Short Stories
Story Stream
Pity the Short Story Writer December 16, 2024
In my youth, I submitted many short stories to literary magazines, journals, and websites. A few were accepted, and that was thrilling. There was the immediate high of seeing your name somewhere else—that undeniable ego-gratification—and the greater ...
A Business Doing Pleasure with You December 11, 2024
There are nefarious forces at work in the sphere of taste. Dislike and possibly judgment itself have been outlawed. Phalanxes of stans stand ready to dox critics and unbelievers. Haters are held at post-point until they recite, and believe, that arti...
Short, Sweet Reads for Fans of the American Absurd December 10, 2024
Dear readers,This week’s theme is “short and sweet”: Short sentences, short stories, a sweet spot of a prose pair, and that’s all she wrote.Enjoy!—Molly...
'Hardly Working' Brews Up Millennial Malaise December 05, 2024
On the occasion I decide to spend $4.50 on a drip coffee from an artisanal shop, the barista serving me is usually a bubbly woman with a septum piercing and a tasteful forearm tattoo—or, if male, a pasty environmentalist with flabby arms. Obedient an...
On Taking Things Slow December 05, 2024
I would describe your book, The Champ Is Here, as a series of loosely linked anecdotes about life in a small town. I’m curious about how you conceptualize it—do you see it as a novel, prose poetry, a short story collection? Do those labels even matte...
Why It’s a Vital Time for Short Stories June 12, 2024
At least once every year, a debut short-story collection comes along and gets under my skin. Last year, it was Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare, by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, and the year before that, it was Bliss Montage, by Ling Ma. All these months la...
Wonder Woman June 07, 2024
The mid to late aughts was a time of catastrophically delusional optimism. You didn’t need to be rich to buy a house; there were loans. You didn’t need to live in an expensive metropole to meet new people; online spaces were opening up. And you didn’...
The Sexy Mind Games of “Hit Man” June 03, 2024
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase “the banality of evil,” popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as “This Gun for Hire” (1942) and “M...
Data, Desire, and Where Fiction Goes Next April 25, 2024
Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s fiction wryly examines the vagaries of living in an age of downward mobility and phone-based anomie—with its indignities, its mystifications, its curious bursts of levity. Her 2020 novel, The Exhibition of Persephone Q, is a ...
Back Home Again April 01, 2024
The story begins in a hotel or motel, where the narrator, a twenty-something only child, has had a disturbing dream involving his or her mother. The novel, introduced by this scene and ending with what follows it, consists otherwise in a long analeps...
Terrifying Vistas of Reality April 01, 2024
In July 1917, Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island wrote a short story called ‘Dagon’. ‘If you don’t care for this,’ he wrote to one editor, ‘you won’t care for anything of mine.’ In the tale, a sailor lost at sea in a wooden rowboat...
What's American Fiction Without the Short Story? March 18, 2024
This week, The Atlantic published a new list of “The Great American Novels.” It’s full of both expected classics as well as both good and/or weird surprises. There is no way to do these lists without the former and no point in doing them without the ...
Percival Everett Can’t Say What His Novels Mean March 12, 2024
In a narrow, windowless room at the University of Southern California, a group of graduate students is workshopping a short story. Its author is silent as her classmates deliver gentle feedback. Some suggest minor improvements of pacing, setting, and...
My Anxiety March 11, 2024
In her short story “Five Signs of Disturbance,” Lydia Davis writes of a woman who is “frightened”:She cannot always decide whether what seems to her a sign of disturbance should be counted as such, since it is fairly normal for her, such as talking a...
On 'Ghost Pains' March 04, 2024
Introducing Tess Lewis’s translation of On the Marble Cliffs, Ernst Jünger’s metaphysical fable of impending apocalypse, Jessi Jezewska Stevens suggests the primary engine of that book’s power, as well as its driving insight, is the coincidence of de...
The Best Short-Story Writer of His Generation? August 02, 2023
On Zoom, Jamel Brinkley is much like his short stories: quiet and unassuming, funny, warm and generous with a sharp undertow of spiky intelligence. Minutes before getting on our call, I had mentioned him to novelist Xochitl Gonzalez, a former student...
