are the ones who are most adrift, most ready to latch onto whatever comes next, and this makes them both tragic and dangerous”: Steve Wingate on Maxim Loskutoff’s debut collection.
Join us for our tenth-annual celebration of the short story, as we dedicate the month of May to short fiction.
