Late in 1933, Dylan Thomas started writing a new short story. “The theme of the story I dreamed in a nightmare,” he wrote to a friend. “If successful, if the words fit to the thoughts, it will be one of the most ghastly short stories ever written.” Thomas was possessed, in part, by rejection.... Continue reading >> [ Source: Literrary Hub | 2024-10-31 08:56:14 UTC ]
Picture a teenager in a suburban Southern California Costco, lingering by the books tables while her parents shopped. There, between the boxed vacuums and party-size clamshells of croissants, I first encountered the writing of Ha Jin. His short story, “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town,” had... Continue reading >> [ Source: Literrary Hub | 2024-09-10 08:55:26 UTC ]
Photo by Arturo Villarrubia Science fiction writer Ted Chiang has won the 2024 PEN/Bernard and Ann Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. The award is given each year to a writer who has “demonstrated exceptional achievement in the short story form.” Ted Chiang has published two... Continue reading >> [ Source: Literrary Hub | 2024-06-12 14:52:48 UTC ]
Canadian author Alice Munro, a master of the short story and the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature, died at her home in Port Hope, Ontario, on May 13. Continue reading >> [ Source: Publishers Weekly | 2024-05-14 04:00:00 UTC ]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The short stories of John Cheever (1912-82) are among the greatest American short stories of the twentieth century. His Collected Stories runs to 900 pages and contains tales which are by turns realist, borderline magic-realist, and downright... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2024-04-17 14:00:45 UTC ]
I have always loved the versatility of the short story, how it can so easily take on the forms of other things. There are playlist short stories, recipe short stories, diary and epistolary-style short stories. There are flash fiction stories, short short stories, and long short stories that... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2024-04-15 11:00:00 UTC ]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Electric Ant’ is a short story by the American writer Philip K. Dick (1928-82), written in 1968 and published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October the following year. The story is about an ‘electric ant’ or robot which has... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2024-03-29 15:00:43 UTC ]
Short stories can do things novels cannot because they’re short. They’re limber and can dart in and out of close-fitting places. They can be weird and daring in ways that novels cannot always sustain. Joy Williams writes in, “8 Essential Attributes of the Short Story (and one way it differs from... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2024-03-28 11:00:00 UTC ]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Kaleidoscope’ is a short story by the American author Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), included in his 1952 collection of interlinked tales, The Illustrated Man. ‘Kaleidoscope’ deals with the theme of death, and how human beings respond to their imminent... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2023-12-29 15:00:31 UTC ]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Moth’ is a short story by the British author H. G. Wells (1866-1946), published in his 1895 collection The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents. The tale might be regarded as a variation on the ‘ambiguous ghost story’ in that we as readers cannot... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2023-12-18 15:00:00 UTC ]
When she was in high school in the early 1950’s, Joanna Russ (1930–2011) read Mark Twain’s short story “A Medieval Romance,” about a duke without a male heir who brings his daughter up to fill the role, hiding her gender from all. Things get complicated when the duke’s niece falls in love with... Continue reading >> [ Source: Literrary Hub | 2023-11-03 08:41:28 UTC ]
“The world here beats faster than a hummingbird’s wings,” writes Alexandra Chang in her new collection Tomb Sweeping. Chang, the author of Days of Distraction and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 recipient, writes poignantly about tenuous connection. In these stories, a wealthy housewife... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2023-11-02 11:00:00 UTC ]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The City’ is a short story about revenge best served cold. Written by the American author Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), the story was included in his 1952 collection The Illustrated Man. The story is about a city which has waited twenty thousand years... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2023-09-17 14:00:52 UTC ]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Eyes Do More Than See’ is a very short story by Isaac Asimov (1920-92), which originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in April 1965. Background The story had a curious genesis. In 1964, Playboy magazine (which published... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2023-08-06 14:00:04 UTC ]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Mexican Movies’ is a short story from Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, a 1991 collection of short stories by the American writer Sandra Cisneros (born 1954). In the story, a young Chicana girl describes going to her local movie theatre to... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2023-07-03 14:00:35 UTC ]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) What are the best short stories about painters, artists, and the world of art? From Gothic pioneers like Edgar Allan Poe to realist writers like Edith Wharton, masters of the short story have often touched upon the subject of art and painting, using... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2023-05-10 14:00:48 UTC ]
‘Wolf-Alice’ is a short story from The Bloody Chamber, the 1979 collection of modern fairy tales written by the British author Angela Carter (1940-92). The story tells of a girl raised by wolves who goes to live with a Duke who is a werewolf. You can read ‘Wolf-Alice’ here before […] Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2023-03-03 15:00:49 UTC ]
The following first appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. William Trevor famously described the short story as “the art of the glimpse,” and compression is generally a virtue. But the most engaging and compelling short stories and novels are not necessarily the... Continue reading >> [ Source: Literrary Hub | 2023-01-27 09:52:28 UTC ]
The list of novels that began their lives as short stories is long and well known. Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, Eudory Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (which began as a short story titled “Gogol”), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (expanded from her 1923... Continue reading >> [ Source: Literrary Hub | 2022-12-15 09:52:44 UTC ]
‘Simmering’ is a short story by the Canadian author and poet Margaret Atwood (born 1939). Published in Atwood’s 1983 collection Murder in the Dark, the story might be regarded as a piece of flash fiction, micro-fiction, or even an example of prose poetry. ‘Simmering’ posits a society in which... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2022-11-28 15:00:57 UTC ]