Evaluating online literary magazines can be tough. According to Duotrope, there are thousands out there and more popping up every day. It’s just not that difficult to throw up a website and start publishing friends. But the online literary journals below raise the bar far higher. They have made publishing online not just a vehicle for […]
One of the most common critiques I hear for short story collections is that they’re “uneven.” I don’t hear it very often for novels, and only occasionally as a critique of an author’s oeuvre. A few brief samples: Publisher’s Weekly called David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” uneven. Seattle Times called Evan S. […]
On November 3rd, John Grisham is dipping into the short story realm with his first collection, “Ford County,” which has a manly ring to it (it’s where his first novel, A Time to Kill, takes place). Nice to have the commercial boys dip into a realm normally owned by the literary folk. I predict sales […]
There's a flurry of new short stories being released over at Five Chapters these next fifteen days. Instead of serializing a story over five days, there's a new short story each day, including some from collections I've been reading lately — Jennine Capo Crucet, who won the Iowa Short Fiction award this year, and Lori […]
Thanks to Absinthe Minded (great name, by the way), for referring me to this article in the Goethe Institut about the literary journal/short story scene in Germany. Love the opening: “Like moles, literary magazines burrow through the subsoil and often bring literary treasures to light. They live on self-exploitation, are sometimes short-lived and bizarre, and […]
Over at Listverse, they do a great job of amassing a huge number of Top 10 Lists, but the ten greatest short story writers is wack. Okay, they have some shoo-ins (oh, and they limit it to American short story writers). O’Henry? I’ll grant that. Poe? Sure. Then debatables. Asimov? Well, he’s a talented writer, […]
The Guardian has released their summer short story bonanza, which includes some as short as a thousand words. Dave Eggers offers “A Fork Brought Along,” which has the amazing distinction of being the funniest story I’ve ever read about a fork. AM Holmes contributes “All Is Good Except The Rain” which has so much dialogue […]
In a high school English class unit called Love/Gender/Family Unit, Kathleen Reilly taught short stories by David Sedaris, Laura Lippman, Stephen King and Ernest Hemingway. But not anymore. She recently resigned, after parents demanded she remove the stories from the curriculum. Parent Sue Ann Johnson was one of the more vocal objectors to the stories, […]
The shortlist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story prize is out, and they did much better at creating a shortlist than last year, when the Jhumpa Lahiri coup took down the prize. An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe) Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw (New Zealand) Ripples and other Stories by Shih-Li Kow (Malaysia) […]
The stories in “Fugue State” will haunt you. Brian Evenson has a remarkable ability to come up with creepy tales that won’t be extracted from your head. For example, take “Invisible Box.” Imagine a girl sleeping with a mime, a mime that’s still dressed up with the gloves and the face paint. During the completely […]
