R.I.P. John Updike. You will be missed. Already a vast number of voices are singing your praises in eulogies. You are the symbol of an era in American writing. But at least you leave us with one last collection of short stories that will come out after you’ve gone: My Father’s Tears and Other Stories
In the spirit of Harper’s Readings, I offer this trivia about literary journals. Below are the journals that use the adjective “oldest” as a badge of pride. And no — despite readers’ assumptions that only one journal would use the term “oldest,” with others using only “older” or “not as young as most,” quite a […]
The Guardian on Barack Obama’s skill with narrative, as well as his fascination with Marilynn Robison’s Gilead. Not content with listing the top ten or a hundred books, The Guardian lists their top 1,000,000 books (okay, top 1,000 — but still, I feel bludgeoned). Lev Grossman in Time Magazine weighs in on the state of […]
Jim Shepard is a funny, funny man. He kept us all in stitches, even as he bemoaned the lack of importance of short stories in popular culture and the way that Europeans value writers much more than Americans do. He read from his new, as-yet-unpublished story “Minotaur,” about the black world in the military (no, […]
For all my readers who are writers, click on the link to the left under Pages: Journals Accepting Electronic Submissions. I found there wasn’t a good list up anywhere, and decided to make my own. It’s a list which will change fairly frequently, but I’ll try to keep it updated.
As of July 2019, 80 of the top 100 journals accept online submissions. Of those 80, 43 charge reading fees. I would strongly advise you to submit first to the journals without submission fees, submit reluctantly to those that charge fees, and never submit to anyone that charges more than $3 (unless it’s a contest […]
For all of you in Los Angeles, Jim Shepard will be at the Hammer Museum this Tuesday night, and so will I. Except he will be on the stage, reading and talking to Mona Simpson, while I will be sitting in the audience, dutifully listening to this short story master.
The first story in Ali Smith’s collection The First Person is half meditation on the form and half character struggling with her friend’s cancer. I won’t reproduce any of the cancer storyline, but the first two quotes below are said by characters when trying to describe the short story: “The novel, he was saying, was […]
Glen Pourciau’s short story collection Invite won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was published by the University of Iowa press. The stories contained in Invite, ten in all, were originally published in journals such as New England Review, Ontario Review, and Mississippi Review. I caught up with Pourciau over email and asked him […]
The One Story blog, Save the Short Story, alerted me to a new book club, Andrew’s Book Club, which focuses on two short story collections a month. January’s picks are Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff and Things That Pass for Love by Allison cheap drugs pharmacy Amend. The book club offers multiple ways to […]
