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# American Short Fiction

Publishing exquisite fiction since 1991.

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## Posts

- [The 2026 American Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-2026-american-shorter-fiction-prize/) - We are thrilled to announce that the brilliant Bret Anthony Johnston—internationally bestselling author of We Burn Daylight and Remember Me Like This and director of the Michener Center for Writers—will judge the 2026 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,500 words. The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication. Previous winners of the Short(er) Fiction Prize have gone on to be anthologized in places such as The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. All entries will be considered for publication. The deadline to enter is February 1, 2026.
- [The 2025 Halifax Prize Winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-2025-halifax-prize-winners-2/) - We are thrilled to announce the winners of this year's Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize, judged by Eric Puchner. We consider it our privilege to have spent time with so many terrific submissions—thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your work. Congratulations to the winners!
- [The Halifax Prize Winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-2025-halifax-prize-winners/) - We are thrilled to announce the winners of this year's Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize, judged by Daniel Mason. We consider it our privilege to have spent time with so many terrific submissions—thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your work. Congratulations to the winners!
- [MFA for All Fall 2025: Registration Open](https://americanshortfiction.org/mfa-for-all-fall-2025/) - We are so excited to announce our new faculty line-up for the Fall 2025 semester of MFA for All. MFA for All was born from our desire to create a space where MFA-quality instruction is widely accessible to writers no matter their age, background, location, or financial situation. Join us for exceptional classes on writing with Elizabeth McCracken, Tommy Orange, and Kevin Wilson. Classes on sale now! Read on for all the details!
- [Read the Winners of the 2025 Insider Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/read-the-winners-of-the-2025-insider-prize/) - Whose voices are these, I wonder each fall as submissions for the Insider Prize begin accumulating in my office. Four years on as director of Texas’s annual literary award for incarcerated writers, some of the names written across the bloated white and manila envelopes have grown familiar—essayists, short story writers, and the places they are relegated to calling “home”.
- [Announcing the Winners of the 2025 American Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-the-winners-of-the-2025-american-shorter-fiction-prize/) - We are delighted to announce that Tony Tulathimutte has chosen the winners of our 2025 American Short(er) Fiction Contest. Thank you to our judge and to everyone who submitted—it is always inspiring to read your work. Congratulations to the winners!
- [TOTES](https://americanshortfiction.org/totes/) - Find more issues and merch in our store.
- [ISSUES](https://americanshortfiction.org/issues/) - Find more issues and merch in our store.
- [Read the winners of the 2024 Insider Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/read-the-winners-of-the-2024-insider-prize/) - “Memories are a nuisance,” Peter wrote to one of our writers after reading his short story, “but nonetheless they seem to make us who we are, as this story confirms.” This year’s submissions told many stories burdened with memory, but just as many stared bravely into the face of hope, satirized the state of politics, speculated on the future of the world, or else built entirely new worlds to inhabit. In short, the stories written on the inside reflected the stories we wrote this year on the outside. Stories of human toil and dreams and everything in between.
- [Story Sessions: Susan Choi in Conversation with Deb Olin Unferth](https://americanshortfiction.org/story-sessions-susan-choi-in-conversation-with-deb-olin-unferth/) - Join ASF for the second installment of Story Sessions, a literary series that brings exceptional authors together for a freewheeling discussion about the power of stories and the ways we share them, on September 12, 2025, at Huston-Tillotson University from 6 – 8:00 p.m. We’re thrilled to welcome the National Book Award-winning novelist Susan Choi to the stage alongside acclaimed novelist Deb Olin Unferth.
- [The Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize: Now Closed](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-halifax-ranch-fiction-prize-2025/) - We’re so pleased to announce that our judge for this year’s Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize will be Eric Puchner, author of the 2025 New York Times bestselling novel Dream State as well as the novel Model Home, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In addition to publication and a $2,500 prize, the winning writer will receive an all-expenses-paid writing retreat at the Tasajillo Residency’s beautiful cabin. The deadline to submit has been extended to June 15, 2025.
- [MFA for All Spring 2024](https://americanshortfiction.org/mfa-for-all-spring-2024/) - MFA for ALL MFA for All was born from our desire to create a space where MFA-quality instruction is widely accessible to writers no matter their age, background, location, or financial situation. MFA for All is not a degree-granting program—it is a community-rich online educational experience led by top-notch faculty, free of the significant hurdles
- [MFA for All Fall 2024](https://americanshortfiction.org/mfa-for-all-2/) - MFA for All was born from our desire to create a space where MFA-quality instruction is widely accessible to writers no matter their age, background, location, or financial situation. MFA for All is not a degree-granting program—it is a community-rich online educational experience led by top-notch faculty, free of the significant hurdles of time, expense, and geography that MFAs demand. Taught by some of the most elite authors of our day, the lectures are designed to be as rewarding for seasoned authors as they are for writers earlier in their careers.
- [Lorem Ipsum Test Post](https://americanshortfiction.org/lorem-ipsum-test-post/) - Lorem ipsum odor amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Velit finibus fermentum aptent nulla imperdiet pellentesque euismod sociosqu. Augue sagittis ornare massa potenti efficitur lacinia suscipit bibendum pellentesque. Sagittis urna tortor cursus commodo purus augue justo rutrum aliquet. Amet ac platea elementum per commodo ipsum felis. Eleifend sit pharetra viverra ornare adipiscing efficitur viverra lobortis. Nam lobortis
- [ISSUE 81](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-81/) - Guest-edited by Fernando A. Flores, featuring new stories by Yvette DeChavez, Julián Delgado Lopera, Carribean Fragoza, Alejandro Heredia, Carmen Maria Machado, Ruben Reyes Jr., and Gerardo Sámano Córdova. Yvette DeChavez, "Saint Gloria" I’d only hung out with Ana and Margarita a few times, and always with Rogelio, but I hated the way they talked, their
- [The Stars at Night 2025](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-stars-at-night-2025/) - This year's program will honor Joy Williams as the Literary Star for her extraordinary body of work, Carrie R. Moore as the Constellation Star for a the story collection Make Your Way Home, Emily Hunt Kivel as the First Star for the debut novel Dwelling, and Leila Green Little as the Community Star for extraordinary literary service fighting banned books.
- [MFA for All Spring 2025](https://americanshortfiction.org/mfa-for-all-spring-2025/) - Registration is open for individual classes of MFA for All Spring 2025, with new faculty Matt Bell, Kristen Arnett, and ZZ Packer. Full-semester registration is closed. MFA for All was born from our desire to create a space where MFA-quality instruction is widely accessible to writers no matter their age, background, location, or financial situation. MFA for All is not a degree-granting program—it is a community-rich online educational experience led by top-notch faculty, free of the significant hurdles of time, expense, and geography that MFAs demand.
- [ISSUE 80](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-80/) - Featuring new stories by Matthew Lawrence Garcia, Laura Grothaus, Joshua Henkin, John McManus, JoAnna Novak, Peter Orner, Lucy Tan, and Zahid Rafiq. Matthew Lawrence Garcia, "Harmony" The day Tupac died I was with a few boys and this girl Elena I was into. Not that she’d been reciprocating. We were at the New Mexico State
- [ISSUE 79](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-79/) - Featuring new stories by Dave Eggers, Becky Hagenston, Jane Kalu, Diane Oliver, and Kate Tighe-Pigott. Dave Eggers, "Keeper of the Ornaments" His doorbell rang. Cole looked at the time: 6:46 a.m. He opened the door to find his new neighbor. Her hair was black, shoulder-length, streaked with pink. Her eyes were wide set, her face
- [Deadline Extended: The 2025 American Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/now-open-the-2025-american-shorter-fiction-prize/) - We are thrilled to announce that the brilliant Tony Tulathimutte—author of the 2024 National Book Award longlisted novel Rejection—will judge the 2025 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,500 words. The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication. Previous winners of the Short(er) Fiction Prize have gone on to be anthologized in places such as The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. All entries will be considered for publication.
- [The Stars at Night 2024](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-stars-at-night-2024/) - Please note that this event has passed. Please visit our Stars at Night page for information about this year’s event. Each year, the editors and staff of American Short Fiction host a grand party that recognizes literary excellence, extraordinary literary service, a brilliant new story collection, and a debut writer from Texas. We’re so excited
- [Forever Oak Park High](https://americanshortfiction.org/forever-oak-park-high/) - They were the only vegetarians, a fact that was highlighted every game day when the other girls loaded up on chicken sandwiches or steak fajitas while Yoon and Carmen ate salads of iceberg lettuce and shredded cheese, forgoing the ranch that came in rectangular packets, which they agreed was disgusting. They ate ironically, offering a round of applause whenever one found an actual cherry tomato. “Sustenance!” they cheered, stabbing the tomato ceremoniously before clinking sporks. Such surface similarities, at the age of fourteen, seemed indicative of a deeper likeness.
- [Announcing the winners of the 2024 American Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-the-winners-of-the-2024-american-shorter-fiction-prize/) - We are delighted to announce that Dantiel Moniz has chosen the winners of our 2024 American Short(er) Fiction Contest. Thank you to our judge and to everyone who submitted—it is always inspiring to read your work. Congratulations to the winners!
- [Story Sessions: Percival Everett in Conversation with Roger Reeves](https://americanshortfiction.org/story-sessions-percival-everett-in-conversation-with-roger-reeves/) - Join us for the first installment of Story Sessions, a literary series that brings exceptional authors together for a freewheeling discussion about the power of stories and the ways we share them, on September 27, 2024, at Huston-Tillotson University from 6 – 8:00 p.m. We’re thrilled to welcome the nationally award-winning novelist Percival Everett to the stage alongside the distinguished poet and National Book Award finalist Roger Reeves.
- [The Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize 2024](https://americanshortfiction.org/halifax-ranch-fiction-prize-2024/) - We’re so pleased to announce that our judge for this year’s Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize will be Daniel Mason, author of The Piano Tuner, A Far Country, The Winter Soldier, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, and most recently North Woods, a New York Times Bestselling novel, a New York Times and Washington Post Top 10 Book of 2023, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. This year, we're again partnering with the Tasajillo Residency, an idyllic writing residency that neighbors the Halifax Ranch just outside of Austin in Kyle, Texas. In addition to publication and a $2,500 prize, we are excited to offer the winning writer an all-expenses-paid writing retreat at the Tasajillo's beautiful cabin.
- [Spiders Cry Without Tears](https://americanshortfiction.org/spiders-cry-without-tears/) - “Here comes Meg now.” Sally waved to the woman shaking her umbrella in front of the shop’s glass door. Meg passed the refrigerated case of variously colored gladioli and smiled her greeting to the manager. “Aren’t you disgusting!” Sally said, circling Meg with a swoop of her hand. “Here everybody else is soaked to the skin. Do you always have to look so good?” Sally playfully made a face at her. “You know, honey, I just don’t feel like the day has started until you come.”
- [EOD](https://americanshortfiction.org/eod/) - Sam feared old people. She feared their drooping folds, their soft edges, like a block of butter left out for too long. They haunted the office in their squelching orthopedic sneakers, moving so slowly that Sam sometimes expected them to leave behind snail trails of mucus. She drifted behind them in the hallways, keeping at least ten paces of distance. She didn’t like to get too close to their odor of mothballs and lye soap; she didn’t want to see where their hair had thinned to reveal the shocking white of their scalps.
- [Shouting Is at Least Talking](https://americanshortfiction.org/shouting-is-at-least-talking/) - For six years I dated Ian, but only once we broke up did everyone close to me reveal they never liked him anyway. “We didn’t want to tell you,” my mother said. “We?” “Your father never liked him either.” She went quiet. “Ian’s tone was a little off. Do you know what I mean?” “He was good at communicating his needs,” I said.
- [Now Open: American Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/now-open-american-shorter-fiction-prize/) - We are thrilled to announce that the brilliant Dantiel W. Moniz—author of the acclaimed story collection Milk, Blood, Heat—will judge our 2024 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,000 words. The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication. Previous winners of the Short(er) Fiction Prize have gone on to be anthologized in places such as The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. All entries will be considered for publication. Submit your entry online between November 30, 2023 – February 15, 2024. .
- [The 2024 Halifax Ranch Prize Winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-2024-halifax-ranch-prize-winners/) - We are thrilled to announce the winners of this year's Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize, judged by Kelly Link. We consider it our privilege to have spent time with so many terrific submissions—thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your work. Congratulations to the winners!
- [The Stars at Night 2023](https://americanshortfiction.org/on-sale-now-get-your-tickets-to-our-2023-stars-at-night-celebration/) - Each year, the editors and staff of American Short Fiction host a grand party that recognizes literary excellence, extraordinary literary service, a brilliant new story collection, and a debut writer from Texas. We're so excited to celebrate The Stars a Night with everyone at on April 1, 2023, at the Tudor Cottage in Austin's Pease Park. The Stars at Night is our favorite event of the year because it’s intimate, festive, community-fueled, and inspiring. We always serve up good eats, fine drinks, special treats, spectacular company, and of course great country music to dance to. It’s the most down-home, sophisticated literary spectacular on the map.
- [The Letters](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-letters/) - My mother has been sending me letters lately. Not letters intended for me but rather letters she has been writing to various people in her life—important influences, she calls them. Relatives, friends, former classmates, coworkers. She has been writing two or three letters a week and sending them to me via email to look over and send back to her with comments. You’re a professor, she tells me, you know the right way to put these things.
- [MFA for All](https://americanshortfiction.org/mfa-for-all/) - MFA for All was born from our desire to create a space where MFA-quality instruction is widely accessible to writers no matter their age, background, location, or financial situation. MFA for All is not a degree-granting program—it is a community-rich online educational experience led by top-notch faculty, free of the significant hurdles of time, expense, and geography that MFAs demand.
- [Issue 78](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-78/) - Featuring new stories by Jeffery Renard Allen, Jamel Brinkley, Mala Gaonkar, Anita Lo, Yasmin Adele Majeed, Emily Mitchell, and Max Ross. Jeffery Renard Allen, "Orbits" You know, only a fool does something for free, the Champ said. I’ve been thinking about how to repay you. A word stalled on his tongue. It sounded like farty. She
- [Bleed and Bleed](https://americanshortfiction.org/bleed-and-bleed/) - Christopher was the nicest man I had ever met and so I was engaged to him. We got engaged during his residency and I told people we would get married when he became a doctor, but he never became a doctor he became a physician-scientist at the university researching von Willebrand disease because he thought this way he could help many people at once instead of one at a time.
- [House](https://americanshortfiction.org/house/) - I don’t climb up the downspout to my window, don’t have to hope it holds. I’ve missed curfew, but I was with Lily; no one is holding their breath. I use the key under the crocodile planter—tangles of rosemary, sage, thyme, a whole world creeping out from inside its jaws—and I take off my shoes, skip the second stair that creaks.
- [Read the winners of the 2023 Insider Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/read-the-winners-of-the-2023-insider-prize/) - Last spring, I approached Nickolas Butler, internationally bestselling author of the novels Shotgun Lovesongs, The Hearts of Men, and Godspeed, to be the judge for this year’s Insider Prize, American Short Fiction’s annual literary award for incarcerated writers in Texas. He’d worked with incarcerated writers in the past, championing their work. His own writing explores the marginalized and forgotten corners of American life. He jumped at the opportunity and provides illuminating commentary on the winning stories below.
- [Introducing Stephanie Macias, ASF's New Managing Editor](https://americanshortfiction.org/introducing-stephanie-macias-asfs-new-managing-editor/) - For five years, Stephanie Macias has been reading and considering submissions to American Short Fiction, and she's been instrumental in running our in-person events in Austin. A virtual Swiss Army Knife of artistic pursuits (she's a writer, photographer, visual artist, musician, and editor), Stephanie is now set to bring her broad experience and enthusiasm for stories to a new role at American Short Fiction: that of managing editor. As the outgoing managing editor, I'm both grateful for and proud of the work I've gotten to do during my tenure, and I'm excited about what the future of the magazine looks like with Stephanie's hand firmly on the wheel.
- [Dievas X](https://americanshortfiction.org/dievas-x/) - There’s no escaping the bath ladies. They come out at night in our small village and limp to my tiny house on Naujoji Street. They knock and I go to open the door. It’s the custom to let everyone in. I’m in northern Lithuania, near the edge of a pine forest with roaming stallions that bite. I left New Jersey to live here.
- [Orbits](https://americanshortfiction.org/orbits/) - The fumes from the super limousine dirtied the snow. The vehicle stretched a full block. She could see her father’s kufi hat duck under the roof as he got inside where ninety-nine other members of his delegation sat looking like packaged food waiting to be microwaved.
- [Issue 77](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-77/) - Featuring new stories by Magogodi oaMphela Makhene, Ben Mauk, Joyce Carol Oates, Laura van den Berg, Ada Zhang, Hilary Bell, and Emily Hunt Kivel. Magogodi oaMphela Makhene, "Dr. Basters" He’s probably licking an ice-cream cone somewhere, Eugene Alexander de Kock. Out. Walking, petting his dog. Whites love their dogs. Part of the family, as they
- [Issue 76](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-76/) - Featuring new stories by J. Robert Lennon, Manuel Muñoz, Eddie Fritts Tomaselli, Deb Olin Unferth, Greg Schutz, Rogelio Juárez, and Justin Taylor J. Robert Lennon, "Pingüino" It’s a gray gumdrop made out of dreadlocks, about the size of an upturned bucket. As Hugo watches, it shakes itself, and the dreads shimmy and wave. Beneath them,
- [Now Closed: The Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize 2023](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-halifax-ranch-fiction-prize-2023/) - We’re so pleased to announce that our judge for this year’s Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize will be the wonderful Kelly Link. A MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Link is the author of the acclaimed books Get in Trouble, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and others. Her latest story collection, White Cat, Black Dog, was published in March 2023 and is a national bestseller.
- [The Potatoes](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-potatoes/) - The potatoes came out of the compost pile thick-limbed and determined, looking almost like tomatoes, given their height. You shook your head. “Once there are potatoes, there’s always potatoes.” I liked the infinity of this. I thought Beget! The potatoes are begetting more potatoes! I thought of who would live in the little house after me, their wonder at the potatoes and the potatoes wondering at them.
- [The 2023 American Short(er) Fiction Prize Winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-2023-american-shorter-fiction-prize-winners/) - We are thrilled to announce the winners of this year's American Short(er) Fiction Prize, judged by Karen Russell. Thank you to everyone who submitted—it is always inspiring to read your work. Congratulations to the winners!
- [Down There](https://americanshortfiction.org/down-there/) - One summer night in 2030, in the garden of a nursing home, two old men began remembering. As a little boy I thought that dried apricots were ears, and I’d wonder who the unlucky soul was who’d had them chopped off. When I was forced to try one, picking it out from a Christmas arrangement of dates and candied fruit, I said to myself: “So this is what ears taste like.”
- [Announcing the 2023 ASF Workshop Fellows & Scholars](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-the-2023-asf-workshop-fellows-scholars/) - Today, we are delighted to announce the Fellows & Scholars for the 2023 ASF Workshop.
- [The Dog Had Ate the Hand](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-dog-had-ate-the-hand/) - They’d been watching the renovations for days. The plan was simple: Cut a hole in the fence. Get inside the house. Grab the copper. Take it home. Sell it. Easy money if Lucas could just stick to the plan. But there was something about the way his skull was born without a soft spot
- [Swung](https://americanshortfiction.org/swung/) - I came along to this place called the Squirrel Ranch, where they had actual live squirrels and rabbits and a rooster in a big outdoor hut of mesh wire. A few deer wandered around in the grass. Postings announced that all these creatures had been rescued but not from what. A series of cabanas and tall fencing sheltered it all from the world beyond.
- [Closed: The 2023 American Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-the-2023-american-shorter-fiction-prize/) - We are thrilled to announce that the brilliant Karen Russell—author of the novels Sleep Donation and Swamplandia! and the story collections Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Orange World, and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves—will judge our 2023 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,000 words. The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication.
- [The Stars at Night 2021](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-stars-at-night-2021/) - ASF’s sixth annual showcase has been postponed until early Spring 2022 due to ongoing public health concerns in our area. We can’t wait to celebrate our thirtieth anniversary with you and cheer on our honorees together safely and in person next year. Please stay tuned here for more info in the coming weeks.
- [The Stars at Night: Constellations](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-stars-at-night-constellations/) - Each fall, the editors and staff of American Short Fiction host a grand celebration that recognizes literary excellence, extraordinary literary service, great teaching and mentorship, and a debut writer from Texas. ASF’s fifth annual showcase goes virtual this year on November 30, 2020, with a stellar program line-up of acclaimed authors, debuts, and community leaders in conversation about how we can stay connected in this time of distance through a shared love of literature.
- [Announcing New Winter Short Story Workshop](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-new-winter-short-story-workshop/) - Join us this winter for a brand-new 8-week short story workshop led led by Stacey Swann, author of the novel Olympus, Texas and former editor of American Short Fiction.
- [A Century Ends](https://americanshortfiction.org/a-century-ends/) - It is decided at a summer staff meeting that The End of the Century will be the schoolwide theme for the year. Since it would be a mathematical fallacy to celebrate the year 2000 as the start of the new millennium, they all have to agree that it is not the turn or dawn of anything yet, just the end. Ellora and Jane, both first-grade teachers, have been passing notes back and forth with their own suggested titles for the schoolwide theme: The Beginning of the End; A New Beginning Begins; The End of Something Followed by the Beginning of Something Else; Same Shit, Different Century.
- [Applications now open for the 2023 American Short Fiction Workshop](https://americanshortfiction.org/applications-now-open-for-the-2023-american-short-fiction-workshop/) - Applications for the 2023 American Short Fiction Workshop are now open! This year's four-day intensive will take place from Thursday, May 25, to Monday, May 29, in Austin, Texas, led by novelist and National Book Award finalist Dr. Brandon Hobson and acclaimed author and No Tokens Founding Editor T Kira Māhealani Madden.
- [The Chiropractor](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-chiropractor/) - A giant mirror sat in front of the massage table. On the floor were bath towels that smelled of mold and alcohol. I watched the chiropractor place his thick, hairy hands on Ma’s ribs—watched him, watched him—pushing against her breasts as he hugged and pulled and lifted her from behind. The chiropractor urged Ma to relax and imagine herself floating on the sea. “You’re on holiday now,” he said, and Ma closed her eyes and leaned into him. “Yes,” he said.
- [Issue 75](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-75/) - Featuring new stories by Lydia Conklin, Darby Jardeleza, Matthew Neill Null, Roger Reeves, Eric Schlich, Caroline Schmidt, Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, and Emma Törzs. Lydia Conklin, "Belong to the Night" A hangover was already running her down, her lungs full of fiberglass. En route to the subway, a rat skittered from under a bulkhead door down the
- [The Only Time I See My Sister](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-only-time-i-see-my-sister/) - Is during the next family tragedy. She picks me up from the airport. Brings me a bottle of cold water, cucumber-infused facial wipes, an orange, and a jumbo box of Cheez-Its, which she knows I won’t eat.
- [The 2022 Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize Winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-2022-halifax-ranch-fiction-prize-winners/) - We are delighted to announce that our brilliant judge, Kristen Arnett, has selected the winners of this year's The Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize. We consider it our privilege to have spent time with so many terrific submissions—thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your work. Read what Arnett had to say about the winners!
- [Damien, 32.](https://americanshortfiction.org/damien-32/) - When I first started dating Damien, he told me that everything I knew about cancer was wrong. I had just survived a bout and it had been wrong. I was young, not very young, but healthy. I did yoga regularly and tended to my core with fitness videos I found on the internet. I drank fresh juice. Not knowing what came next was the wrongest part of all.
- [Read the Winners of the 2022 Insider Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/read-the-winners-of-the-2022-insider-prize/) - This year’s submissions capture the uncertainty, loss, and despair so many of us have experienced in the past two years. But they also capture self-reflection, hope, and a desire to escape to a new world—whether to a post-pandemic future filled with millions or clones, or to a more humane existence for those living within the confines of our criminal justice system.
- [Our Family Fortune-Teller](https://americanshortfiction.org/our-family-fortune-teller/) - The sign in my window says “Card Reader.” It is small, fuzzy, and lit up in a shade of 1960s pawnshop neon that implies my lack of card-reading expertise as well as a dwindling interest in the so-called future of my business. Still, people knock on my door and come inside. And come back. And ask me for the kind of giveaway they receive at espresso drive-throughs: one free session for every ten. Nothing, it seems, is more trustworthy than irrelevance.
- [Bodies of Water](https://americanshortfiction.org/bodies-of-water/) - 6:32 a.m. There is an agitation in the Morgans’ swimming pool. The water becomes abruptly more aware, as if nudged from drowsing. The September sun is edging over the horizon. A flurry of crows crosses the brightening sky. Their squabbling rings out in the morning quiet of this Palm Springs suburb.
- [Announcing New Fall Short Story Workshop](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-new-fall-short-story-workshop/) - Join us this fall for a brand-new 8-week short story workshop led by Fernando A. Flores, author of the two brilliant collections Valleyesque and Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas. Participants will join an intimate group (capped at 12) in a craft-inspired class held at ASF Headquarters in East Austin. More details, including how to apply, here.
- [Remembering Austin literary legend Joe W. Bratcher III](https://americanshortfiction.org/remembering-austin-literary-legend-joe-w-bratcher-iii/) - We are heartbroken at the loss of Austin literary legend, publisher of Host Publications, owner of independent bookstore Malvern Books, founder of Adam's Music House, and friend Joe W. Bratcher III, who passed away last Thursday, July 28th, due to complications from Covid.
- [The 2022 American Short(er) Fiction Prize Winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-2022-american-shorter-fiction-prize-winners/) - We are thrilled to announce the winners for this year's American Short(er) Fiction Prize, judged by National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson. Thank you to everyone who submitted—it is always uplifting to read your work. Congratulations to the winners!
- [Contest Closed: The Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/deadline-extended-the-halifax-ranch-fiction-prize/) - Thank you to all who entered the 2022 Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize contest, which will be judged by acclaimed novelist Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth: A Novel and the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things. For additional contest and submissions opportunities, please visit our submissions page.
- [A Random Strike](https://americanshortfiction.org/a-random-strike/) - I hated my job at the bowling alley more than usual that day. The Maximum Lilac deodorizer had run dry. I was too busy renting out shoes to slap an out-of-order sign on Mission Impossible, which left me with a list of token refunds a mile long. My period was nine days late. Some adults nearby were talking about the war in Ukraine while their children tried to bowl with two hands.
- [Killers](https://americanshortfiction.org/killers/) - the water is deeper than it looks; and we’re not the worst swimmers, but it’s dark; we tend not to swim at night; no, we tend not to swim at night with guys; we all knew of the girl who drowned; she sank like a stone, they said; she was showing off that night, they said; the guys all said [...]
- [ASF launches a collaboration with Texas Monthly](https://americanshortfiction.org/asf-launches-a-new-collaboration-with-texas-monthly/) - Today, American Short Fiction launched a new collaboration with Texas Monthly: a semi-regular series of short stories from Texan authors edited by ASF Coeditors Rebecca Markovits and Adeena Reitberger and copublished in ASF Online and Texas Monthly's print and digital editions. Texas Monthly has chronicled life in the Lone Star State for almost half a century and reaches a combined monthly audience of over 34.6 million.
- [Playing the Ghost](https://americanshortfiction.org/playing-the-ghost/) - I quit Texas after Lorelei troubled my waters. Ten, fifteen years ago. I drove to New Orleans, then Biloxi and Kansas City, wherever there was nine-ball action. If I found a motor court laid out like a horseshoe, I’d rent a room for a week. A month if the pool hall had Gold Crown tables,
- [Spare the Rod](https://americanshortfiction.org/spare-the-rod/) - You can never just call up one ghost. You get one, and before you know it all the others are there listening in on everything you got to say. It’s like back when I was a boy, and the only kind of phone service folks out in the country could get was a party line. If you called one house on our street, you’d called them all.
- [My Constellation of 8: Cara Blue Adams](https://americanshortfiction.org/my-constellation-of-8-cara-blue-adams/) - Join ASF for the latest installment of My Constellation of 8 on May 17th at 6:30 p.m. CDT, featuring award-winning author Cara Blue Adams, and benefiting The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn.
- [Announcing the 2022 ASF Workshop Scholars & Fellows](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-the-2022-asf-workshop-fellows-scholars/) - This year, we are delighted to launch the inaugural American Short Fiction Workshop. This May, we will welcome twenty-four writers to Austin to study with short-story masters Karen Russell and Dantiel W. Moniz. Today, we're so pleased to announce our initial cohort of ASF Workshop Fellows & Scholars.
- [On Sale Now: Get Your Tickets to Our 2022 Stars at Night Celebration](https://americanshortfiction.org/on-sale-now-get-your-tickets-to-our-2022-stars-at-night-celebration/) - After a COVID-19 hiatus, we're delighted to once again host our annual Stars at Night celebration. This year, we'll celebrate and honor literary stars Yiyun Li, Stacey Swann, Danielle Evans, and Meg Kuehn. For full details and to purchase your tickets, visit our Stars at Night events page.
- [Goodwill](https://americanshortfiction.org/goodwill/) - Let’s say you work in a candy factory cleaning the chocolate vats, and the job is dull, but you’re like, It’s necessary so the kids can be safe. Except then you read an article about how your boss’s boss basically puts cocaine in the chocolate bars that makes kids go insane with lust and craving for more of their product.
- [Audition](https://americanshortfiction.org/audition/) - It was crazy for the Reverend Doctor Preston McKinsey to think there was something sinister in the wind that day, but he felt it in the way it stung his cheeks—like a miniature slap to the face—and he saw it in the hardened pellets of sleet bouncing down the stairs as he entered the subway station.
- [A Shameful Citizen](https://americanshortfiction.org/a-shameful-citizen/) - Nuclear war? Rising sea levels? Such trifles never worried them. They were less concerned with knowing how and when the bees might return than with tracking down an ex-boyfriend, than hiring the neighborhood oracle to grope across the cosmos for the definitive answers they couldn’t just find on the computer. Mistresses, godmothers, and fiancées.
- [Pioneers](https://americanshortfiction.org/pioneers/) - Violet stepped out of the noodle shop and remembered to check that they had included the chili sauce she’d requested. She was working the dinner shift at the oyster bar in a few hours and didn’t need to be spending money like this, but she was tired of the bar’s menu and even more tired of the leering kitchen staff.
- [Introducing the American Short Fiction Workshop](https://americanshortfiction.org/introducing-the-american-short-fiction-workshop/) - This year, we are delighted to launch the inaugural American Short Fiction Workshop. From Thursday, May 26 to Monday, May 30, we will welcome twenty-four writers to Austin to study with short-story masters Karen Russell and Dantiel W. Moniz over the course of four energizing, enlightening days.
- [Matt's](https://americanshortfiction.org/matts/) - Day after the school shooting in Florida, my son’s elementary practices lockdown. When I pick his five-year-old self up in the parking lot crowded with parents I don’t breathe.
- [On Balconies](https://americanshortfiction.org/on-balconies/) - Everybody loved Berlin except for me and Emory. From my rented bed I could hear the others laughing in the streets. I’d pass the empty bottles on the curbs, lined up like tiny cities for the homeless to collect. Where New York had rooftops; Berlin had balconies, and everywhere I went I was sad and dumb and twenty-two—an age that pretends to matter when it doesn’t.
- [Issue 72](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-72/) - Celebrating Emerging Black Writers: Featuring new stories by Elinam Agbo, Selena Anderson, Desiree C. Bailey, Jonathan Escoffery, Rickey Fayne, Gothataone Moeng, Dantiel W. Moniz, Dennis Norris II, and Maya Perez. Guest-edited by Danielle Evans.
- [What the Tide Returns](https://americanshortfiction.org/what-the-tide-returns/) - She counts the children as they come through the door—one, two, and three—to reassure herself that they are hers. She can’t say just how happy she is to see them; she’s missed them all summer long. She hardly recognizes them; they’re browner than ever before, and somehow warmer to the touch.
- [Summer Film Club: Andre Dubus](https://americanshortfiction.org/summer-film-club-andre-dubus/) - In this weekly series, Intern Alyssa, your fearless reader, will review popular short stories and their film adaptations. We’ll explore what works in each medium and what doesn’t, and how exactly the allure of literature can translate to film. Alyssa has no formal training in film, unless subscribing to Netflix and following Roger Ebert on
- [Online Fiction: Interview with Alexander Lumans](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-alexander-lumans-2/) - Hot? Yeah, so are we. Luckily, our August web exclusive is the short fiction equivalent of diving headlong down a Slip ‘n Slide: a brief-yet-exhilarating trip that’s guaranteed* to lower your core temperature a degree or two. With snow, glaciers, and a cameo by South Pole-navigating Sir Ernest Shackleton, “The Unicorns” by Alexander Lumans is no-holds-barred fun and all kinds of cool. So go on, dive in, read “The Unicorns” on the ASF website. Plus, learn the story behind the story in our interview with the author.
- [Balikbayan](https://americanshortfiction.org/balikbayan/) - Two of my uncles hoisted the balikbayan box out of the truck bed. I heard the package hit the ground even though I was ten meters away, sitting on the porch, where I always sat. My seven younger cousins played with marbles in the shade, but when my uncles waved them over, they raced across the driveway to swarm the gift like moths around a fire.
- [Rockaway](https://americanshortfiction.org/rockaway/) - In May, Amy called to say she was squatting in the caretaker’s quarters of the Rockaway Motel. She needed her car; she wanted to sell it. When I pulled her old Volvo wagon into the dusky parking lot, I could see it had once been a nice getaway: empty pool in the middle of a courtyard surrounded by a clutch of cabins. Thick stands of pitch pine protected the motel from the sea.
- [ASF's Favorite Reads of 2021](https://americanshortfiction.org/asfs-favorite-reads-of-2021/) - Love them or hate them, year-end best-of lists can help us make sense of our moment in history, and what moment in history has demanded that we search for clarity, meaning, and comfort like 2021? Instead of offering a list of ASF staffers' favorite books published this year, we asked them about the books they read this year that sustained, inspired, or changed them, regardless of when the book was published.
- [Issue 74](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-74/) - Issue 74 features stories by Sanjay Agnihotri, Mala Gaonkar, hurmat kazmi, Taisia Kitaiskaia, Morgan Thomas, and Kirstin Valdez Quade.
- [Ricky](https://americanshortfiction.org/ricky/) - Carla felt sure she was the only rich girl to ever work the counter at Glazy’s Ham Depot. Carla hadn’t always been rich. Before Ed, she and her mom had once lived in a minivan for a year, so Carla remembered the ins and outs of being a have-not. Plus, her name was Carla, which
- [Issue 73](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-73/) - Anthony Veasna So, "We Would've Been Princes!" “So what do you say?” Marlon asked, standing up and grinning. Something about his unabashed drunkenness, his gleeful childlike pronouncements, complemented his broad shoulders. “Party with us?” Was it blood that zoomed to the FAMOUS SINGER’s cheeks or just maternal pity? Being handsome and pathetic was Marlon’s selling
- [Issue 71](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-71/) - ISSUE 71 Featuring new stories by Brandon Hobson, Melinda Moustakis, Patrick Nathan, Tracey Rose Peyton, Anne Valente, and Rachel Vogel. Subscribe now to receive the Summer issue. Tracey Rose Peyton, “The Last Days of Rodney” He was known most everywhere—a face, a caption, a grainy video clip—but it had been over twenty years now, and he was
- [ISSUE 70](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-70/) - American Short Fiction Issue 70 (Winter 2020), feauring stories by Annesha Mitha, Amy Sauber, Joyce Carol Oates, Lisa Taddeo, Mary South, and Ted Thompson.
- [ISSUE 69](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-69/) - Issue 69: Featuring new stories by Karl Taro Greenfeld, Susan Steinberg, Brandon Taylor, Cara Blue Adams, Lauren A. Green, Kirstin Allio, Meg Pinto, Will Johnson, and Lydia Conklin.
- [ISSUE 68](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-68/) - ISSUE 68: Featuring new stories by Rebecca Makkai, Amanda Rea, Alejandro Puyana, Jamie Figueroa, Michael Martone, Marie-Helene Bertino, Ariel Berry, Elin Hawkinson, and Mark Labowskie.
- [ISSUE 67](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-67/) - ISSUE 67: Featuring stories by Fernando A. Flores, Michaela Hansen, Mark Mayer, Joyce Carol Oates, Holiday Reinhorn, and Kevin Wilson.
- [ISSUE 66](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-66/) - ISSUE 66: Featuring stories by Jamel Brinkley, Kevin A. González, Blair Lee, Claire Robbins, Justin Sanders, and Jennifer Tseng.
- [ISSUE 65 - The Emerging Writers Issue](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-65/) - Issue 65, Summer 2017: The Emerging Writers Issue, featuring fiction by Amanda Emil Anderson, Emma Copley Eisenberg, Akil Kumarasamy, Sonya Larson, Amelia Maggio, Walter B. Thompson, and David E. Yee
- [ISSUE 64 - The Novella Issue](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-64/) - ISSUE 64: The Novella Issue, featuring long stories by Max Ross, Chantal Aida Gordon, and Christie Hodgen.
- [ISSUE 63 - Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Issue](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-63/) - ISSUE 63, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Issue: Featuring fiction by Andrea Barrett, Alexander Chee, Jennifer duBois, Danielle Evans, Bret Anthony Johnston, Emily Kiernan, Joyce Carol Oates, and Erin Somers
- [ISSUE 62](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-62/) - ISSUE 62: Featuring fiction by Porochista Khakpour, Aaron Steven Miller, Leona Theis, Kyle McCarthy, Matt Bell, and Smith Henderson
- [ISSUE 61](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-61/) - ISSUE 61: Featuring fiction by Caitlin Horrocks, Manuel Muñoz, Sara Majka, Kathryn Scanlan, and Bob Proehl
- [ISSUE 60](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-60/) - Issue 60: Featuring stories by Chris Leslie-Hynan, Laura van den Berg, Jennifer Murvin, Emily Geminder, Julian Zabalbeascoa, and Lauren Groff.
- [The 2021 Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize Winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-2021-halifax-ranch-fiction-prize-winners/) - We are delighted to announce that our brilliant judge, R.O. Kwon, has selected the winners of this year's The Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize. We consider it our privilege to have spent time with so many terrific submissions—thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your work!
- [The Chimp](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-chimp/) - Down slid the chimp. Not quite like a fireman, more hand-over-hand because the pole inside the four-foot-wide acrylic cylinder running floor-to-ceiling in the middle of my apartment had branches. Surely, shit piled on the floor below – the chimp is good at tearing off his diaper – but the beauty of it was I couldn't see it or smell it, and the rent was great because the chimp's owner kept the top and bottom apartments of the triplex.
- [American Short(er) Fiction Prize 2022](https://americanshortfiction.org/american-shorter-fiction-prize-2022/) - We are thrilled to announce that Brandon Hobson—author of Where the Dead Sit Talking, a National Book Award Finalist, and the 2021 novel The Removed, hailed by the NPR as "deeply resonant and profound"— will judge our 2022 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,000 words. The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication. Previous winners of the Short(er) Fiction Prize have gone on to be anthologized in places such as The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. All entries will be considered for publication.
- [A Letter from the Editors: 30 Years of Extraordinary Short Stories](https://americanshortfiction.org/a-letter-from-the-editors-30-years-of-extraordinary-short-stories/) - At American Short Fiction, we believe reading is transformative and that literature has the power to change the way we see ourselves, our world, and our place in it. ASF was founded in 1991 with a mission to publish today's most significant stories. In 2021, as we celebrate our 30th anniversary, our editors continue that legacy by advancing the short form, in all its diversity and complexity, in every edition.
- [Child of God](https://americanshortfiction.org/child-of-god/) - I was drunk. I mean, not usually. Not on a weekday. But that night, Bill had been out with Petra and then he’d texted me. He wanted to hook up. He and Petra weren’t married, not for another month, but she was my friend and she didn’t know and if I told her about Bill, I’d have to say I was the other woman.
- [Announcing the 2021 Winners of The Insider Prize, Selected by Mitchell S. Jackson](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-the-2021-winners-of-the-insider-prize-selected-by-mitchell-s-jackson/) - Sponsored by American Short Fiction and now in its fourth year, the Insider Prize highlights work by incarcerated writers in Texas, whether they live in state or federal prisons, local jails, or immigration detention centers. Read the winning selections here.
- [Days of Craving](https://americanshortfiction.org/days-of-craving/) - When I flew back to New Haven the day after the Texas wedding, my landlady’s house had acquired the smell of homecoming. She—my landlady—poked her head through my bedroom door and asked: “Are you in love?” rolling her eyes up and wide like a cartoon character. I shook my head.
- [Introducing ​​Story Menagerie: Literary Postcards by Edward Carey](https://americanshortfiction.org/introducing-​​story-menagerie-literary-postcards-by-edward-carey/) - Award-winning author and illustrator Edward Carey’s daily drawings have been an unexpected source of joy for all of us at ASF during a difficult year and a half. These illustrations—some whimsical, some terrifying—are playful, incisive, and magnetic, much like our favorite short fiction. We liked them so much we commissioned Carey to create a set of limited-edition literary postcards, which are now on sale for $25.
- [My Constellation of 8: Kirstin Valdez Quade](https://americanshortfiction.org/my-constellation-of-8-kirstin-valdez-quade/) - Join American Short Fiction for the latest installment of My Constellation of 8 on October 26th at 6:30 p.m. CST, featuring award-winning author Kirstin Valdez Quade in conversation about eight of her literary influences with ASF's Coeditor Adeena Reitberger.
- [Contest Closed: The 2021 Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-2021-halifax-ranch-fiction-prize/) - We’re thrilled to announce that our judge for this year’s Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize will be the brilliant R.O. Kwon, author of the bestselling novel, The Incendiaries, and coeditor of the groundbreaking new story anthology, Kink, published by Simon & Schuster in February 2021. And there's more exciting news! This year, we've partnered with the Tasajillo Residency, and in addition to publication and the $2,500 prize, we are excited to offer the winning writer an all-expenses-paid writing retreat at the Tasajillo's beautiful cabin, which neighbors the Halifax Ranch just outside of Austin in Kyle, Texas.
- [I'll Give You a Reason](https://americanshortfiction.org/ill-give-you-a-reason/) - I met Maria back in the fifth grade. She was this skinny girl whose mom would always pack her salami sandwiches for lunch. When I think of Maria today, I think of those slices of salami stuffed inside a hardened Kaiser roll. No lettuce, tomatoes, or cheese. Just belch-inducing salami.
- [To Deaden the Nerve](https://americanshortfiction.org/to-deaden-the-nerve/) - Marines sit on the ground with their feet in their hands, their bare knees against the wet morning grass to stretch their groins, to loosen their limbs, to gather themselves near the flight line behind company headquarters. They await the arrival of their instructor, the start of their next round of martial arts training. They wait to advance, to add to their takedowns and submissions, to harden their bodies, train with new weapons . . .
- [Cazones, 2016](https://americanshortfiction.org/cazones-2016/) - My dying father and his friend, the former mayor, told me that if it was stories of the massacre I wanted, then there was this farmer living in a seaside village we should track down. So, we lowered ourselves into the mayor’s old green Volkswagen Beetle—my wheezing father in the passenger’s seat and myself in back—and made for La Costa Esmeralda.
- [Announcing the 2020 Winners of the Insider Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-the-2020-winners-of-the-insider-prize/) - For the last three years, American Short Fiction has sponsored a contest for incarcerated writers in Texas. A group of writers at the Connally Unit, in Kenedy, Texas, came up with the name: The Insider Prize. Each year we get dozens of essays and short stories from men and women in prisons and jails across the state, some handwritten and others produced on typewriters. They tell stories about their lives before prison, about the conditions inside, and about the many places their imaginations take them.
- [Register Now: 2021 Short Story Summer Camp](https://americanshortfiction.org/2021-short-story-summer-camp/) - Join us this summer for a first-ever, limited-entry manuscript consultation and virtual craft series from the editors of American Short Fiction. Each registrant will receive detailed feedback on their submitted story and attend a series of three virtual live seminars focused on honing and refining their work with an editor's eye. Register now for early bird pricing.
- [The 2021 American Short(er) Fiction Prize Winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-2021-american-shorter-fiction-prize-winners/) - We are thrilled to announce the winners for this year’s American Short(er) Fiction Prize, judged by Susan Steinberg. Thank you to everyone who submitted—it is always uplifting to read your work. Congratulations to the winners!
- [The Get-Go](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-get-go/) - Sadie’s mother was tall and narrow, with a long braid down her back, black when Sadie was very little, then silvery, then silver, an instrument to measure time, an atomic clock. Her father had been tall, too, both he and the mother the tallest members of short families. In photographs and at reunions, they loomed. Everyone was happy when they had a short child: they’d decided to fit in after all.
- [My Constellation of 8: Elizabeth McCracken](https://americanshortfiction.org/my-constellation-of-8-elizabeth-mccracken/) - Join American Short Fiction for the latest installment of My Constellation of 8 on June 8th at 6:30 p.m., featuring award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken in conversation about eight of her literary influences with ASF's Coeditor Adeena Reitberger.
- [Even on Good Nights](https://americanshortfiction.org/even-on-good-nights/) - On my morning walk along the service road, I see through the chain-linked fence a man on his knees. He’s smashing his fist, the flesh of which is a bloody mush, into the pebbly shoulder of the highway. The sound of it is like the slapping of a paper bag full of wet sticks into concrete. He’s not an old man, but not young either.
- [CLMP Contest Code of Ethics](https://americanshortfiction.org/clmp-contest-code-of-ethics/) - American Short Fiction endorses and abides by the Code of Ethics developed by the Council of Literary Magazines and Press (CLMP): The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. Intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form
- [2021 American Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-the-2021-american-shorter-fiction-prize/) - We are thrilled to announce that Susan Steinberg, author of three remarkable story collections—The End of Free Love, Hydroplane, and Spectacle—and Machine: A Novel (read a beautiful ASF-published excerpt, "Killers," here), will judge our 2021 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,000 words.
- [The Vacant Field](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-vacant-field/) - I stood at the edge of a vacant field. Police who were not dressed as police were looking in the field for things that were dangerous. These were items left by a woman who was not dressed as a terrorist and who also was not one. She did wear a uniform. She was no longer there in the field. An officer picked up a wrench and threw it in my direction.
- [She Said It Like She Meant It](https://americanshortfiction.org/she-said-it-like-she-meant-it/) - There’s a cemetery on a mountainside in Kabul that’s running out of space. I read a New York Times piece about it years ago. A group of boys run grave maintenance, for a price, and one girl, six years old, works the mountainside with them. She brags like the boys about taking in mourners—too young to appreciate how much we mourners want to be taken in.
- [The North](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-north/) - My uncle was driving us north, where the enemy planes hadn’t yet attacked. He took turns drinking from a bottle with the man sitting up front. My parents and I were squeezed in the back. My mother closed her eyes and held me close. My father kept biting his lips. “Drink up,” my uncle said, passing the bottle to my father. My father returned the bottle untouched.
- [Bread Week](https://americanshortfiction.org/bread-week/) - 1. Your father calls you train wreck, as in, HEY, wake up, train wreck, bud, you’re falling asleep—beady, bootblack eyes narrowed on you from the Hemingway chair in the basement. Your mother is memorizing two-letter words, your baby boy squeezing the dog’s fur, and gentle, gentle, your wife is saying, practice gentle on the giraffe.
- [Cat's-Eye](https://americanshortfiction.org/cats-eye/) - At night I oil the door, whose hinges have been squeaking all year, and in the morning when I open it, they’re quiet. The rest is the same. I don’t wake anyone. The cat follows me into the bathroom. After I sit down, he jumps onto my lap, which is half-fleece, half-skin. Each paw, cold as a child’s nose, lands at a slightly different moment.
- [Ember](https://americanshortfiction.org/ember/) - Chuchi marvels at the sparks brightening this darkest night, and I guess they are kind of pretty. You look up, let your eyes water against the cold, and can’t tell the embers from the stars. We don’t have a tree this year, so maybe smoldering flakes of the Brownsburg Public Library are as close to Christmas lights as we’re gonna get.
- [New Folktale About Myself](https://americanshortfiction.org/new-folktale-about-myself/) - I’m sweeping the floors one morning when I notice a gouge in the wood like a finger mark in cake icing. I cover it back up with the rug and resolve to sand it down, but a few days later I lift the rug again and see that the hole has widened, deepened. Now I can run two fingers through it. What’s more, it’s soft around the edges, wet to the touch.
- [The 2020 Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize Winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/2020-the-halifax-fiction-prize-winners/) - We are delighted to announce that our brilliant judge, Manuel Gonzales, has selected the winners of this year's The Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize. We consider it our privilege to have spent time with so many terrific submissions—thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your work!
- [Issue 72 Editor's Note](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-72-editors-note/) - I am thrilled to be putting this issue in your hands. It is, as ever, a collection of singular short stories that celebrate the form and highlight its range, but it is also a gift at the end of a turbulent year—work to get lost in, work to be found in, work that in its celebration of emerging writers, and Black emerging writers in particular, encourages us to imagine everything that is yet to come: all of the chances we’ll have to see more brilliant work by the writers included here, none of whom yet have a book in print, and all of the chances we’ll have to celebrate and center Black writers who have found a way to make room for themselves while we wait for the world to catch up. By definition, an emerging writers issue believes in the future.
- [The Very Last Time I Set Out to Stargaze](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-very-last-time-i-set-out-to-stargaze/) - I’m in Joshua Tree, California, the very last time I set out to stargaze. I’ve come for the month of July to this hallucinogenic desertscape inland of Los Angeles, where my goal is to disconnect from daily life. Oneness with the universe and all that.
- [The Constellation Challenge](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-constellation-challenge/) - This November, American Short Fiction invites you on a journey to reach out to your chosen family and grow your constellation of influences. As part of a month-long postcard-writing challenge, we’ll share daily prompts from our honorees Jamaica Kincaid, C Pam Zhang, Selena Anderson, and Charlotte Gullick and invite you to send notes out into your universe and strengthen the invisible threads that connect us. The Constellation Challenge package includes a set of 28 limited-edition printed postcards, exclusive never-before-seen writing from established authors alongside up-and-coming voices, and a spot at the culminating celebratory “The Stars at Night: Constellations” virtual gathering in an immersive experience you don’t want to miss. You will emerge from this month changed—and by sharing your own stories, loves, and constellations, you will change the literary landscape, too.
- [The Invisible String](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-invisible-string/) - In our bathroom, there’s a worn 3x5 notecard taped to the mirror that reads, “There’s an invisible string connecting me to you.” When my daughter, Hope, was five, we moved from Northern California to Austin, Texas because I had a new job as Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the community college.
- [Swan of the Gods](https://americanshortfiction.org/swan-of-the-gods/) - Back in college, I unwisely took an introduction to astronomy class hoping I’d learn something mystical about the formation of stars, how they came to be named, even what secrets they could tell me about my future. The class, however, was much more interested in teaching us how to quantify the universe.
- [Dummy Post for Fixing Bullet Points](https://americanshortfiction.org/dummy-post-for-bullet-points/) - Bullets from the visual editor. Notice that the text of this sentence renders differently than the font that follows the bullets. Can we change this in the stylesheet? Alas alack! Do these render the text lighter? If so, how do we fix it? What what what?
- [My Constellation of 8: A Conversation with Carmen Maria Machado](https://americanshortfiction.org/my-constellation-of-8-a-conversation-with-carmen-maria-machado/) - Our next My Constellation of 8 event will take place on October 13th via Crowdcast and will feature award-winning author Carmen Maria Machado, who will share eight titles that have shaped her as a writer and person. She'll be joined in conversation by ASF's Coeditor Adeena Reitberger and, as with previous events in the series, we'll have an ASL interpreter at the event. Our bookselling partner for the evening is Philadelphia's Harriett's Bookshop, an experiential bookstore named for historical heroine Harriet Tubman that celebrates women authors, women artists, and women activists.
- [Karst](https://americanshortfiction.org/karst/) - He wakes in the landscape of his childhood, the karst. The house is surrounded by stone that dissolves in water, limestone that becomes fissured and hazardous because of its own weakness. The clints are the parts left standing. Grykes are the absences between. It is in the grykes you find life: hart’s tongue fern, butterfly orchid, primrose. Sheltering in the sinkholes.
- [Less Than Five Miles from Home](https://americanshortfiction.org/less-than-five-miles-from-home/) - My mother and I were heading north out of Marathon, Florida, in the middle of the night, everything we owned in the back of the car. I was thirteen, and she was driving. We were coming off an overseas bridge when someone screamed from the opposite side of the street.
- [In Nature](https://americanshortfiction.org/in-nature/) - A week before Christmas, Maggie’s son is married in the bare spot of land under the hemlocks where nothing ever grows. Maggie hangs white lights in the branches. She covers her son’s pregnant bride in a pale woolen blanket. She wakes early the morning of the wedding and spends hours digging a path through the fresh snow so that the guests—the bride’s aunt, and friends from the ranch where the young couple works—can come up to her cabin for warm bread and jam and champagne. At some point, glitter is thrown. Weeks later, when the snow melts in patches, Maggie finds it mixing into the earth and curses.
- [I Hold a Wolf by the Ears](https://americanshortfiction.org/i-hold-a-wolf-by-the-ears/) - Margot’s destination is a walled medieval village several thousand feet above Trapani, overlooking Punta del Saraceno and the Mediterranean Sea. The village can be accessed only by a single road and as the taxi winds its way up through the arid copper hills, her phone chimes in her purse. It’s her sister, Louise, calling from the airport in Rome.
- [The Stars at Night 2017](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-stars-at-night-2017/) - Join us on the night of Thursday, November 2nd, for our second annual The Stars at Night, a beer-and-boots gala celebrating American Short Fiction, our Texas heritage, and our city's writers and those who champion them. Come for the live country music and dancing, and stay for the open bar, delicious food, and the bright view of the city skyline. This year, American Short Fiction is proud to honor three stars: Dan Chaon, Joe Bratcher III, and Anushka Jasraj. Tickets on sale now, and they're limited! Get yours today.
- [](https://americanshortfiction.org/asf-presents-stars-night-gala/) - Join us on the night of Thursday, November 3rd for the first annual beer-and-boots gala celebrating ASF, our Texas heritage, and our city's writers and those who champion them. Come for the country songs and dancing, and stay for the free cocktails, light snacks, and the bright view of the city skyline.
- [The Sun and the Pacific, Flowers](https://americanshortfiction.org/sun-pacific-flowers/) - In the afternoon, I was usually lying in the hammock reading Don Quixote while avocados fell on the roof and the grapefruit tree blew its scent around the yard. Bougainvillea and jasmine grew on all the walls, and several varieties of palm snaked up in the sky. The medians were a riot of rosemary. I remember oleander and trumpet vines and sidewalks littered with jacaranda blooms. Hibiscus and giant agaves. Bella donna. There was a tree that made wooden flowers; I have one still, years later. [...]
- [My Constellation of 8: A Conversation With Roger Reeves](https://americanshortfiction.org/my-constellation-of-8-a-conversation-with-roger-reeves/) - Please note that this event has already occurred, but the good news is that you can watch a recording of the event on Crowdcast here, in its entirety. Watch a Recording of the Event Here This fall, American Short Fiction will host three virtual events featuring some of today’s most exciting and celebrated writers. Unlike other virtual
- [My Constellation of 8: A Conversation with Esmé Weijun Wang](https://americanshortfiction.org/my-constellation-of-8-conversations-with-brilliant-literary-minds/) - This fall, American Short Fiction will host three virtual events featuring some of today’s most exciting and celebrated writers. Unlike other virtual events, which importantly seek to promote and share a writer’s own work, we’re inviting Roger Reeves on August 25th, Esmé Weijun Wang on September 15th, and Carmen Maria Machado on October 13th to discuss and share eight books that shaped their thinking, changed them, and helped them grow as writers, as thinkers, and as people.
- [Appointment](https://americanshortfiction.org/appointment/) - “I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, unwinding my scarf and piling my layers on an empty swivel chair beside the stylist’s station. The crumpled clothes looked shabby in the gleaming, mirrored room, like something you’d find under a bridge. I was wearing pretty much everything I owned. This little jaunt was the first time I’d left the house in weeks, and let me tell you, you could die out there.
- [Every Possible Landform, Weather Condition, and Natural Disaster: An Interview with Matthew Baker](https://americanshortfiction.org/every-possible-landform-and-weather-condition-and-natural-disaster-an-interview-with-matthew-baker/) - Matthew Baker's second collection of short stories, Why Visit America, takes ambitious aim at this country's societal and political systems. Each story arrives through some manner of warped lens—a lens in which America, at first, appears very unfamiliar. New technologies, new borders, new pandemics. But the deeper into these stories you read, the more you recognize similar dangers at play in our own United States.
- [Join us for Lit City at The LINE Hotel, featuring Rebecca Makkai & Paul Lisicky](https://americanshortfiction.org/join-us-for-lit-city-at-the-line-hotel-featuring-rebecca-makkai-paul-lisicky/) - On Monday, May 20th at 7 p.m., join us in the East Lobby of the LINE Austin for the second installment of our new literary salon, Lit City at the LINE. This month features Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers, and Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door, hosted by Richard Z. Santos. Cocktail hour to follow readings and conversation.
- [The Stars at Night 2018: A Celebration of Writing and Community](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-stars-at-night-2018-a-celebration-of-writing-and-community/) - Join us on Thursday, October 11th, for The Stars at Night 2018, a bright Texas evening of honky-tonk and literary splendor. Come for the live country music and readings, and stay for the open bar, delicious food, and the historic charm of Mercury Hall, complete with beautiful gardens and rambling live oaks on a bright starry lawn. Mark the date on your calendar and shine those cowboy boots—it's an evening you don't want to miss! [...]
- [The House in the Woods: An Interview with Jane Delury](https://americanshortfiction.org/nate-brown-interviews-author-jane-delury/) - In her lush debut, The Balcony, author Jane Delury offers readers wide-angle and macrocosmic glimpses of life in and around a French manor house over the course of more than a century. A novel-in-stories, The Balcony examines the changing fortunes of families who've come and gone over the manor's history, looking both at the occupants of the main house as well as those who've lived in the cottage on the grounds of the estate. [...]
- [STORE](https://americanshortfiction.org/store/) - excerpt text
- [The 2020 Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-2020-halifax-ranch-fiction-prize/) - We’re thrilled to announce that our judge for this year’s Halifax Fiction Prize will be the brilliant Manuel Gonzales, author of the acclaimed novel The Regional Office Is Under Attack! and the prize-winning short story collection The Miniature Wife. Gonzales's work is wildly inventive and deeply moving, and as a contributing editor to ASF, we're especially pleased to have him as the judge for the contest this year. All submitters will receive a complimentary copy of the prize issue.
- [Ara's Man](https://americanshortfiction.org/aras-man/) - Ara killed my dog so I had to screw her man. His mouth was still swollen from the tooth he lost and he tasted terrible, but I did it anyway. I had to. Afterward, tearfully, he told me a story about a boy from his part of the land who stole an arrowhead from a neighboring clan. They caught the boy and fed him white clay from the river until he exploded. Blood and bones and ropes of glossy pink organs everywhere. This was during the hard times when there was barely a weed to suck on, and no meat, not even a rat. [. . .]
- [Belly of the Beast](https://americanshortfiction.org/belly-of-the-beast/) - It’s Saturday night, and the beast has swallowed my husband. One minute he was there, the next, gone—just a shout, half smothered, as the creature engulfed him. I didn’t see the actual swallowing. I arrived seconds later, in time to see the wolfish thing licking its jowls. It’s not like anything you’ve ever seen: Eyes small and black like papaya seeds. Hispid hair covering its limbs. Claws like small sickles. Tongue: long and leathery. I would have attacked it, grabbed a fire iron or my husband’s reenactment sword if I had been feeling heroic, but there was something about the way the creature sighed, tired after its work consuming him, that made me pause and watch. [...]
- [2020 American Short(er) Fiction Prize Winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/2020-american-shorter-fiction-prize-winners/) - We are thrilled to announce the winners for this year's American Short(er) Fiction Prize, judged by Deb Olin Unferth. Thank you to everyone who submitted—reading your work during this time has been a bright spot for us. Congratulations to the winners!
- [Everything Old Is New Again: An Interview With Co-Web Editor Adam Soto](https://americanshortfiction.org/everything-old-is-new-again-an-interview-with-co-web-editor-adam-soto/) - Writer and editor Adam Soto has long been a part of American Short Fiction's editorial team, and this month, he joins our longtime web editor Erin McReynolds as our website's co-editor. Together, they'll determine which stories are published here on our website. I recently emailed with Soto to ask about his forthcoming novel, his approach to editing, his favorite writers, and his aspirations for the magazine.
- [What We Have Learned: An Interview with Clare Beams](https://americanshortfiction.org/what-we-have-learned-an-interview-with-clare-beams/) - Clare Beams’s Bard Fiction Prize-winning story collection We Show What We Have Learned transports us to saltwater marshes that promise healing and schools that promise transformation (in more ways than one), to bodies in decay, tightly corseted, breaking apart, and numbed—worlds singularly strange yet incredibly, vibrantly real.
- [ASF Celebrates Black Writers](https://americanshortfiction.org/asf-celebrates-black-writers/) - As Black History Month nears an end, we asked members of our staff compile a list of their favorite short fiction by Black writers. For this list, our scope was broad. From naturalism to fabulism and lush, metaphorically rich descriptions to pared down prose, the stories included here are formally and stylistically varied, and their concerns are many. We hope you love these stories just as much as we do, and that you'll take the opportunity to revisit some old favorites listed here.
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Joy Baglio](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-joy-baglio/) - Though our Web Exclusive "Belly of the Beast" was published on Halloween, it's a timeless story, drawing on folk tale traditions of employing monsters to contend with painful human realities. In this case, a spouse grows distant, frightening, and dangerous, lost (literally) inside of a beast. We talked with author Joy Baglio recently about the flash form, the Master Switch of Life, and why writing by hand changes everything.
- [Contributions](https://americanshortfiction.org/contributions/) - We have been practicing esusu for a long time. Our mothers did it, our mothers’ mothers did it. And probably their own mothers, too. We’ve never had a problem of this substance before, nothing so significant until this woman showed up. Nothing we couldn’t fix, anyway. This is how our system works: each woman has one month to contribute a certain amount of naira. Our names are on a list, and when that month is over, whoever’s number one takes it all. Then the contributions begin again, and at the end of the second month, number two collects. [. . .]
- [Say Hello to Amanda Faraone, Our New Development & Communications Director](https://americanshortfiction.org/say-hello-to-amanda-faraone-our-new-development-communications-director/) - Our little team here at American Short Fiction has just grown by one: this month we're welcoming the wonderful Amanda Faraone on board as our new development and communications director. As a fiction writer, literary programmer, and seasoned communications and development professional, Faraone brings valuable experience to the table, and we're so grateful and excited to have her on our team.
- [Now Closed: The 2020 American Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/now-open-the-2020-american-shorter-fiction-prize/) - We are thrilled to announce that Deb Olin Unferth, author of six remarkable books, including Wait Till You See Me Dance, Minor Robberies, and the forthcoming novel Barn 8, will judge this year’s American Short(er) Fiction Prize. The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,000 words.
- [Lobsters](https://americanshortfiction.org/lobsters/) - Tom’s barrel chest jerked up, then down at regular intervals, following the dictates of the hospital ventilator. Attached to the machine, he seemed all torso, his lower half an afterthought, like the straw-haired Resusci Annies that he’d haul around the high school gym during CPR units. That was long ago, when he was the coach and Helen was the music teacher and they were, improbably perhaps, in love.
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Nora Lange](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-nora-lange/) - In Nora Lange's flash fiction, “Her Cousin Lena,” Rose records a long-distance phone call with her mother. Their exchange reveals a disconnect that, though often funny, describes the “love and horror” of a certain flavor of mother-daughter relationship. Haunting the conversation is the absent figure of Rose’s cousin, Lena, to whom the mother constantly compares her daughter, and who becomes the axis point of their unaddressed tensions. We chatted recently with Nora about her story and writing. [...]
- [In 2020, Recommit to Reading Literary Magazines](https://americanshortfiction.org/in-2020-recommit-to-reading-literary-magazines/) - With the new year comes our best-ever subscription bundle. From now until February 1st, you can get a one-year subscription to American Short Fiction, BOMB, and The Believer for only $80. That's a 27% discount on the cover price! This bundle makes a great gift as well, so if you've got a literature and art-loving friend or two, get this deal while the getting's good.
- [Further Thoughts on Revision or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the "Beast Christ"](https://americanshortfiction.org/further-thoughts-on-revision-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-beast-christ/) - In 2018, I published an essay that collected some of my thoughts about what writers should think about prior to submitting their work to literary journals. That piece was based on a talk I'd given that year at the Muse and the Marketplace conference in Boston. I returned to the Muse in the spring of this year and delivered a sequel to that talk, one in which I was able to include a few more thoughts (and expand upon previous ones) on revision.
- [Bourbon and Milk: On Time](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-and-milk-on-time/) - This past summer, for the first time in ten years, I didn’t work on a book. I'd been working on one difficult book or another since before I got pregnant with my son—he is nine now—and even the thought of beginning another difficult, many-year project made me want to take a very long nap. I had already started telling people I was working on another book—a book length essay about disaster—but if I’m being honest, I hadn’t really started anything yet. The most recent book had been difficult to write—difficult on the heart and the mind—and then difficult to talk about and read from once it was out in the world. I’d started working on that book when my daughter was seven. She’ll be thirteen this December, and in six years she’ll be starting college [...]
- [The Stars at Night 2019: A Bright Texas Celebration of Literature](https://americanshortfiction.org/save-the-date-announcing-the-stars-at-night-2019-honorees/) - Join us on Thursday, October 17th, for our 4th annual The Stars at Night celebration, a bright Texas evening of brilliant company, joyful honky-tonk, and literary splendor. Tickets are limited and on sale now! Come for the country music, dance lessons, and readings, and stay for the open bar, delicious food, silent auction [...]
- [2019 The Halifax Fiction Prize Winner](https://americanshortfiction.org/2019-the-halifax-fiction-prize-winner/) - We're delighted to announce that our wonderful judge Rebecca Makkai has selected the winner of The Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize. We received many terrific submissions—thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your work! Winner: "Visitors" by Rachel Vogel Judge's Citation "This story made me tremendously nervous, which is about the highest compliment I
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Min Han](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-min-ha/) - If you remove technology and industry, anything remotely modern about human beings, what sort of animal are we? What is the shape of our heart, after all? To explore these questions, Min Ha went back to the Stone Age for August's Web Exclusive, "Ara's Man." We talked with the debut author about telling a universal story set in another world, about the importance of travel, and how bullshit it is that there aren't more stories where early females occupy the significant roles (that archaeology continues to prove) they held. [...]
- [ASF Goes Back to School: Back Issues for the College Classroom](https://americanshortfiction.org/asf-goes-back-to-school-back-issues-for-the-college-classroom/) - In recent years, we shipped over 300 free back issues of American Short Fiction to colleges and universities including Rowan University, the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin, Towson University, Missouri State University, and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. If you’re a creative writing instructor who’s teaching a workshop at a U.S. college or university this fall, we’d be happy to send you a box of back issues to use in your classroom. [. . .]
- [The Internal Conversation Is Constant: An Interview with Danielle Lazarin](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-internal-conversation-is-constant-an-interview-with-danielle-lazarin/) - Danielle Lazarin’s debut story collection Back Talk (Penguin Books, 2018) features women grappling with what they—often deliberately—leave unsaid and displays the intricacies of the desires and rages that live inside those silences. Hailed as “beautifully crafted” by the New York Times, Back Talk is a story collection that lingers long after a first read, not only for its beautiful prose and unforgettable characters but for its quiet, powerful tensions. [. . .]
- [Enid & Floyd & the Moon](https://americanshortfiction.org/enid-floyd-the-moon/) - Enid leans over the sink while her husband, Floyd, dyes her sparse hair. His veined, shaky hands are covered in the clear plastic gloves that came in the Clairol “Flame Red” coloring kit. The gloves are too small and stop below his wrists. It’s awkward, but everything for him is awkward or impossible. Using an old pair of children’s scissors, he struggles to snip the top off the squeeze bottle. His hands feel like dumb paws.[...]
- [Bourbon and Milk: Response Training](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-and-milk-response-training/) - I sit at my desk at home in my New Jersey suburb, writing poems about gun violence, and I hear police sirens. My first thought is that there is a shooter at my daughters’ high school three blocks away. Since the Newtown massacre, police presence, sirens, and lockdowns are a feature of my daughters’ lives. Kids accept this new reality. My girls tell me that they are used to being told to “shelter in place”—which means there is no active danger—and they often can decode when a “lockdown drill” is happening (demanded by the state to occur once a month) as opposed to a true threat [. . .]
- [The 2019 Insider Prize, Memoir Honoree: "Bucknaked Gurney Unit" by Kevin Murphy, Selected by Joyce Carol Oates](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-2019-insider-prize-memoir-honoree-bucknaked-gurney-unit-by-kevin-murphy/) - It’s 1996 and I’m waiting in line with ten other men. It’s cold and we’ve been standing outside for thirty minutes, freezing. We’re waiting to go to commissary and we’ve just been given slips to fill out. I’m wearing a thin, green, TDC issued jacket that’s two sizes too small for me. The zipper is broken, the sleeves run out well before my arms do and there’s a tear on the right shoulder. My pants are as big on me as the jacket is small and I’m juggling to keep one closed and one up, while trying to fill out the slip I’ve been given [...]
- [The 2019 Insider Prize, Fiction Honoree: “Mother’s Son” by F.R. Martinez, Selected by Joyce Carol Oates](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-insider-prize-2019-fiction-honoree-mothers-son-by-f-r-martinez/) - She said they came at night. That’s what I always remember hearing her say, ever since I could remember anything anyone said, looking up from my toys on the floor when she was cooking or sewing. "They came at night, in the middle of the night." She was consumed by the injustice of it, the sadness, the anger, something taken from her she’d never get back. "In the middle of the night, mi hijo. Think how terrible that is." Night was scary. Darkness. Headlights in the road outside. The isolated farmhouse. The men calling for her husband, a dozen of them, a priest leading them [. . .]
- [What Doesn't Kill You: An Interview with Sabrina Orah Mark](https://americanshortfiction.org/what-doesnt-kill-you-an-interview-with-sabrina-orah-mark/) - Poet Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of Wild Milk, a collection of surreal short stories that marks her debut in fiction. Wild Milk has been called "necessary book for our perilous age" by Kirkus and a collection of "tales to wake you up at last" by author Edward Carey. Though short, these stories are deep as the ocean blue. You can drown or swim in them (and enjoy yourself either way). I recently spoke with Orah Mark, who opened up about [...]
- [Putting Emotion into Language: A Conversation with Polly Rosenwaike](https://americanshortfiction.org/putting-emotion-into-language-a-conversation-with-polly-rosenwaike/) - In her artfully constructed debut collection Look How Happy I’m Making You, Polly Rosenwaike presents stories about motherhood, pregnancy, and the range of emotions that surround becoming—or not becoming—a parent. Rosenwaike expertly explores anticipation and excitement, loss and longing in twelve stories, which Kirkus calls “An exquisite collection that is candid, compassionate, and emotionally complex.” [...]
- [Contest Closed: The 2019 Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize is closed for submissions!](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-2019-halifax-ranch-fiction-prize-is-now-open/) - The 2019 Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize has closed for submissions. Thank you to everyone who submitted their work. Keep your eyes out for the winner, chosen by Rebecca Makkai, in an upcoming issue of American Short Fiction.
- [Les Dansants](https://americanshortfiction.org/les-dansants/) - If we were not so young and beautiful as we'd been in those years before the babies, at least we were beginning to look less tired. It was summer but cool enough in our second-story flat over the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and the babies were not really babies anymore. Probably—yes—we were still young and beautiful.
- [Dinosaurs, the Alphabet, and Ten Things to Consider Prior to Submitting a Story for Publication](https://americanshortfiction.org/nate-brown-on-ten-things-to-consider-prior-to-submitting-a-story-for-publication/) - A few years ago, the late James Salter was honored at the annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Festival with a prize in Fitzgerald’s name. During his keynote address at the award ceremony, Salter said something that was stupefying in its simplicity: reading, he said, was among the very greatest pleasures in his life. [...]
- [The Moths Came](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-moths-came/) - In a cloud, at night. Or like an army at sunrise. To every tree and every spike of grass, every ridgepole, every windowsill, they came. To every clothesline, especially. From the candy-coated wires, they formed strings—onions braided together by their tops—and we woke to find them swaying. Don’t open the door, we say to our daughter.
- [Winners of the 2019 American Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/winners-of-the-2019-american-shorter-fiction-prize/) - We are thrilled to announce the winners for this year's American Short(er) Fiction Prize, judged by Danielle Dutton. Thank you to everyone who submitted. The winning stories will be published in the magazine’s summer issue. [...]
- [Against Arguments: An Interview with Esmé Weijun Wang](https://americanshortfiction.org/against-arguments-an-interview-with-esme-weijun-wang/) - Esmé Weijun Wang is the author of the novel The Border of Paradise and the best-selling essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias, published in January. Called “riveting” by NPR and “mind-expanding” by the New York Times Book Review, The Collected Schizophrenias offers an intimate and rigorously nuanced exploration of the myriad meanings of schizophrenia [. . .]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Amy Stuber](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-amy-stuber/) - Amy Stuber's flash fiction story "I'm on the Side of the Wildebeest" distills a familiar modern dilemma into a crystallized moment. On a road trip, a mother contemplates a very different childhood for her kids than the one she had—one in which technology, the constant deluge of information, and the threat to the planet create anxieties that are harder to escape. [...]
- [Her Cousin Lena](https://americanshortfiction.org/her-cousin-lena/) - Rose kept a notebook near and recorded her phone conversation with her mother, just because. A part of her, the part that supported herself and paid for her condoms, cigarettes, and rent, assumed a recording of her conversation with her mother might one day come in handy. Her mother wasn’t afraid of psychological blackmail. She
- [Video Games, Trash TV, and Death Metal Music: An Interview with Jennifer duBois](https://americanshortfiction.org/an-interview-with-jennifer-dubois/) - Jennifer duBois has a new novel that was published last week: The Spectators. LitHub lists it as one of the “Most Anticipated Books of 2019,” and Booklist calls is “brilliantly conceived” and “utterly unforgettable.” In this interview, ASF contributing editor Stacey Swann asks duBois about the genesis of the novel, its structural challenges, and what nineties talk show culture can tell us about our current cultural moment [. . .]
- [A Person Who Looks: An Interview with Lacy M. Johnson](https://americanshortfiction.org/a-person-who-looks-an-interview-with-lacy-m-johnson/) - Houston-based Lacy M. Johnson’s recent essay collection, The Reckonings, grapples with vital questions: the concept of evil, police killings, the BP oil spill, and the complexity of speaking truth to power. Finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in the category criticism, Johnson’s essays move between the personal and the political with deftness and precision. This interview [. . .]
- [Life on Land](https://americanshortfiction.org/life-on-land/) - https://soundcloud.com/americanshortfiction/life-on-land-by-nina-maclaughlin Katya can hold her breath for over seven minutes. She’d practiced alongside us in the pool. Up to her chin, she kneeled in the shallow end and took a deep inhale and long slow exhale, so long it seemed impossible her lungs had gathered that much air, not balloons for birthday parties there below
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Keenan Walsh](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-keenan-walsh/) - January's Web Exclusive, "Flood," describes a significant moment of change in a troubled family's life. It's notoriously hard to master a run-on sentence, but author Keenan Walsh does it here. In editing, we realized there was no way to break it up without losing its very necessary urgency, that the whole thing was an intricately woven tapestry that needed to stay intact. What's more, the form forces the modern, harried reader to slow down and take in shimmering details that they might otherwise miss, effectively carrying you away in its flow. Here, our web editor Erin McReynolds interviews Walsh about the story, and about the precariousness of writing a story in one very long sentence [. . .]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Zach Powers](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-zach-powers/) - In Zach Powers' flash fiction story, "Surface Treatments," a father paints himself into a corner—literally. While the circumstances are absurd, there is such an accuracy and familiarity in the helpless acceptance of his wife and children alternating between observing and gamely participating in his self-exile. We spoke to Powers about writing, this story, and—since he's also an expert on the subject—what to do when you're in Savannah [. . . ]
- [Flood](https://americanshortfiction.org/flood/) - My sister couldn’t see till she was seven, after we’d moved across town for the fifth time because all our landlords “had it out for us,” as my parents said, and the new place was in a better neighborhood because my mom’s boss owned it and had cut us a deal on rent, so we were zoned at a better school that was more equipped to deal with my sister’s seizures than our old school had been—though since she’d switched to phenobarbital the year before they weren’t so bad, just absent spells where she’d stumble like the floor had quaked and sit there staring for a while, but still, at our old school they’d always pulled me from my class and into hers, where I’d go sit with her on the carpet and hold her hand till she woke confused and sobbing [...]
- [Editorial Outtake: American Pop by Snowden Wright](https://americanshortfiction.org/editorial-outtake-american-pop-by-snowden-wright/) - This installment of Editorial Outtakes features a deleted scene from American Pop, the new novel by Atlanta-based author Snowden Wright. Published by Harper Collins, the novel follows the Forster family, a clan whose fortune is made via patriarch Harold's famous Panola Cola Company. With their roots planted in the fertile soil of America's Gilded Age, the Foresters' story seems, at first, like the tale of a charmed (and charming) tycoon but soon presents as something else entirely [. . .]
- [Contest Closed: The American Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/submissions-open-the-american-shorter-fiction-prize/) - Thanks for your interest in the 2019 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. The contest is now closed. This year's judge is Danielle Dutton, author of three remarkable books and publisher of Dorothy, a publishing project. The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,000 words. The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication, and the second-place winner will receive $250 and publication. Previous winners of the Short(er) Fiction Prize have gone on to be anthologized in places such as The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. Please keep an eye on our website for this year's winners.
- [Five Questions for the Snake Charmer](https://americanshortfiction.org/five-questions-for-the-snake-charmer/) - At some point on my way to the nephew’s birthday without a present, somewhere between swigging Gatorade and weaving around piss puddles and clamping my lips against vomit or provocative statements (as my dear sister puts it), I feel a hand grab mine. A shock of warmth, then the hard shove of a box. I watch enough news to know: I'm holding a bomb. In a few seconds the wet red jelly of me, still smelling of last night’s mint and Campari, will scatter the city streets like confetti.
- [How to Make a Life for Ourselves: An Interview with Kevin Wilson](https://americanshortfiction.org/how-to-make-a-life-for-ourselves-an-interview-with-kevin-wilson/) - In Issue 67, Kevin Wilson’s "The Lost Baby” haunts readers with the sudden, small-town disappearance of a couple’s infant child. The story, which also appears in Wilson’s newest collection, Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, is emblematic of Wilson’s superb and thrilling prose, his stories as compassionate as they are strange. Every one of his characters, from the grieving mothers to the flailing young men, are so deeply human, so reassuringly like us, we can’t help but root for them in spite of their bad decisions [. . .]
- [Blind Oracle of Mactan](https://americanshortfiction.org/blind-oracle-mactan/) - He is the blind oracle at Unchained Melody Massage Parlor. He specializes in f­­oot rubs. He can stimulate all kinds of glands with pulls and pricks of the tendon and phalanges. He can, for example, make a person grow taller by pushing on the well of the big toe, which is the pituitary gland reflex
- [I'm on the Side of the Wildebeest](https://americanshortfiction.org/im-on-the-side-of-the-wildebeest/) - I’m with my family watching bats circle through the dusk around the upper rim of the Grand Canyon when the bank calls to ask if I’ve purchased $1,279 of perfume, liquor, and cigarettes in Montreal in the last hour. It seems unexpected, the phone agent says, and I imagine the list of my actual purchases from the last two days: gas, pretzels, candy in cellophane bags, one night at a Best Western in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, where the hot tub was questionable but we all sat in it anyway because after ten hours of driving, much of it on two-lane highways in western Kansas where the whole world was feed lots and semis driven by addicts, we were willing to take one more risk.
- [Save-A-Child](https://americanshortfiction.org/save-a-child/) - When the Boeing 727 takes off from Mitchell Airport, the bolts that hold the landing gear door in place are already unwinding. Eight miles away, Tucker Knoebel is making his way home early to the suburb of Oak Creek to be with his wife, Della. He loves entering the subdivision from the city when the streets turn from straight gray creases to lilting curves meant to mimic the flow of hills and rivers. Tucker sometimes feels like he is in his childhood train set among the metal models of the post office, the butcher shop, the station. Even the people are like his brightly painted figures—everyone posed with a prop: boy and ball, girl and jump rope, woman and garden shovel, man and lawnmower. It’s almost as though he can just move a pair of children and a pool to his own backyard. [...]
- [Sign of the Times](https://americanshortfiction.org/sign-of-the-times/) - Simon had first seen the sign while walking back from the Sunday farmer’s market in early November. It was printed on paper, affixed to a streetlamp, and stuck over an old gig poster. He hadn’t paid it much mind but, as he walked, he saw another copy, and then another still. He had an urge
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Kate Reed Petty](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-kate-reed-petty/) - In February's Web Exclusive flash fiction, "Fish Jokes," a woman is challenged with articulating exactly what her former boss did to her that was inappropriate. In order to convey Annie's struggle to recollect what happened, name it, and support her own reaction to it, author Kate Reed Petty created an ingenious modern trope that everyone
- [Rough Likenesses: An Interview with Kate Gavino & Devin Symons](https://americanshortfiction.org/rough-likenesses-an-interview-with-kate-gavino-devin-symons/) - Though artists and writers Kate Gavino and Devin Symons have never met, each has taken to attending literary events where, in addition to listening to the work, they draw the authors. Gavino’s project, Last Night’s Reading, began in New York in 2013, and she estimates that she’s attended approximately 400 readings since then. Last month,
- [Reading RX with Danielle Dutton](https://americanshortfiction.org/reading-rx-with-danielle-dutton/) - We're thrilled to have Danielle Dutton, author of three remarkable books and editor of Dorothy, a publishing project, as the judge for this year’s American Short(er) Fiction Prize—a contest for extraordinary short stories under 1,000 words. We asked Danielle about her favorite books this year, and she compiled this wonderful reading list of titles new and old, a confection of styles and genres and small-press gems that are a refreshing and welcome detour from conventional year-end best-of lists.
- [Make a Year-end Contribution to ASF, and We'll Send You Some of Our Favorite Things](https://americanshortfiction.org/make-a-year-end-contribution-to-asf-and-well-send-you-some-of-our-favorite-things/) - As 2018 comes to a close, we look back on these last eleven months with gratitude for all that our readers, authors, staff, and supporters have helped American Short Fiction accomplish. We're thanking participants in our year-end giving campaign with our soft and stylish T-shirts, our large, heavy-duty tote bags, individual story feedback from an ASF editor, or a workshop for you and your writer friends.
- [Web Exclusive Interview: G.E. Stiteler](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-g-e-stiteler/) - In August's Web Exclusive flash fiction, "Father as Astronaut," a young woman mourns the loss of her father in an increasingly hostile world where everyone is fighting for survival. It's a story that's wildly imaginative, unsettling, and full of heart. Our own Erin McReynolds recently talked to G.E. Stiteler about this story, about a world in trouble, and what gives her peace [. . .]
- [Editorial Outtake: If You Leave Me](https://americanshortfiction.org/editorial-outtake-if-you-leave-me/) - Editorial Outtakes is a series in which we publish excerpts from recent books that you won’t find anywhere else because, prior the publication, these sections were cut. This installment of Editorial Outtakes features an original chapter from Crystal Hana Kim's debut novel If You Leave Me. [. . .]
- [The Unicorns](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-the-unicorns/) - The blizzard is over. But the sea waves still crash high upon the shore, making it impossible to row off any of the archipelago’s islands. The unicorns are cantering about and talking about the weather. “Fucking cold!” “And how!” The unicorns have come to the archipelago to be chosen by the Rider. It is the
- [All the Girls We Knew in the Suburbs](https://americanshortfiction.org/girls-knew-suburbs/) - It was the night before Christmas, but all that meant to us was that no one else was out and the suburbs were our playgrounds more than ever. We were two Jewish kids from the city and it was not our holy night. No family unwrapping ceremonies awaited us in the morning. Our days of unwrapping, all eight of them, had ended a week earlier, though those days of miracle light were not our holiest. Everyone thought that because they fell so close to Christmas, even if no one ever knew exactly when; they seemed to orbit around the birth of Christ like a set of moons, sometimes close, sometimes far. Our holiest rituals fell in autumn, though in truth nothing was particularly holy to us. We were not much for atonement. [...]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Ben Hoffman](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-ben-hoffman/) - Ben Hoffman's "All the Girls We Knew in the Suburbs" was an obvious and perfect choice for our December online exclusive short story. Featuring bored Jewish teens on Christmas Eve, the story is an examination of difference, ennui, and adolescent anxiety, and its dark tone stands in sharp contrast to the bright, shining high holiday of Christendom. We recently emailed Hoffman to ask about the story, his other work, and about those long, cold Wisconsin winters.
- [The Supervillain Stalled in His Lair](https://americanshortfiction.org/supervillain-stalled-lair/) - There is nothing that occupies the Supervillain’s mind more, nothing that is a more constant source of obsession and angst, than his secret lair. Even the Superhero, his great nemesis, manifests as an afterthought compared to his lair (although the threat of the Superhero is, of course, a prime source of the anxiety the Supervillain feels about his hidden home). [...]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Lincoln Michel](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-lincoln-michel/) - Lincoln Michel's "The Supervillain Stalled in His Lair" kicks off our 2015 web exclusive fiction, and it's a lovely and bizarre look at the placid, boring world through the eyes of an ambitious and anxiety-rattled super villain named, uh, the Supervillain. As satires go, this one's less send-up than human interest piece. Told from the point of view
- [The Solidarity of Fat Girls](https://americanshortfiction.org/solidarity-fat-girls/) - It is your luck to be the brother of three fat girls. They have insisted on the moniker. “We are fat girls,” Elsie has told you. “If you don’t accept it, who will?” “Don’t say that,” you have replied, hopelessly. “You’re beautiful,” and she has kissed your forehead wetly, like an aunt—she is thirteen years your senior; she relishes that word girls—and said, “Exactly.” [...]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Courtney Sender](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-courtney-sender/) - In Courtney Sender's "The Solidarity of Fat Girls," three sisters raise their younger brother following abandonment by their mother. The story traces their little family's trajectory only in the broadest sense, noting the major events of their lives, including the illness and death of one sister as well as the engagement of the younger brother to a fat girl who "doesn't assume that people's brothers should love her." [...]
- [When a Woman Thinks That Her House Is on Fire](https://americanshortfiction.org/woman-thinks-house-fire/) - Nasya Beckman wakes to the smell of smoke. She rolls onto her side and swats clumsily at her alarm clock, as though this is the source of the disturbance, as though this is some new technology for waking heavy sleepers—the release of gas. In fact, the alarm clock is an antique, a six-inch double-bell with a little copper hammer. It was a gift from Nasya’s rabbi for her one hundred volunteer hours as a kiddush hostess, minyan attendee, and Bikur cholim coordinator. Her rabbi said he’d never seen such devotion. He said it was good to keep oneself busy following tragedy. [...]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Jake Wolff](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-jake-wolff/) - This month's online fiction interview is with Jake Wolff, author of "When a Woman Thinks That her House Is on Fire." In this lyrical tale of one family's double-loss, we learn that Nasya and Ned have lost one son and we watch as they lose their house to a fire. More than a story of loss, though, the piece looks at the things that tragedy leaves in its wake. [...]
- [The Battle](https://americanshortfiction.org/battle/) - The voice crackled through the oxidized copper grill. “What do you see?” it said. “It’s important that you tell us exactly what you see.” But Sergei didn’t look at his screen. Instead he wiped the aspic from his drooping mustache, closed his government-issued lunch pail and glanced over at Ivan asleep at his joystick. Sergei
- [Online Fiction Interview: David Naimon](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-david-naimon/) - David Naimon's "The Battle" is an oddball buddy tale of sorts set in a Black Sea bunker in some not-too-far-off future. The stakes are high—international tensions run deep as global warming has opened the arctic to shipping lanes—and Sergei, Naimon's protagonist, is charged with monitoring the progress of Russian submarines as they stake claims on
- [Things American: Baltimore Authors Respond to the Death of Freddie Gray](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-baltimore-authors-respond-death-freddie-gray/) - Baltimore’s bus benches are simple, utilitarian things: just two molded concrete end-pieces and seven wooden planks that you wouldn’t think much of were it not for the slogan embossed on the slats of the backrest: “Baltimore: The Greatest City in America.” [...]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Terese Svoboda](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-terese-svoboda/) - Peter Benchley's 1974 novel Jaws tells the story of a menacing great white shark who terrorizes the fictional Long Island town of Amity, NY. In 1975, Steven Spielberg turned it into what was, for a time, the highest grossing film at the box office. If Benchley and Speilberg's Jaws has a topical and tonal opposite, it just might be Terese Svoboda's tale of a weird, dark family road trip [...]
- [Jaws](https://americanshortfiction.org/jaws/) - That's the book she cracks as soon as she's fought off her little brother for the back. Not a hatchback, that is a decade in the future, but the way back, where the station wagon's nasty final seats never get pulled up into position, the one with the backwards view, her preferred. The roads to the north are pretty straight—what is there to bend them?—and except for a series of smooth dips that everybody shrieks through, flat as the pancakes she had for breakfast. Perfect for extreme terror on the water at two hundred-plus pages. [...]
- [The Tobacconist](https://americanshortfiction.org/tobacconist/) - George searched his pockets for change, cluttering the counter with lint and pen caps, a crumpled tissue, pausing to clean his glasses while the tobacconist waited at the open register. It was the tobacconist he cared about, not the neatly lined cigars he had thumbed through moments earlier. George could see the smoke shop from his kitchen window, and last week had watched the tobacconist as he emerged and stood on the street corner in a pouring rain, until his coat was drenched through and rain coursed from his hat. [...]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Anna Noyes](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-anna-noyes/) - June's online exclusive, "The Tobacconist" by Anna Noyes depicts longing so convincingly that it's difficult to pass judgment on the story's conflicted, suffering protagonist, George. It seemed to us that the magic of the story was that it depicted complication and ambivalence so tenderly. We emailed Noyes to ask about writing conflicted characters, about her
- [Online Fiction Interview: Hilary Leichter](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-hilary-leichter/) - Hilary Leichter's "The Statue of Limitations" plays by its own delightful set of rules. It's at once the story of a couple imprisoned in their own home (a statue marking the furthest that they can roam into their yard without the "risk of pursuit") and a parable for how intimacy ebbs and flows in a relationship. [...]
- [Things American: Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson and the Hell’s Angels at La Honda: August 7th, 1965](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-ken-kesey-hunter-thompson-hells-angels-la-honda-august-7th-1965/) - Fifty years ago today, Ken Kesey, not yet thirty and already the author of two acclaimed novels, invited the members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang [...]
- [Things American: Writers Remember James Salter](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-writers-remember-james-salter/) - American novelist, story writer, and screenwriter James Salter died on June 19th, leaving behind a body of work that presents a vision of a century in dramatic motion. He was a writer of the quotidian and a craftsman of the first water whose interest in sensory experiences is most evident in his arresting narrative passages.
- [Ships](https://americanshortfiction.org/ships-2/) - In Varna we stayed in the apartment building across the street from the house of the sea captain. There lived his juicy wife, beautiful daughter, gorgeous son-in-law, and two grandchildren, a girl and Mario. The heads of the black Labrador and the big orange cat were framed by the heart-shaped iron door ornament, and a gold plaque below them read: “Captain Tomov’s family. An exemplary home.” Every year it seemed the house grew one story higher. It looked like a schooner. The wind billowed out the colorful sheets and beach towels that hung on wooden clothespins, threatening to sail the entire house away. [...]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Sofi Stambo](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-sofi-stambo/) - Sofi Stambo's "Ships" presents a vivid summer break on the Black Sea during which a young, unnamed protagonist pines for the son of the Tomov family, which is headed by a sea captain who lives across the street from her grandparents. It's a story so precise in its sensory details that it feels deeply familiar—and
- [The Five Star Hotel of Bangkok](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-five-star-hotel-of-bangkok/) - Everyone laughed about its name. In the 90s, the old concrete building had been a brothel, but it was now owned by a dreadlocked Israeli living out his dream of running a cut-rate hostel-cum-bar. For 100 baht, you rented a cinderblock room in one of the top three floors, a little box with exposed electrical wires and fluorescent lighting that flickered like life was quivering out of the tubes every time a semi clattered past. For 150 baht, the Israeli rented you a mattress. [...]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Cam Terwilliger](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-cam-terwilliger/) - In our September web exclusive, Cam Terwilliger's “Five-Star Bangkok Hotel” laser-focuses on that critical moment when we take a gamble on a burgeoning notion of self and freedom, and aren't so certain of the win. We emailed Cam to investigate how he comes to his stories, what jobs best fit a writing habit, and to go into that heart of darkness that is self vs. selflessness. [...]
- [Editorial Outtakes: Benjamin Markovits](https://americanshortfiction.org/editorial-outtakes-benjamin-markovits/) - Benjamin Markovits, author of our debut installment of Editorial Outtakes, found that the heart of his most recent novel, You Don't Have to Live Like This, lay in Detroit, not in his protagonist's past. Here's Markovits's take on the cut excerpt, followed by some never-before-seen pages from the novel. [...]
- [ASF Reads: Fall 2015](https://americanshortfiction.org/asf-reads-fall-2015/) - Periodically, we poll our staff to see what they're reading and to ask about what they're excited to see published in the coming weeks and months. For this fall's installment of ASF Reads, we've included recently published and forthcoming titles, as well as a few earlier titles and a couple of classics that our staff demanded appear
- [Online Fiction Interview: Liam Callanan Remembers Ihab Hassan](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-liam-callanan-remembers-ihab-hassan/) - We were immediately enchanted by our October web exclusive, Ihab Hassan's “Three.” Sadly, Dr. Hassan passed away shortly after we accepted his work for publication. His colleague and friend, the author Liam Callanan, was kind enough to share some memories [...]
- [Editorial Outtakes: Carmiel Banasky](https://americanshortfiction.org/editorial-outtakes-carmiel-banasky/) - Editorial Outtakes is a feature in which we publish excerpts from novels and story collections that you won’t find in the finished books because, prior to publication, these sections were cut. This installment of Editorial Outtakes features Carmiel Banasky, whose prologue to her debut novel The Suicide of Claire Bishop was cut from the manuscript at the proverbial last minute. Here's the disappeared prologue [...]
- [An Interview with Angela Flournoy](https://americanshortfiction.org/an-interview-with-angela-flournoy/) - Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House follows one large Detroit family struggling to do right by one another while also figuring out what to do about the family home, which is on the brink of foreclosure. It’s a tender look the messiness of sibling relationships set against the backdrop of a slumping economy and the then-emerging housing crisis of 2008. The novel was recently named a finalist for the National Book Award [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Lee Conell](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-lee-conell/) - This season, as the nights turn ever longer and we turn ever inward to contemplate life’s mysteries, stories like our November exclusive, “A Guide to Sirens,” seem especially to speak (or sing) to us. We talked to author Lee Conell about her inspiration for the story, about magic and the unexpected, and about creatures real and imagined. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Leslie Parry](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-leslie-parry/) - Our December Web Exclusive, “The Night Bus,” beautifully elucidates the moment two lives intersect—lives forever changed by random acts of violence. We talked with author Leslie Parry about anonymity, anxiety, and a very effective antidote for procrastination. [...]
- [That's When Things Got Weird: A Conversation with Amber Sparks & Lincoln Michel](https://americanshortfiction.org/thats-when-things-got-weird-a-conversation-with-amber-sparks-lincoln-michel/) - We've have had the pleasure of reading the work of Amber Sparks and Lincoln Michel for a number of years, and we've published work by each of them as web exclusives in the not-so-distant past. This fall, Michel published his debut collection of short fiction, Upright Beasts, and Sparks's next book, The Unfinished World, will be
- [Bourbon and Milk: When the Mayhem Becomes Too Much](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-milk-mayhem-becomes-much/) - Welcome to the third annual holiday edition of Bourbon and Milk. Once again, with a nod towards the thankfulness many of us associate with the holidays—a thankfulness steeped in both the warmth and the insanity of family—we asked five writer-parents to identify and write about “crappy” literary parents, and five non-parents to chime in on “exemplary” ones. [...]
- [Winston](https://americanshortfiction.org/5801/) - He killed a hare and removed its heels, yanked from the meat of each haunch the bone he did not know to be the tibia. He laid the leg bones parallel on the flattest nearby stone and split the wide end of both with one press of his Bowie. He set each in a convenient niche that was the absence of a second premolar, sucked loose marrow while he worked skinning the leporid and stringing it above a new fire, his lips pinned back by the bones. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Kyle Langston](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-kyle-langston/) - Our January Web Exclusive, “Winston” is one of those stories that gets under your skin and stays there. Its power is owed to precise, enduring images; the relatable longing of its characters; and beginning-to-end tension. Really, it gave us a lot of feelings—which we then discussed with author Kyle Langston. [...]
- [The Hungry Valley](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-hungry-valley/) - Now he fed his horses too much rich corn sweetened with molasses: their middles were round and taut as barrels, and their hooves curled, and instead of nipping and tossing about like they had in the past, they loitered at the gate all day, calling out to him whenever he passed. His old dog he fed too much kibble and too many table scraps: its back was strangely broad and thin of hair like a threadbare piece of overstuffed furniture, and it could no longer move quickly nor jump with ease. The cats lapped milk from pie tins on the barn floor [...]
- [Nota Bene: Nat Baldwin Has Been Feeling the Bern Since, like, 2002](https://americanshortfiction.org/6004/) - Nat Baldwin's been writing, performing, and recording music for virtually all of his adult life. In addition to playing bass in Dirty Projectors, Baldwin has recorded half a dozen solo records that put his upright bass and his vocal range on full and incredible display. Baldwin's also a fiction writer, and in the past two years, he's published stories in PANK, Timber, Alice
- [Coddled, Sexting Millennials: Jennifer duBois Interviews Tony Tulathimutte](https://americanshortfiction.org/jennifer-dubois-interviews-tony-tulathimutte/) - Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens is a searing and savagely smart dissection of the life and opinions of a group of San Francisco millennials: bipolar autodidact Henrik, ruthless aspiring writer Linda, porn-addicted romantic Will, and hazily embattled activist Cory. With relentless intelligence and wit—and prose that’s earning comparisons to David Foster Wallace—Tulathimutte examines his characters’ anxieties and aspirations [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Kathryn Scanlan](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-kathryn-scanlan/) - Winter is a time for compression—shortened days, confinement indoors, a turning inward. But compression produces something nuclear-hot and energetic, and our February Web Exclusive, "The Hungry Valley," is a stellar example of this. Author Kathryn Scanlan helps us explore how this is achieved in writing. "The Hungry Valley" also appears in our Winter issue. [...]
- [Things American: At the Mountains of Loneliness](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-at-the-mountains-of-loneliness/) - I went to the Arctic Circle because of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. I went there to work on a novel, too, but I wouldn’t be writing a novel—wouldn’t even still be a writer—without Lovecraft. While in the Arctic, I thought about Cthulhu. I carried a protective charm a friend had stitched for me in case I encountered any Old Ones. I stared into the fissures of three-hundred-foot-tall glaciers and expected to see a tentacle lash out [...]
- [To God Belongs What He Has Taken](https://americanshortfiction.org/to-god-belongs-what-he-has-taken/) - Marie buys her morning coffee at the convenience store on the corner of her block. One of the men who works there is named Ahmed. He is Iraqi. When he laughs, which he does often, his enormous belly shakes. She likes Ahmed. She’s been buying her coffee from him since she’s lived on this block, almost two years. In a week, the sale on her apartment, her first, will be final, and she and her daughter Tove will move in with Lennart. Marie has been marking this change by counting down the days until she will no longer buy her coffee from Ahmed’s store. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Jensen Beach](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-jensen-beach/) - David Foster Wallace said that fiction is “one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.” In our March Web Exclusive story, “To God Belongs What He Has Taken,” Jensen Beach deftly places us in the mind of a Stockholm woman caught up in a fantasy about a stranger. It is a subtle and detailed snapshot of a form of loneliness so universal that [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Suzanne Morrison](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-suzanne-morrison/) - In our April Web Exclusive story, "The Mother's Portion," a woman with a husband and six children goes to extreme measures to reclaim herself. It's a surprising story; it makes triumphant that which we think of as affliction. We talked with author Suzanne Morrison about liberation, our mutual love of Maggie Nelson, and the importance of telling our survival stories. [...]
- [Editorial Outtakes: Benjamin Warner](https://americanshortfiction.org/editorial-outtakes-benjamin-warner/) - Editorial Outtakes is a feature in which we publish excerpts from novels and story collections that you won’t find in the finished books because, prior to publication, these sections were cut. This installment of Editorial Outtakes features a deleted scene from Benjamin Warner, whose debut novel, Thirst, was published by Bloomsbury last week. An intense, literary novel with the pacing of a thriller [...]
- [Hunter S. Thompson & Oscar Acosta in the Desert: <br> A 45-Year Retrospective](https://americanshortfiction.org/hunter-thompson-oscar-acosta-desert-45-year-retrospective/) - On the morning of Friday, March 19th, 1971, Hunter S. Thompson, already the bestselling author of one book and long overdue on his contract for another, accepted what appeared to be a fairly innocuous journalistic assignment: write five hundred words of copy for Sports Illustrated to go along with a photo essay on the Mint 400 motorcycle race [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Daniel LoPilato](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-daniel-lopilato/) - What with baseball season now in full swing, May's Web Exclusive Fiction is incredibly timely—and yet timeless. In "Your Father," a dad and son try to connect through a televised baseball game. At its heart is a dilemma that has always played itself out and will continue to do so for as long as we have to contend with our parents' identities and our own, regardless of the technology involved. We talked with author Daniel LoPilato about the parent-child struggle, identity, and irony. Basically, America. [...]
- [Editorial Outtakes: M. Thomas Gammarino](https://americanshortfiction.org/editorial-outtakes-king-worlds/) - Editorial Outtakes is a feature in which we publish excerpts from novels and story collections that you won’t find in the finished books because, prior to publication, these sections were cut. This installment of Editorial Outtakes features a deleted scene from King of the Worlds, the new novel by M. Thomas Gammarino, which tells the story of Dylan Greenyears, a has-been Hollywood heartthrob whose best days [...]
- [Embracing the World, from High to Low: An Interview with Benjamin Hale](https://americanshortfiction.org/interview-benjamin-hale/) - In his first story collection, Benjamin Hale introduces us to characters who inhabit the margins of society: an expat outlaw revolutionary trying to find her way home, a dominatrix confronting a new possible role as mother, a performance artists eating himself towards death. What at first may read as absurd becomes meaningful and then moving through Hale’s skillful and playful storytelling. [...]
- [To Be in Love in Brooklyn: An interview with Emma Straub](https://americanshortfiction.org/straub/) - Emma Straub’s latest novel, Modern Lovers, came out on Tuesday—just in time to top your summer reading lists. The book follows a group of college friends and ex-bandmates as they struggle to come to terms with their middle aged, adult lives in Brooklyn, navigating the difficulties of marriage, parenting, and illegal kombucha production. [...]
- [Starting with the Problem: An Interview with Sara Majka](https://americanshortfiction.org/6487/) - Sara Majka’s Cities I’ve Never Lived In is my favorite kind of story collection—one that strikes many, many delicate balances. It’s both comforting and spooky, dreamlike and surprisingly frank, clear-eyed and slyly supernatural, and often all simultaneously. Majka’s stories follow a common narrator—recently divorced and adrift in a reflective, tonal sadness—into new towns and old relationships [...]
- [Lesser Missiles](https://americanshortfiction.org/lesser-missiles/) - We smelled smoke and, out the window, embers rose in the night. We got out of bed and pulled the red alarm box in the hallway and went outside. From across the street, we watched fire destroy our apartment building. The woman who lived down the hall from us wore a nightgown and fanned herself with a magazine and shook her head. We found a motel nearby, mostly used by military girlfriends and wives. Then we walked to the beach. This was Oxnard, a coastal city in Southern California near Port Hueneme and in a severe drought. Dry sugar beet farms stretched out from two military bases and the Kavli Foundation that supports the advancement of science. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Kathryn Savage](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-kathryn-savage/) - Kathryn Savage’s “Lesser Missiles” grabbed us from the first, spare, and startling sentences. Whenever this happens, we might cross our fingers and tense up a little, carried away by the momentum of the story but still conscious that we are rooting for the narrative to sustain that opening power, to not let us down. Kathryn’s story succeeds beautifully, and its final moments deliver us gently, without apology, to the vastness of our own vulnerabilities [...]
- [Seeing Backward: An Interview with Whitney Terrell](https://americanshortfiction.org/6550/) - In the novels The Huntsman and The King of Kings County, Whitney Terrell tackled politically charged problems like housing segregation and institutional racism. Both novels are set in his hometown of Kansas City, Mo., the near epicenter of the United State where these issues have erupted on a national stage. Terrell’s third novel, The Good Lieutenant, features a protagonist from the same landscape, Emma Fowler, who attempts to escape it [...]
- [Every Notebook, Photograph, and Letter: An Interview with Jan Ellison](https://americanshortfiction.org/6542/) - Jan Ellison’s debut novel, A Small Indiscretion, came out in paperback this spring. The book takes readers across decades and continents—from Berkeley to London and back again—to show us what happens to a happily married mother of three when the mistakes and youthful transgressions of years past unexpectedly turn up to meddle [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Rose Gowen](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-rose-gowen/) - July's web exclusive story, "The Sun and the Pacific, Flowers," is both a beautiful meditation on the passage of time and a careful, close look at a young person's anxiety that she's not doing or being quite enough. Writer Rose Gowen's images and sensory details are stunning; the story is brimming over with oleander and hibiscus, rosemary, agave, palms, and citrus trees. The smells and sounds of the Santa Barbara coast [...]
- [Gorman, CA](https://americanshortfiction.org/gorman-ca/) - On the way to the wedding in Los Angeles, they ran out of gas. They were a couple, a man and a woman. The woman was driving them down from San Francisco, where they had spent a few days—it was their first time in California, and they were both from somewhere else. The man promised they would make it to the gas station. “How could you know that?” she asked. He didn’t answer. The car was a rental, and it was shitty, and the woman had to press the gas pedal all the way to the floor to make it up and over each mountainous slope. Soon the odometer began its inevitable decline, the needle wilting towards zero, and the woman felt a similar inward wilting, a sinking feeling of coming trouble. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Heather Wells Peterson](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-heather-wells-peterson/) - In our August web exclusive story, "Gorman, CA," a couple's car runs out of fuel on the side of the road in a land that is foreign to them both. Heather Wells Peterson indicates lack throughout the landscape and the action as a skilled painter would, in the wilt of the odometer's needle, in the drought-stricken hills, in the protagonist's silence. It's one of those subtle revelations that's so sublime in short fiction [...]
- [Lockwood](https://americanshortfiction.org/lockwood/) - Roberto was brown and his people lived beside us, so of course I went over on weekends. They were full Mexican. That made us superior. My father found every opportunity to say it. Not to their faces, he’d just whistle through the window, but Ma took it upon herself to visit most evenings. She still didn’t have many friends on the block—we were too dark for the blancos, too strange for the blacks. But Roberto’s mother dug the company. She invited us in. Her husband worked construction, pouring cement into Grand Parkway. She didn’t have papers. No one was hiring. So what she did with her days was look after Roberto. [...]
- [America](https://americanshortfiction.org/america/) - Mr. Bixby is showing us again how to do the lay-back. He says we're all too stiff, but what he means is that we're all too white. "Curl your upper backs! With every kick you're giving yourselves." He kicks as high as his shoulder and lets his upper back droop and he looks idiotic, but he's trying to get Melissa Ridge to quit it with her ramrod ballet kicks, and anyway, Mr. Bixby is Mr. West Side Story, and all we can do is go along. [...]
- [Things American: In the Air, Election Night 2016](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-in-the-air-election-night-2016/) - My ears won’t pop, and the bites on my right arm itch, my arm and neck—red flares I can’t ascribe to any particular predator, just marks of Texas. I get a second tiny bottle of whiskey. My taller-than-me daughter sleeps against my shoulder, too old these days, too grown up. We are over the Rockies, Denver to Helena, a tiny plane half full. I get the second whiskey because the flight attendant asks if I want another before she closes out her till. No flight attendant has ever asked me this. I will always have another if offered [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Erin McGraw](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-erin-mcgraw/) - In November’s web exclusive, “America,” a white teenager in Ohio finds herself awakening in the body of the Puerto Rican “Marisol” from A West Side Story. The story is beguiling at first because of its voice and given the comic richness inherent in the world of high school theater. But then layer upon layer quickly opens up, revealing truths about identity via the innocence and volatility of adolescence. We chatted briefly with author Erin McGraw about appropriation, empathy, and identity in fiction [...]
- [The Cupcake Factory](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-cupcake-factory/) - This is New Hampshire in winter, past midnight. The roads are clear, the houses dark, the sky a suffering orange-gray, fat with frost and the forecasted blizzard. In the distance, like the North Star, John Stapleton, Jr. can see the truck-stop sign hovering above I-95, Bob’s Big Boy spinning just above the tree line, offering up his empty tray. Stapleton’s sister Esther is driving. She tucks a greasy lock of hair behind her ear and pounds a fist on the dashboard, trying to resuscitate the speakers, which have worked sporadically for years but seem to have sputtered out completely today, along with their banter. Still, he trusts her enough not to ask where they’re going. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Siân Griffiths](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-sian-griffiths/) - In our January web exclusive story "The Key Bearer's Parents," a pair of loving parents (clowns, by trade) explain how they raised their son in order to try and make sense of his very troubling decision—a decision whose implications seem to depend entirely on the reader's point of view. It's a story that prompts an endless number of questions, so we were thrilled to have the chance to ask them of author Siân Griffiths.
- [Lake House](https://americanshortfiction.org/lake-house/) - We retired, and we bought a house by a lake that none of our friends had ever heard of, in a town none of our friends had ever heard of, in a region of northern New York far from anything, where every low place is the place of a lake. The lake was cool in summer and deep, and we swam in it. All around us were the low small houses of our neighbors and the piney woods, and beyond the woods were the fields where farmers grazed their cattle. The whole town smelled of manure most days. After a while we grew to like it. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Daisy Johnson](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-daisy-johnson/) - April's Web Exclusive, "A Bruise the Size and Shape of a Door Handle," is a haunting story whose slow, creeping tension evokes the likes of Edgar Allen Poe and Shirley Jackson. And yet it is so thoroughly modern, an enlightened study of unhinged, potent adolescent-female sexuality. [...]
- [Endangered](https://americanshortfiction.org/endangered/) - The artists were kept in cages. This was for their own good. The world had gotten really ugly, really fast, and the artists, generally, did not have the skills to survive. Most did not know how to shoot guns, for instance. Or how to make bombs out of soda bottles. The artists were a dying breed, in all honesty, which is why the government, along with a few wealthy do-gooders, put them in cages—nice cages—that resembled the artists’ natural habitats. One pen looked like a gallery opening, with wine, cheese, and water crackers restocked daily. Another featured dumpster couches paired with a threadbare oriental rug. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Libby Flores](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-libby-flores/) - Our March Web Exclusive story, "Good," viewed a goodbye from the perspective of the one who did the dick move, "the bad guy," reminding us that good writing isn't at all interested in concept of "the bad guy." Author Libby Flores talked with us about writing the other side of the story, Amy Hempel's advice about tackling a big concept, and how Tom Waits lyrics are basically terrific flash fiction. [...]
- [Between the Shores](https://americanshortfiction.org/between-the-shores/) - Nicoya and Daniel are born in the same hospital in Jerusalem on the same date. At 2 a.m., their fathers exchange smiles in the nursery. When Nicoya is three months old, her mother takes her on a bus to the assisted living home where Nicoya’s grandmother lives. In the back of the same bus, Daniel sleeps against his mother’s chest for two stops before he is carried off the bus and down the street and into his home, eyes peacefully closed all the while. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Allegra Hyde](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-allegra-hyde/) - May's flash fiction exclusive, "Endangered," imagines a world in which artists are kept in cages for their own safety. But author Allegra Hyde is more about the utopia than the dystopia—and what with the sorry state of the world right now, it's completely understandable. We talked recently about utopias, how to get closer to your own (hint: it involves going off social media) [...]
- [On The Social Interactions Of Bottlenose Dolphins In Maternal Bands](https://americanshortfiction.org/social-interactions-bottlenose-dolphins-maternal-bands/) - Me and Marty were just about wrapping up the day’s log on the social interactions of bottlenose dolphins in maternal bands is how we happened to be out on the water at the time. Out of nowhere, one of the bottlenoses plumb took off out into deep waters. Like it remembered it left the oven on or something, it plumb took off out of the feeding ring, which if you know anything about maternal bands of bottlenose dolphins is out of the question. Dolphins aren’t so much a march-to-the-beat-of-your-own-drummer type of cetacean. Certainly not come feeding time. But sure enough, the rest of the bottlenoses about-faced and followed the one on out into deep waters, leaving untouched a whole school of mackerel they already went through the trouble of tracking and encircling. Not to mention leaving us scratching our heads, me and Marty. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Kyle McCarthy](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-kyle-mccarthy/) - "I think being a woman is insane," says the narrator in September's hilarious and timely Web Exclusive story, "The Seagull." With keen wit, Kyle McCarthy illustrates the unwinnable, frustrating, and ultimately pretty ridiculous conundrum that being a good, modern feminist can be. Given where we are right now, as a country, and the coincidental connection
- [The Sister](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-sister/) - A girl named Caroline lived with her twelve brothers in a house on the edge of the woods. The youngest, Philip, was her friend and responsibility. Mother and Father had died years ago of an illness. The brothers talked about how hard it had been to watch, something Caroline couldn’t remember. Each of the brothers had a job. Some wore suits and some wore coveralls. Philip had been born with one eye, due to his mother’s fever during pregnancy. The eye rolled around in his head, searching whichever room he found himself in for his sister. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Anessa Ibrahim](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-anessa-ibrahim/) - October's Web Exclusive story "Ray Charles Never Lost Anything Important" brings an ancient archetype, the soothsayer, to a group of teenagers in East Los Angeles in a funny and sweet, totally believable scene that could take place at almost any time. We chatted with Anissa Ibrahim recently about mysticism and belief and writing. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Anton DiSclafani](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-anton-disclafani/) - In our December Web Exclusive story, "Flight," author Anton DiSclafani freezes a moment in the life of an aged John J. Audubon. It's a moment that allows us a bird's-eye view of the famed ornithologist/artist's exotic origins, his loss and his passion, and his rivalry with Alexander Wilson. It's elegiac without being mawkish, and you walk away feeling as though you've just been up close with a rare and brilliant specimen. [. . .]
- [You Haven't Won Anything Yet](https://americanshortfiction.org/you-havent-won-anything-yet/) - The officer shows me a photo of the missing child. “Is this you?” he says. “If it is,” I say, “do I win a prize?” He thinks it’s a joke and he narrows his eyes, but what he can’t see is I’m half-serious. The last time I opened my door for police, they went Gordon Ramsay on my couch cushions and earned me a cash settlement in the low four figures. This officer, with his acne scars, looks more like a Jehovah’s Witness. “Will you please take it?” He rattles the photocopy. I believe it’s still called Xerox paper. “That looks nothing like me.” “Do you have any photos of yourself as a child?” [...]
- [The 2018 American Short(er) Fiction Prize Winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-2018-american-shorter-fiction-prize-winners/) - We are thrilled to announce the winners for this year's American Short(er) Fiction Prize, judged by author Amber Sparks. Thank you to everyone who submitted. The winning stories—by Ariel Berry and Elin Hawkinson—will be published in the magazine’s fall issue.
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Bryan Washington](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-bryan-washington/) - In September's web exclusive story, "Lockwood," a young boy gets a new neighbor, with whom he shares a brief friendship. The story's brilliance is in how clearly it manifests in the mind, as if happened to you. And in many ways, it has—each of us has experienced a similar convergence of moment, setting, and person [...]
- [Choose Your Own](https://americanshortfiction.org/choose-your-own/) - You are sitting in the bedroom of a house that is inches away from the freeway. Cars whiz past at an alarming rate, and it seems to you that a minor slip of the steering wheel will send a car crashing into the bedroom, killing the occupants of the house. You are there on a date with the man who lives there, a man named Oswald. He complains that the highway was built too close to his house, taking away his front yard—you see the tiny blades of grass that are left of it, so few you can count them, but he does admit that he has an exciting view from his bed. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Jeanne Jones](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-jeanne-jones/) - In October's fiction web exclusive, "Choose Your Own," author Jeanne Jones explores a familiarly adult dilemma in a familiar childhood format. She takes you (well, you take yourself) on a labyrinthine journey that's designed to reflect just how existential this whole finding-love thing can be. We talked with Jeanne about interaction; what Julie Otsuka, George
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Merrill Feitell](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-merrill-feitell/) - In Merrill Feitell's "The Cupcake Factory," we bear witness to a moment between siblings that we know will become, for one of them, a searing memory. We know because it's told as if the scene is already crystallizing as it unfolds, and with a weight that can only manifest. We talked to Feitell about the story, cupcakes, long projects, point of view, and shameful stacks of unread books.
- [Ex Marks the Spot: a Review of Mary Miller's Always Happy Hour](https://americanshortfiction.org/ex-marks-spot-review-mary-millers-always-happy-hour/) - Always Happy Hour, Mary Miller’s second collection of stories, opens with the strangest dedication I have ever read: "For my exes." Why would one dedicate anything to one’s exes? And not just one ex–not, say, “The One I’m Still Friends With”–but all of them, wholesale? At once blunt and tender, impersonal and twistedly sweet [...]
- [Good](https://americanshortfiction.org/good/) - https://soundcloud.com/americanshortfiction/libby-flores-good Sea grass tickled the backs of our knees as we crossed the beach. Meredith was trailing behind, humming something familiar, but it was faint, mixed with the salt in the wind. Barefoot, I sank deeper. We were walking toward the water, meeting the edge of the continent, both feeling strange. I turned to make
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Michael Powers](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-michael-powers/) - In February's Web Exclusive, "Lake House," a couple has retired to a remote location. We know there is tension between them, and between the narrator and his adult son, but the origins and causes of this tension are only hinted at, the way a painting focuses its composition by suggesting some elements and detailing others. Our more detailed image is that of a drone silently making its way across the treetops [...]
- [A Bruise the Size and Shape of a Door Handle](https://americanshortfiction.org/bruise-size-shape-door-handle/) - When Salma was nine her mother died and she went to live with the father she knew only through birthday phone calls and from her mother’s steel-lined phraseology—he was a bitch on heat; a fucking rabid, no-cock-and-balled pug with more horn than a wolfhound. They stood in the hallway and looked at one another. Pick a room, any room, he said. She took the attic as if it were a birthright, carrying one suitcase up after the other. Life was a making do and she stood on the bed and stretched to place both hands flat on the ceiling, leaving her prints in dust. [...]
- [Novelist of the Appetites: An Interview with Ashley Warlick](https://americanshortfiction.org/novelist-appetites-interview-ashley-warlick/) - Ashley Warlick spent ten years on her latest novel, The Arrangement, a fictional retelling of the life and loves of famed food writer MFK Fisher. With lush, clean prose and pitch-perfect dialogue, Warlick lays bare the many appetites of a woman and writer ahead of her time. The novel spans the early years of Fisher’s career [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Shoshana Akabas](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-shoshana-akabas/) - In June's Web Exclusive story, "Between the Shores," two people seem to move in parallel throughout their lives, always a hair's breadth away from interacting directly, only feeling the ripples of each other's actions but never knowing each other. We spoke with author Shoshana Akabas about this idea, about interconnectedness and empathy, and how our treatment of refugees right now doesn't bode well for either. Read our interview after the jump! [...]
- [Editorial Outtakes: Shawn Wen](https://americanshortfiction.org/editorial-outtakes-shawn-wen/) - Editorial Outtakes is a series in which we publish excerpts from recent books that you won’t find anywhere else because, prior publication, these sections were cut. This installment of Editorial Outtakes features author Shawn Wen, whose A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause is a kaleidoscopic, book-length essay examining the life and art of Marcel Marceau. Published this week by Sarabande Books, the book is by turns a journalistic endeavor, an imaginative inroad into the artist's world, and a history. [...]
- [The Seagull](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-seagull/) - At the Gala to End Sexual Assault, which was to benefit a non-profit founded by an actress who starred in a TV show that sensationalized sexual assault, and which was held in a museum of dead animals who had been shot and killed by men who were by now themselves quite dead, I found myself feeling a little—how to say it—agitated. [...]
- [Ray Charles Never Lost Anything Important](https://americanshortfiction.org/ray-charles-never-lost-anything-important/) - Hugo was a neighborhood debate. Ask me and I’d say, No, he wasn’t gifted from birth, wasn’t like Mozart composing with a finger up his nose and diaper rash on his ass. But mine was a minority opinion. To this day, people come to me and insist, with a passion I’ve only seen in late-night
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Michael Czyzniejewski](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-michael-czyzniejewski/) - In August, we published a Web Exclusive story, "Monster," that seemed fitting (given that it was playground season and all) and creepy. But not creepy in the way you'd think—the unexpected twist of this story lodges itself in the place where our inadequacies lie, and it's comforting to be so recognized, isn't it? We talked to author Michael Czyzniejewski about this last month. [...]
- [The Art of Staring: An Interview with Jamel Brinkley](https://americanshortfiction.org/art-staring-interview-jamel-brinkley/) - In his much-anticipated debut collection A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley lays bare the full and complex interiority of black men and boys kicking against all manner of inexorable truths, while living an inch from ruin in Brooklyn and the Bronx. We’re thrilled to publish “Wolf and Rhonda” in ASF's spring issue, wherein a high school reunion serves as the site for a reckoning with the past, approached from two completely different but wildly illuminating points of view.
- [Editorial Outtakes: Cutter Wood](https://americanshortfiction.org/editorial-outtakes-cutter-wood/) - This installment of Editorial Outtakes features a scene from Cutter Wood's Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime, which tells the story of the 2008 murder of Sabine Musil-Buehler. Wood's account of the investigation is augmented by a more personal investigation into the nature of love. What results is a moving work of true crime that has much to say about intimacy, memory, and the power of writing. The book was published earlier in April by Algonquin Books.
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Peter Grimes](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-peter-grimes/) - Yes, we're suckers for any writing that incorporates food, but it was the apt depiction of a marriage beginning to stagnate—and the surprising amount of tension it generates—that made us choose "Menu" as our January Web Exclusive flash fiction. We spoke with author Peter Grimes about writing and pursuing the tenure track . . . and, of course, about food. Obviously. [...]
- [Editorial Outtakes: The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist](https://americanshortfiction.org/editorial-outtakes-the-strange-and-true-tale-of-horace-wells-surgeon-dentist/) - Editorial Outtakes is a series in which we publish excerpts from recent books that you won’t find anywhere else because, prior publication, these sections were cut. This installment of Editorial Outtakes features two outtakes from The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist, a novel by journalist and fiction writer Michael Downs. [...]
- [Surface Treatments](https://americanshortfiction.org/surface-treatments/) - It took less than a month for the coats of paint to completely cover the electrical outlet in the kitchen. So much for coffee. So much for toast. The nearest outlet was in the dining room. The longest extension cord was only six feet. We suggested that our parents buy a longer one, maybe one that wasn’t orange and meant for outdoors, maybe one that wasn’t caked with saffron dirt, but we were only children. Like most children, even the wisest things we said went ignored. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Corey Flintoff](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-corey-flintoff/) - Yes, that Corey Flintoff! When we came across the recently retired NPR reporter's flash story, "Dream of the White Worm," we were of course intrigued. Then we discovered that with an honest, unassuming domestic scene, he'd managed to capture the disconnect between people who may love and care for each other deeply, but never fully understand the fears and challenges the others face. It was pretty cool to talk to someone whose voice we could hear in our heads. . . and to get to use the word "phallocracy." [...]
- [Editorial Outtakes: The Floating World](https://americanshortfiction.org/editorial-outtakes-the-floating-world/) - Editorial Outtakes is a series in which we publish excerpts from recent books that you won’t find anywhere else because, prior the publication, these sections were cut. This installment of Editorial Outtakes features a deleted scene from novelist C. Morgan Babst's debut The Floating World. Published in 2017 and out this month in paperback, Babst's acclaimed story of life in New Orleans following the destruction of Hurricane Katrina has been hailed as poetic and tragic family tale with the narrative momentum of a literary mystery [...]
- [2018 The Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize Winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/2018-the-halifax-ranch-fiction-prize-winners/) - We are delighted to announce that our wonderful judge ZZ Packer has selected the winners of the inaugural Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize. We received many wonderful submissions—thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your work!
- [The Clown](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-clown/) - The clown counted his murders as he drove the new couple to the house on Rocking Horse Lane. Not few. The Lexus needed air again, according to the little orange light, the man in his passenger seat was offering original commentary on the Clintons, and behind the clown’s left eye a toothache and an earache were collaborating. Not few at all, and some of the murders had been admirably painful, admirably patient. Outside the Lexus it was seventy-two degrees in October, and inside the Lexus, according to a different screen, it was also seventy-two degrees, the car’s climate system blowing hard even so. The clown hated the Lexus and was wearing a blazer he’d bought to match it. In the backseat, the woman, very pregnant, was picking her teeth with the aid of her phone. The clown’s mouth—thirsty—tasted like waffle fries and crispy chicken sandwich, and so did all the rest of him.[...]
- [Things American: Treatment vs. Healing](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-treatment-vs-healing/) - 1. The nurse woke me at four-thirty in the morning to take my blood. Someone else had taken it less than six hours before, in the emergency room, but pointing that out seemed disrespectful because he was a nurse with years of schooling behind him, and I was just another suicidal senior in high school.
- [Things American: How Mad Men & Upstairs Downstairs Negotiate History](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-how-mad-men-upstairs-downstairs-negotiate-history/) - Every so often a show comes along that attempts to take stock of and reflect upon the moral predicaments of the last half century—serving as a reminder for how far we’ve come, or how far we have yet to go. The strength of Mad Men—one of many strengths—comes from the show’s use of history [...]
- [From Printed Page to Silver Screen: An Interview with Novelist Ted Thompson](https://americanshortfiction.org/from-printed-page-to-silver-screen-an-interview-with-ted-thompson/) - This month, filmmaker Nicole Holofcener's adaptation of Ted Thompson's 2014 novel The Land of Steady Habits premieres on Netflix. We recently talked to Thompson about the book, the adaptation, and about the movie's incredible cast, which includes Ben Mendelsohn, Edie Flaco, Connie Britton, Thomas Mann, and Charlie Tahan. There's even a little cameo by Thompson and his wife, Carrie [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Tyler Stoddard Smith](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-tyler-stoddard-smith/) - "I aspire to dread . . . " begins June's online short story, "Knausgaard in Space." And with these words, we knew author Tyler Stoddard Smith had nailed the Nordic icon and we were in for something very funny. And boy, did we need it. Here, Smith talks to web editor Erin McReynolds about Weird Al, the legendarily awkward meeting between Knausgaard and Jeffrey Eugenides, and the potential hilarity of having no escape. [...]
- [The Key Bearer's Parents](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-key-bearers-parents/) - We were good parents. We know people assume otherwise when they see our wide ties and honking red noses, but we were. We took that job seriously. We told our son that he could be anything he wanted to be, just like you’re supposed to. Yes, we could see his embarrassment when we showed up for Career Day, how he threw the basketball into the field as our tiny car pulled in so that his friends would look away. And though we were happy clowns, smiles broader and wider than any lips, the disappointment underneath our makeup was easy to read. “It’s fine,” we said, fitting on our over-sized shoes and adjusting the flowers in our hats. We told ourselves that he would get over it.
- [Heliotrope](https://americanshortfiction.org/heliotrope/) - The placenta began to speak a month into my affair with Nick. The baby had gone right down after his lunch—Tofu Pup, rice cake, cup of orange juice. The OJ was our secret. My sister didn’t like Beau to have juice because of the sugar, but I felt sorry for the kid. I believe in
- [Announcing the Winners of the Insider Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-the-winners-of-the-insider-prize/) - Submissions to The Insider Prize—a writing contest for incarcerated writers in Texas, which we held for the first time this year—came to us in envelopes of many sizes. Most had been previously opened, with a red TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS stamp on the inside of the lip of the envelope that had been taped shut after an inspection. Some were composed on a typewriter. Others were handwritten. [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Nathan Go](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-nathan-go/) - In May's Web Exclusive, "The Blind Oracle of Mactan," author Nathan Go takes us to an island in the Philippines, to a fantastical man who just, as it turns out, wants what any of us wants. The prose is light and funny, winding lithely around something that reveals itself to be as profound and enduring a problem as human beings have ever known. Even a human who has lived many, many lifetimes over. We talked with Nathan about how this strange and wonderful story came about. [...]
- [Dream of the White Worm](https://americanshortfiction.org/dream-of-the-white-worm/) - https://soundcloud.com/americanshortfiction/corey-flintoff-dream-of-the-white-worm Lynette bends to hug Robbie, who sits at the kitchen table with his coffee. She’s just woken up, and her cotton nightie still smells of their bed. “I dreamed I was grabbed by a huge white worm and dragged into a hole,” she says. “It was horrible.” He strokes her shoulders, feeling like he
- [Strange New City: An Interview with Lucy Tan](https://americanshortfiction.org/a-strange-new-city-an-interview-with-lucy-tan/) - Lucy Tan's debut novel What We Were Promised is a deftly constructed multiple-perspective work that tells the story of the Zhen household. After attaining educations and building careers in the United States, Wei and Lina return to Shanghai with their daughter, Karen, where they find themselves a part of a new generation of urban elites. Quite suddenly, Wei is tasked with dramatically expanding his business while Lina finds herself part of an upper-crust previously unimaginable to her. [...]
- [Father as Astronaut](https://americanshortfiction.org/father-as-astronaut/) - My first assignment was an infestation: albino deer flocking in townspeople's yards, grazing away what little greenery was left. I concocted a spray, biodegradable and harmless to plants but noxious to animals. The herd scattered like skeleton teeth in the foothills and starved. More recently, I was assigned to a village that had seen the face of God, every villager among them, which was why they were losing teeth and hair, why their bones had turned to meringue.
- [Tomorrow or Forever: An Interview with Jack Kaulfus](https://americanshortfiction.org/interview-with-jack-kaulfus/) - In Jack Kaulfus’s debut story collection, Tomorrow or Forever, the Austin-based author examines life, the afterlife, and the identities we may take on in those spaces and beyond. These nine stories move through a variety of settings, from the cramped inside of a plane to a mystical small town sculpture garden, painting backdrops that are alternately recognizable and otherworldly. In these eclectic stories, tension lies between [...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Hal Walling](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-hal-walling/) - Our March Web Exclusive, "You Haven't Won Anything Yet," is a taut, complex, and slightly odd story about a missing child and an adult with a missing childhood. It's a terrific example of using negative space, and nearly every sentence is a surprise. We (finally) spoke with author Hal Walling about his approach, and, yes, indulged ourselves with a couple of Canada questions. [...]
- [The Origins of "The Window" & Short Story Writing Prompts](https://americanshortfiction.org/origins-window-short-story-writing-prompts/) - Two of my favorite writing games are collaboration and asking what if. My sister Amanda is a visual artist with whom I often collaborate. In the case of “The Window,” our collaboration was accidental. Living in different cities, we often send each other snapshots of our daily lives. She sent me a photo of a street cat she’d noticed on her walk to and from work. She kept seeing the same cat, taking pictures of it and sending them to me. We grew attached to the cat. After it disappeared, we guessed at and even worried about its fate. We wondered what the cat’s story was. One particular photo of a dumpster compelled me. That is what got me started. [...]
- [Editorial Outtakes: This Darkness Got to Give](https://americanshortfiction.org/editorial-outtakes-this-darkness-got-to-give/) - Editorial Outtakes is a series in which we publish excerpts from recent books that you won’t find anywhere else because, prior the publication, these sections were cut. This installment of Editorial Outtakes features a deleted scene from fiction writer Dave Housley’s new novel, This Darkness Got to Give. In the vein of character-driven contemporary horrors like Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps and A Questionable Shape by Bennet Sims, Housley engages with and subverts what readers may already know of vampires and horror tropes as he introduces you Cain, a vampire who’s also a Deadhead. [...]
- [Flight](https://americanshortfiction.org/flight/) - I am traveling across the sea, again. Sometimes it seems I have spent more time on water than on land; sometimes, when I am home, I wake up in the middle of the night and am surprised when my old legs meet solid, unswaying ground.
- [Your Father](https://americanshortfiction.org/your-father/) - All of this is occasioned by a telephone call from my dad: I sit down on the couch, flip on the tube, and descend the cable channels to the low double-digits, where I find the red-jowled faces of men trapped inside too-tight sport coats going on at length about this player or that, and I know I’ve landed on the run-up to a baseball game. I have an immediate gut reaction to these men because, as it happens, I’m under imminent threat of getting my face slammed into my own locker by letterman-wearing jocks who, no doubt, will become less successful versions of the men I’m watching here on the tube. [...]
- [The Mother's Portion](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-mothers-portion/) - The gravedigger was a woman. Tall, broad-shouldered, her cheeks flushed red from the cold. Or from shame. She hadn’t done the job we’d hired her to do: dig our mother’s grave. Father David, the priest from Gibraltar who looked and spoke like Michael Caine, had told her and the groundskeeper that the family would not be leaving until our dead was in the ground. It didn’t matter if the hole she had dug couldn’t contain her. “Enlarge it,” Father David said. [...]
- [Monster](https://americanshortfiction.org/monster/) - The last couple times I took my boys to the playground, there was this guy there. He looked harmless, nice even, a baseball cap, jeans, T-shirt. He could have been my age, maybe ten years older or ten years younger—his long, untended beard made it hard to guess. While my boys hit the slides, the swings, and the monkey bars, I’d sit, let them do their thing, on hand in case they fell or decided to wander off. The guy with the long beard, though, he was all in, rotating kids on the little merry-go-round, refereeing games of tag, and playing this game he called “Monster” [...]
- [A Guide to Sirens](https://americanshortfiction.org/a-guide-to-sirens/) - Frank’s island tour—offered free to hotel guests—is described by the Paradise Inn’s brochure as a brief excursion into the island’s myths, mysteries, and mermaids, its selkies and sirens. What the brochure fails to mention is that most of the tour is aimed at selling extra-cost amenities. Frank has today’s group look at the hotel’s spa, the sea-themed restaurant, the saltwater pool, and some pinkish seashells with purported medicinal properties. Only after that does he finally gather the handful of patrons inside a thatched pavilion on the beach. [...]
- [Three](https://americanshortfiction.org/three/) - Widowed and childless, the man yearned to visit his mother’s Anatolian village. It would be his first journey out of Egypt, squeezed between two deserts, and his dreams had become filled with snow-dusted pines. Collecting his savings from a life working the land, he boarded a rattletrap bus to Alexandria, goats and straw baskets tethered to the roof. In the ancient port, he scanned the ships on the horizon, specks trailing threads of smoke. The ancient Library of a million scrolls, the Pharos that stood high among the Seven Wonders of the World—now rubble on the harbor floor—seemed alien to his purpose. [...]
- [The Night Bus](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-night-bus/) - Of all the bus drivers on duty that night, it was Angus who was taken in for questioning. He guessed it was because of his ear: a burned puff, as pitted as a peach stone, with fleecy white scars that radiated down to his neck. It was the ear of a bogeyman, a man who would kidnap a young girl in a painter’s smock as she idled beneath the palmettos.
- [Things American: On Quitting the (not so) Great American Novel](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-on-quitting-the-not-so-great-american-novel/) - I want to tell you, because maybe it’s four in the morning and you’re googling “how to know when to give up on a novel.” How you are supposed to know? I’ve wondered this many times myself over twenty-three months, through a hundred and fifty thousand words, dozens of chapters, three false starts, and too many conversations to count. Then—in a moment—I came to the answer and I gave up on the book. [...]
- [Editorial Outtakes: Mike Scalise](https://americanshortfiction.org/editorial-outtakes-mike-scalise/) - Editorial Outtakes is a feature in which we publish excerpts from recent books that you won’t find anywhere else because, prior the publication, these sections were cut. This installment of Editorial Outtakes features writer Mike Scalise, author of The Brand New Catastrophe, reflecting on some of the particularities of revealing character details in nonfiction. [...]
- [The Statue of Limitations](https://americanshortfiction.org/statue-limitations/) - They install the statue in our backyard, so we know how far we are allowed to roam without risk of pursuit. They plant it along the tree line, wielding chisels and pulleys. We watch from the window, the two of us, his hand on my shoulder. If you want me to explain the height of the statue, there's the fact that my husband can stand under it for a bit of shade, and as you know, he's quite tall. When I stand directly behind the statue, I disappear, and I'm quite wide these days. [...]
- [Closed: The Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/halifax-ranch-prize-fiction/) - Thanks to everyone who entered a story in our Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize. The 2018 contest entry period has now closed. The winner of the prize will receive $2,500 and publication in an upcoming issue of American Short Fiction. For additional information about the magazine, our authors, events, and our two annual fiction contests, please sign up for our email list.
- [Bourbon and Milk: Truth Flags, Secret Knowledge, and the Need to Sometimes Stomp Around, Raise Your Voice and Carry the Television Out to the Garage](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-milk-truth-flags-secret-knowledge-need-sometimes-stomp-around-raise-voice-carry-television-garage/) - Last year, with a nod towards the thankfulness many of us associate with the holidays—a thankfulness steeped in both the warmth and the insanity of family—I dedicated a holiday season Bourbon and Milk (which you can read here) to literary parents and their children. [...]
- [Contest Closed: American Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/american-shorter-fiction-prize/) - We are thrilled to announce that Stuart Dybek will be judging this year's American Short(er) Fiction Prize. The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,000 words. The first-place winner will receive a $500 prize and publication, and the second-place winner will receive $250 and publication. Previous winners of the Short(er) Fiction Prize have gone on to be anthologized in places such as The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. [...]
- [Best of the Net 2017!](https://americanshortfiction.org/best-net-2017/) - We are thrilled to announce that two ASF stories—"Endangered" by Allegra Hyde and "A Bruise the Size and Shape of a Door Handle" by Daisy Johnson—have won Best of the Net 2017. Congratulations to all the winners!
- [Summer Film Club: Joyce Carol Oates](https://americanshortfiction.org/summer-film-club-joyce-carol-oates/) - In this weekly series, Intern Alyssa, your fearless reader, will review popular short stories and their film adaptations. We’ll explore what works in each medium and what doesn't and how exactly the allure of literature can translate to film. Alyssa has no formal training in film, unless subscribing to Netflix and following Roger Ebert on Twitter
- [Summer Film Club: Mary Gaitskill](https://americanshortfiction.org/summer-film-club-mary-gaitskill/) - In this weekly series, intern Alyssa, your fearless reader, reviews popular short stories and their film adaptations. We’ll explore what works in each medium and what doesn’t, and how exactly the allure of literature can translate to film. Alyssa has no formal training in film, unless subscribing to Netflix and following Roger Ebert on Twitter
- [Fish Jokes](https://americanshortfiction.org/fish-jokes/) - To start, Anna searches for his name. The search returns 5,881 emails—every single thing he sent her for the thirteen months they worked together. She filters out his work address but his personal Gmail still returns 1,739. Too many to comb through one by one. She can’t search by date; she doesn’t remember the date. If she’s going to find this email, she’s going to have to remember the words he used.
- [Menu](https://americanshortfiction.org/menu/) - We’ve already tried everything. We tell the waitress to bring rolls, wine. Meanwhile we’ll decide what we want to order. This is our favorite restaurant. It’s the only restaurant in town as far as we’re concerned. The atmosphere is exquisite—carpet with hunting scenes, dark wood. The mayor and his cronies sit nearby, tearing apart their steaks by candlelight and spilling juice on their ties. I wave. [...]
- [Knausgaard in Space](https://americanshortfiction.org/knausgaard-in-space/) - I aspire to dread, and so I embraced the opportunity to write about my struggle in outer space. As a boy in Oslo, I experienced the same dream people born in the Space Age had all over the world: the dream of having intercourse with Pat Benatar. I abandoned this dream when MTV stopped playing music videos and I never thought about space again, until my editor called. “I’ll see you in the next life,” I said. “Space travel is much safer than before,” he replied. “You’ll be fine.” [...]
- [14 Writers You Love & Their Favorite Short Stories](https://americanshortfiction.org/14-writers-you-love-their-favorite-short-stories/) - Spring is here, and so are the promises of the season: the famous flowers are in bloom, the strawberries are ripe for picking, the earth's axis has started to tilt toward the sun, and—with its lackadaisical charm and balmy swagger—spring fever has set its sight on all of us. Oh, did we mention the kittens? But perhaps the best thing about the season is the arrival of May—Short Story Month—which is, as you might expect, American Short Fiction's favorite month of all. To celebrate we invited some truly wonderful writers to say a few words on their favorite short stories. [...]
- [Something to Rage Against: An Interview with James Han Mattson](https://americanshortfiction.org/something-rage-interview-james-han-mattson/) - In his beautiful debut novel, James Han Mattson explores the fallout from an act of violence that will seem all too familiar to American readers. Using multiple first-person narrators, Mattson deftly orbits the book's central tragedy, allowing readers a broad view of the event that does much more than explore a killer's motivations. [...]
- [Support ASF & Get this Dog-Approved Tote Bag!](https://americanshortfiction.org/support-asf-in-2017/) - As the new year approaches, we look back with gratitude on the magazine's accomplishments and think about how we can grow in the years to come. We know you share our belief in the essential power of stories. Reading is an empathetic act, and fiction is a big tent as well as a clear window through which readers have access to experiences far different from their own. As a 501(c)3 arts nonprofit, we need your support now more than ever. [...]
- [The American Short(er) Fiction Prize is now Closed](https://americanshortfiction.org/american-shorter-fiction-prize-now-open-submissions/) - The American Short(er) Fiction Prize is now closed for submissions. Thank you to everyone who entered! We look forward to reading your work. A winner and runner-up will be announced in the coming months. We are thrilled that Amber Sparks—author of the story collections The Unfinished World and May We Shed These Human Bodies—is judging this year’s contest.[...]
- [Web Exclusive Interview: Richard Mirabella](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-richard-mirabella/) - Back in November, we published the Web Exclusive story "The Sister" by Richard Mirabella, a tale with a timeless sense of the heartbreak and loss. We talked with Mirabella about the story's roots, queer fiction, and the pains and pleasures of writing when you've got a full-time job.
- [The Janitor in Space](https://americanshortfiction.org/janitor-space/) - The janitor makes her way through the hallway with purpose, suctioning space dust and human debris from crevices of the space station. She is good at her job. She can push off from the walls in a steady trajectory without even looking; her eyes are always on the windows and the impossibly bright stars beyond.
- [Texas Book Festival Interviews: An Austin Collection](https://americanshortfiction.org/texas-book-festival-interviews-austin-collection/) - With the Texas Book Festival approaching, we caught up with a few authors featured in this year’s lineup for some mini–interviews. Deb Olin Unferth, Jardine Libaire, and Owen Egerton are a few of Austin's favorite local writers, while our other interviewees—Amelia Gray, Mary Miller, and Manuel Gonzales—have all recently called Austin home. We asked these six to share a few insights about themselves, their books, and the Lone Star State.
- [The Stars at Night: An Interview with Dan Chaon](https://americanshortfiction.org/stars-night-interview-dan-chaon/) - I first came to Dan Chaon's work years ago via his celebrated story collection Among the Missing; even as a fledgling writer, I recognized that Chaon had the chops for beautiful writing and even greater empathy. Now, Chaon's newest novel Ill Will showcases a multi-talented writer diving into the deep waters of emotional hazards and physical violence, all set against the backdrop of contemporary America [...]
- [2017 American Short Fiction Prize Winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/2017-american-short-fiction-prize-winners/) - We are delighted to announce that Lauren Groff has selected the winners of the 2017 American Short Fiction Prize. The first-place prize goes to Michaela Hansen for her story "The Devil in the Barn" and the second-place prize goes to Wendy Rawlings for her story "Coffins for Kids!"Our deepest thanks to Lauren Groff for judging the American Short Fiction Prize, and to all of you for submitting your work. And congrats to the winners! Look out for the winning story in an upcoming issue of American Short Fiction! [...]
- [ASF Goes Back to School: Our Second Annual Back Issue Giveaway](https://americanshortfiction.org/asf-goes-back-school-second-annual-back-issue-giveaway/) - Last year, we shipped over 150 free back issues of American Short Fiction to colleges and universities including Rowan University, the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin, Towson University, Missouri State University, and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. If you're a creative writing instructor who's teaching a workshop at a U.S. college or university this fall, we'd be happy to send you a box of back issues to use in your classroom. [...]
- [Contest Closed: The American Short Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/american-short-fiction-contest-open-submissions/) - Thank you to everyone who submitted work to this year's American Short Fiction Prize—a contest for stories between 2,000 and 6,500 words. This year we are honored to have Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies (Obama's favorite book of 2015), as our guest judge. The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication in our spring issue. One runner-up will receive $500 and all entries will be considered for publication. We will announce this year's winner and runner-up in the fall.
- [The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017!](https://americanshortfiction.org/o-henry-prize-stories-2017/) - We're so pleased to announce that Manuel Muñoz's story, "The Reason Is Because," from ASF Issue #61, has been selected for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017 by Laura Furman and this year's jury panel of Elizabeth McCracken, David Bradley, and Brad Watson. The anthology will be out in September. Congratulations to all the winners!
- [Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award Winner!](https://americanshortfiction.org/sunday-times-efg-short-story-award-winner/) - Hooray for Bret Anthony Johnson, whose beautiful elegiac story "Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows About Horses," published in ASF's 25th anniversary issue, was announced as the winner of the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award on April 27th in London. The prize is the richest for a story in the English language. Congrats, Bret!
- [Announcing our American Short(er) Fiction Contest Winners!](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-american-shorter-fiction-contest-winners/) - We are delighted to announce that Justin Torres has chosen the winners of our 2017 American Short(er) Fiction Contest. The first-place prize goes to Claire Robbins, for her story “Arms Out.” The second-place prize goes to Blair Donahue, for her story “Filament.” More details about our winners after the jump! [...]
- [Winners of the American Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/winners-american-shorter-fiction-prize/) - It is time to raise your fruit for the winners of the 2016 American Short(er) Fiction Contest, judged by Amelia Gray! This year we had many wonderful submissions, so thank you to all who submitted to the contest—reading your stories has been an honor and a pleasure, a welcome reminder of the beauty and versatility and promise of
- [Issue 64 Release Party & Reading](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-64-release-party-reading/) - We are thrilled to announce the arrival of Issue 64—so thrilled that we decided to throw a party! This is no regular party—it's a reading party at the dark and delightful King Bee Lounge, featuring ASF staff members, including contributing editors JENNIFER DUBOIS and STACEY SWANN, editorial fellow CHARLES RAMSAY MCCRORY, and assistant editor HEATHER
- [ASF Contributors Johnston & Henderson Longlisted for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Fiction Award](https://americanshortfiction.org/asf-contributors-johnston-henderson-longlisted-2017-sunday-times-efg-short-fiction-award/) - On the heels of a wonderful AWP conference in Washington, DC, we returned home only to find that recent ASF contributors Bret Anthony Johnston (ASF 63, Fall 2016) and Smith Henderson (ASF 62, Summer 2016) have been included on the longlist for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Fiction Award. Johnston's story, "Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows About Horses" appeared as the issue opener in our special 25th Birthday edition. Henderson's "The Trouble" was the final story in our most recent summer issue.
- [Best American Short Stories 2017!](https://americanshortfiction.org/best-american-short-stories-2017/) - We are thrilled to announce that two ASF stories will be anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2017, edited by Meg Wolitzer. Congratulations to Danielle Evans, author of "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain" from Issue 63, and Kyle McCarthy, author of "Ancient Rome" from Issue 62 for the honor!
- [Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017!](https://americanshortfiction.org/best-american-nonrequired-reading-2017/) - Three cheers for Smith Henderson, whose ASF story "Trouble" from Issue 62 will be anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017, edited by Sarah Vowell. "Trouble" was also a semifinalist for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, and we're thrilled his terrific story has received such distinguished recognition. Congrats, Smith!
- [Contest Closed: American Short(er) Fiction Contest](https://americanshortfiction.org/asf-short-story-contest/) - The American Short(er) Fiction Contest is now closed. Thank you all for your submissions. This year we are honored to have Justin Torres as our guest judge. The winners will be announced on this site. The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication in a future issue of ASF. [...]
- [Bourbon and Milk: "Oh, My Dear. Where Is That Country?"](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-milk-oh-dear-country/) - This latest installment of Bourbon and Milk (in which writer-parents tackle the ins and outs of working while raising little ones) features authors Casey Fleming, Greg Brown, Manuel Gonzales, Miah Arnold, Joshua Rivkin, Lacy M. Johnson, Alyssa Knickerbocker, Joshua Furst and ASF's own Giuseppe Taurino on the tricky issue of discussing the 2016 election and this week's inauguration of Donald J. Trump [...]
- [Things American: Thoughts on Last Night](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-thoughts-last-night/) - It felt sad and strange today to be sitting at the helm of a magazine called American Short Fiction. That first word on our masthead, our understanding of what that word means, pulled and pinched and pummeled as it has been over the last few months by our leaders and our pundits and by the new president-elect most of all, took a violent final beating last night, and it was hard, this morning, not to hear a bitter, bruised irony in its syllables [...]
- [Announcing our American Short Fiction Contest Winners!](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-american-short-fiction-contest-winners/) - We are delighted to announce that Victor LaValle has chosen the winners of our 2016 American Short Fiction Contest. The first-place prize goes to Amanda Emil Anderson, for her story “The Goodnow Guide.” Look out for the story in an upcoming issue of American Short Fiction! [...]
- [Pride Is Every Month: A Short Reading List from Our Editors](https://americanshortfiction.org/say-goodbye-june-lets-not-forget-great-works/) - In 2016, there's something almost anachronistic about creating a list of your favorite LGBTQ books. What kinds of books might qualify for such a list? Must the author identify as gay, bi, lesbian, trans, asexual or agender to be included? In putting together such a list, don't you run the risk of unintentionally ghettoizing "LGBTQ books" and [...]
- [Bourbon and Milk: Slow but Steady-ish](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-and-milk-slow-but-steady-ish/) - I confess, I get a little impatient when I hear graduate students with teaching assistantships—that is, students who not only aren’t paying tuition but who are being paid—say they don’t have time to write. Which is not to say that I didn’t feel exactly the same way when I was a graduate student with a teaching assistantship. But what I want to tell them now is, if they’ll only be able to write once they finish their coursework [...]
- [ASF Short Fiction Contest Now Closed](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-american-short-fiction-contest-now-open/) - The American Short Fiction Contest is now closed. This year we are honored to have Victor LaValle—author of the story collection Slapboxing with Jesus and novels The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver and The Ballad of Black Tom—as our guest judge. The winner of the contest will receive $1,000 and publication in the magazine. The runner up will receive $500, and all stories submitted to the contest will be considered for publication. More details after the jump. [...]
- [Inside the Issue: Rachel Swearingen on Postcards, Nostalgia and History](https://americanshortfiction.org/inside-the-issue-rachel-swearingen-on-postcards-nostalgia-and-history/) - When I was a child my father, an antique dealer, often brought home boxes of old postcards from estate sales. He collected black and white photographs of Main streets across America, but I preferred the hand-tinted, folded portfolios of Hollywood homes, European travel destinations, and the cheap stamps—3cents!— smeared with inky postmarks [...]
- [Best American](https://americanshortfiction.org/best-american/) - Congratulations to Ammi Keller, whose story, "Isaac Cameron Hill," will be anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015, edited by Adam Johnson! The story originally appeared in ASF Issue 58.
- [Scars](https://americanshortfiction.org/525/) - The pitcher just struck out Esperanza Duarte. Right then redemption was up to me. I have the biggest legs of all the Lady Mantises. Daddy used to always say people here like it when you can do something special but not too special. [...]
- [Bourbon & Milk – Thankless Chasms, Unlearnable Lyrics, and the Warmth of Home](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-milk-thankless-chasms-un-learnable-lyrics-warmth-home/) - Some of my earliest memories involve sitting at the kids’ table during the holidays with an ear tilted towards the adults’ side of the room, straining to hear stories about my parents’ and their siblings’ upbringing. Funny anecdotes were great, but mostly I hoped to hear about the blow-ups, and screw-ups and beatings. [...]
- [Things American: Buffalo](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-buffalo/) - Buffalo is a whale that fell asleep at the bottom of the ocean. Buffalo is a three-year-old that doesn't cater to vegetarians. Buffalo is a new poem. It’s that weird bird that turns into fire. Buffalo is a Bowie knife run across a forearm twenty years ago. It’s an outpost of a long gone people.
- [What We're Reading](https://americanshortfiction.org/what-were-reading/) - When our website was still incubating, we used our Tumblr to share what our staff had been reading lately. Now that we're up and running in the world, we thought we'd share a few of their summer reads here. Except to change it up a bit, we asked them to include a GIF that corresponded with their read, in whatever way they wanted.
- [Introducing "Things American"](https://americanshortfiction.org/introducing-things-american/) - Introducing "Things American": As you know, we're fiction people. We're American Short Fiction, after all. But Kurt Vonnegut warned: "Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak." And, in truth, we’re also interested in the broader experience of what it is to be an "American"--that funny, fuzzy-edged word. Inspired by our determination to...not do what Vonnegut said, we're introducing the "Things American" series [...]
- [Ten Views of the Border](https://americanshortfiction.org/ten-views-border/) - The imposition of borders was met, initially, with something akin to relief. This isn’t to say that the citizens of the region were pleased at the prospect of seeing their familiar world dismantled before their eyes, but the period leading up to the imposition had been, let us not forget, pestered by rumor and anxiety. Now at least matters had been decided, and there was a general hope on the part of both the Northwestern and Southeastern Inhabitants (strange to hear ourselves defined this way!) that life would return to normal. [...]
- [Summer Film Club: Denis Johnson](https://americanshortfiction.org/summer-film-club-denis-johnson/) - Welcome to the ASF Summer Film Club! In this weekly series intern Alyssa, your fearless reader, will review popular short stories and their film adaptations. We’ll explore what works in each medium and what doesn’t, and how exactly the allure of literature can translate to film. Alyssa has no formal training in film, unless subscribing
- [The American Short(er) Fiction Contest: Now Closed](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-american-shorter-fiction-contest-is-now-open-for-submissions/) - We are thrilled to announce that Amelia Gray, whose widely praised collection, Gutshot, came out in May, will be judging this year’s American Short(er) Fiction Contest. The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,000 words. The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication, and the second-place winner will receive $250 and publication. All entries will be considered for publication. [...]
- [Imaginary Enemies](https://americanshortfiction.org/imaginary-enemies/) - Elbow and I ducked out of our nephew’s birthday party and drove to Walmart to check on ammo prices. I didn’t care about ammo prices. I was along for the ride. Elbow was married to my sister and just out of the Marine Corps. His hair was still high and tight, and he strutted around with
- [Announcing Our American Short Fiction Contest Winners!](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-our-american-short-fiction-contest-winners/) - We are so pleased to announce that Elizabeth McCracken has chosen the winners of our 2015 American Short Fiction Contest. The first place prize goes to Leona Theis, for her story "How Sylvie Failed to Become a Better Person Through Yoga." The second place prize goes to CJ Hauser for her story "Gala 4135." [...]
- [There's Still Time to Make a Year-end Gift to ASF!](https://americanshortfiction.org/save-the-date-giving-tuesday-is-dec-1st/) - Next year will mark 25 years since the very first issue of American Short Fiction was published, and in December, we're hoping to raise $5,000 to help us continue well into the next quarter century. For our editors and staff, bringing these stories to readers around the world is a genuine labor of love, and it takes a large group of dedicated writers, editors, artists, subscribers, and supporters to make it happen. [...]
- [Online Fiction Interview: April Wilder](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-april-wilder/) - The stories in April Wilder's debut collection, This is Not an Accident, inhabit, in her words, "the territory of the American absurd," and each first page is like the edge of a cliff. A story might begin, say, in a defensive driving class or in a kitchen with the grandchildren, and then it careens off, suspending the reader in that place where falling feels like flying. [...]
- [Bourbon and Milk: Dead Kitties and Shallow Graves](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-milk-dead-kitties-shallow-graves/) - One of our two cats died recently—Mr. Melo. He was the older of the pair, and the first pet my wife and I ever adopted. We spent his entire last day in vet offices before finally admitting him to an animal clinic around 7 P.M., hopeful but worried. Around 10 o’clock, my wife called the clinic and was told Melo was as comfortable as he could be under the circumstances. An hour later, I got a call back informing me he was dead.
- [Bourbon and Milk: When the Danger Is You](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-milk-danger/) - When I was in graduate school, working on the stories that would become my first book, Short People, one of my professors pulled me aside for a private meeting in which he did me the great favor of warning me to rethink my project. “After you have children, you’re going to regret having written these stories,” he said. What he meant was that, once I experienced the fervent parental urge to protect the seed of my loins from any and all real or perceived danger, my worldview would change and along with it, my sense of fiction’s mission. [...]
- [New: Audio of Authors Reading Their Online Fiction](https://americanshortfiction.org/4898/) - Big news, friends. Since January, we've been working on a little project: from here on out, you'll be able to find audio content for our online exclusives embedded with the text of the stories and over on our Soundcloud page.
- [Bourbon and Milk: Here Is the Essay, Now Where Is the Child?](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-milk-essay-now-child/) - “Where do you get so much energy?” I asked my daughter recently, the age-old parenting question. She was running around like on any other day while I sprawled supine on the floor. Not because I had any unusual reason to be tired. I was tired because that is the state I have been in for the last four years. [...]
- [Bourbon and Milk: Undismissible Unicorns](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-milk-undismissible-unicorns/) - We’d just finished dinner and Z was sitting on my lap. At the opposite end of the table, P was sipping a well-deserved glass of wine. “Is today Tuesday, Daddy?” Z said. “Today’s Wednesday,” I said, and without warning began to tickle and nuzzle her until she was laughing so hard she could barely breathe. [...]
- [ASF & Lit Crawl Austin Present: Whose Line Is it Anyway?](https://americanshortfiction.org/asf-lit-crawl-austin-present-whose-line-is-it-anyway/) - We are excited to join Lit Crawl Austin to present our second installment of "Whose Line Is it Anyway?" a hilarious and highbrow night of literature, guessing games, and other foolish fun. Come hang out at Wonderland Austin with Texas Book Festival authors Elizabeth McCracken, Lauren Groff, Alexandra Kleeman, Benjamin Markovits, and Skip Horack, and watch these
- [Bourbon and Milk: Notebook to Nightcap](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-milk-notebook-nightcap/) - Bourbon and Milk is an ongoing series that dives into the perplexing spaces parenting sometimes pushes us and explores the unexpected ways writers may grow in them. If you’re interested in joining the conversation or contributing a Bourbon and Milk post, query Giuseppe Taurino at giuseppe@americanshortfiction.org. — It’s five a.m., and I’m thinking of how my
- [ASF & Lit Crawl Present: Whose Line Is it Anyway?](https://americanshortfiction.org/asf-lit-crawl-present-whose-line-is-it-anyway/) - American Short Fiction is excited to join Lit Crawl Austin to present our second installment of "Whose Line Is it Anyway?"— a hilarious and highbrow night of literature, guessing games, and other foolish fun. [...]
- [Excerpt: Honey from the Lion, by Matthew Neill Null](https://americanshortfiction.org/excerpt-honey-from-the-lion-by-matthew-neill-null/) - Tomorrow Lookout Books will publish Honey from the Lion, the debut novel of Matthew Neill Null. The novel travels the same West Virginian logging terrain as "The Slow Lean of Time," the stunner of a story we published in our Spring 2014 issue. Like "The Slow Lean of Time," Honey from the Lion employs a sweeping omniscient narration [...]
- [Listen to our Web Exclusive Stories Read by the Authors](https://americanshortfiction.org/listen-web-exclusive-stories-read-authors/) - Since January, we've been working on a little project that we hope expands the reach of our web exclusive stories and that gives you, our readers, website visitors, subscribers, supporters and pals, a new way to engage with the fiction we publish.
- [Pushcart News](https://americanshortfiction.org/pushcart-news/) - Congratulations to Barrett Swanson, whose story “Annie Radcliffe,You Are Loved,” which you can read in ASF’s 56th issue, just won a Pushcart Prize! It will be published in the 2015 Collection.
- [Now closed: the American Short Fiction Contest](https://americanshortfiction.org/now-open-american-short-fiction-contest/) - The deadline to submit to our American Short Fiction Contest was JULY 1. The contest is now closed—our thanks to all who submitted! We look forward to announcing the winners, chosen by judge Elizabeth McCracken, soon.
- [Bourbon and Milk: Wonder and Worry](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-milk-wonder-worry/) - I have a photograph of my son Simon—then four years old—holding up my collection of stories on the day it arrived in the mail. He’s so proud, his smile so huge that his eyes are scrunched shut. He’s oblivious. When I took that photograph, I knew I was supposed to be nervous, if not terrified. I knew I was supposed to imagine a thirteen-year-old Simon opening that book [...]
- [Baltimore Authors Respond to the Death of Freddie Gray: A Reading and Community Conversation](https://americanshortfiction.org/baltimore-authors-respond-death-freddie-gray-reading-community-conversation/) - Join ASF and the University of Baltimore on May 13th for a reading and conversation with Baltimore writers who've recently confronted the death of Freddie Gray. Authors Jane Delury, Michael Downs, Derick Ebert, Kenneth Morrison, Lia Purpura, Deborah Rudacille, Khaliah Williams & others will read at 8 PM at UB's Merrick School of Business.
- [American Short(er) Fiction Contest: Winners Announced!](https://americanshortfiction.org/american-shorter-fiction-contest-winners-announced/) - We are pleased to announce the winners for the 2015 American Short(er) Fiction Prize, judged by Stuart Dybek. Thank you to everyone who submitted. We were overwhelmed by the breadth and quality of the stories, and, reading them, were thrilled again and again by the versatility and potential of the flash fiction form. [...]
- [Come and Take It: Texas Lit Party at AWP](https://americanshortfiction.org/come-take-texas-lit-party-awp/) - Kick off your AWP with Texas’s finest indie presses and lit mags. Come have a drink on us at Liquor Lyle's on Wednesday April 8th from 7 PM until the whiskey runs dry. With your hosts: American Short Fiction, The Austin Review, Bat City Review, Foxing, Gulf Coast, Litragger, NANO Fiction, and A Strange Object.
- [Best of the Net](https://americanshortfiction.org/best-net/) - Congratulations to Sarah Gerkensmeyer, whose story, "Ramona," was selected by Sundress Publications for the 2014 Best of the Net Anthology! "Ramona" was published on our website as April's web exclusive.
- [Review: Elizabeth McCracken's Thunderstruck and Other Stories](https://americanshortfiction.org/review-elizabeth-mccrackens-thunderstruck-stories/) - If, as George Saunders would have it, fiction is more interesting when death is in the room, then Thunderstruck and Other Stories, which won The Story Prize last week, is positively teeming with interest. Still, the various deaths and disappearances running through the nine meticulously crafted stories in Elizabeth McCracken’s moving and deeply cathartic collection could easily overwhelm if not for the charismatic force of her prose [...]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Keith Lesmeister](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-keith-lesmeister/) - This month, our online fiction came from Keith Lesmeister, whose tight fist of a story "Imaginary Enemies" clocks in at a trim 965 words. That's less than half of the 2,000 word maximum we here at ASF have imposed on our web fiction. That cap exists, in part, because we know that great stories come in all sizes and that the web—for all of its faults and all of its cat videos—is a particularly good venue for short work. [...]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Sarah Gerkensmeyer](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-sarah-gerkensmeyer/) - Sarah Gerkensmeyer's "Ramona," our online exclusive for April, is nearly a contradiction in terms. It's at once a tender-hearted, naturalistic reflection on adolescence and faded friendship and an utterly non-naturalistic look at the limits of embodiment. In this interview, we asked Gerkensmeyer about bending the rules of nature in fiction [...]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Kim Addonizio](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-kim-addonizio/) - Earlier this month, we brought you Kim Addonizio's "The Other Woman," a piece that depicts three people in a tight, tense orbit. Addonizio is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer, and we were curious to ask her about working across so many different forms, and about what leads her to write in one over another. [...]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Alison McCabe](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-alison-mccabe/) - Alison McCabe's "Heirloom" deftly trades in contrasts. Over the course of a few hundred words, the diction evolves from the colloquial to the lyrical, and the strangest of details—a cat toy mistaken for a rodent, a son-in-law's name long forgotten—are also the story's most humorous. We recently emailed McCabe to ask about her work […]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Amber Sparks](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-amber-sparks/) - There are at least as many ways to title a story as there are to write one. An author might conjure up a title that points to a story's symbolic weight ("A Perfect Day for Bananafish," say) while another might employ a seemingly benign phrase ("Family Furnishings") only to have it churn and reverberate in the mind of a reader throughout the reading experience. […]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Kathleen Founds](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-kathleen-founds/) - In recent months, we've had the very great pleasure of publishing lots of terrific stuff online—and we've we've covered a lot of ground, topically. From an epistolary piece that used the format of a student evaluation form as its scaffolding to a naturalistic piece about a recently returned veteran and his do-gooder brother-in-law, we've aimed to mix it up in this space. We've taken that to a new extreme this month, as we published "The Wormhole" by Kathleen Founds. […]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Erica Plouffe Lazure](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-erica-plouffe-lazure/) - Catherine, the devoted band mother in Erica Plouffe Lazure's "Marchers," is a wonderful example of just how affecting strong, straightforward, reliable narration can be. With an admitted pride in her son's accomplishments and an implied annoyance at the petty goings-on of her small-town life in rural North Carolina, Catherine's direct and clear narration makes the
- [Online Fiction Interview: C.M. Barnes](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-c-m-barnes/) - This month, I want to preface our online exclusive interview with an anecdote. In my first semester of graduate school, I taught an introductory creative writing class in which I received four—four!—stories that were about a dying or recently deceased grandmother. My first thought: why no dead grandfathers? My second thought: along with stories about car crashes and college keg parties, I must ban stories about dead or dying grandmothers in future classes, and that's just what I did. [...]
- [Online Fiction Interview: Helen Hooper](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-helen-hooper/) - Few things are more disappointing than a predictable work of fiction, but one worse thing is the work of fiction that aims to surprise but falls flat. There's a big, fat, twist in November's online exclusive work of fiction, "Edge Habitat," by Helen Hooper. It's a particularly welcome twist because, well, it blindsided us. We recently emailed Hooper and asked her to tell us a bit about that twist [...]
- [Edge Habitat](https://americanshortfiction.org/edge-habitat/) - The window over the kitchen sink looks out at the backyard. Theory’d been, she could watch the kids play. Croquet or whatever. That was a long time ago. Carl had put in a garden that turned out to be popular with local wildlife. Once the shoots were up they came and returned, voracious. Subsequent Googling to learn that deer like edge habitat. Which is what this is, he said. The edge. The best place. [...]
- [Heirloom](https://americanshortfiction.org/heirloom/) - Vermin everywhere, the old man said, and so he could not eat, didn’t matter if it was bread pudding, or his MumMum’s corn meal mush, or Tastykake butterscotch krimpets. Didn’t matter how toothsome, the old man couldn’t stomach it, not with all the mice. Too often he’d pick them up and toss them into the compost
- [Best Words of 2014](https://americanshortfiction.org/best-words-2014/) - Tick-tock, and another year rolls off the clock. We asked our staff here at American Short Fiction what they were reading in 2014. Words, words, words, they said, and proceeded to specify. Here, in no particular order, are some of our favorite lines of literature from the past year, with a few rediscovered oldies thrown in for good measure. The Germans have a saying they like to share around this time of year: Guten Rutsch, they say, which means, good slide, as in slip easily into the new year [...]
- [An Interview with Bret Anthony Johnston](https://americanshortfiction.org/interview-bret-anthony-johnston/) - Bret Anthony Johnston has the distinction of being among the few writers occupying that slim but coveted slice of the Venn diagram: creative writing directors who have also been pro skateboarders. His latest work, Remember Me Like This, is a quiet and rich novel centered around a teenage boy named Justin who is returned to his family four years after his kidnapping. [...]
- [Bourbon and Milk: Bedtime Existential](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-and-milk-bedtime-existential/) - I’ve been on bedtime duty since we first brought my daughter home from the hospital. Our routine has changed over time, but the crux of it has and continues to revolve around books. I like to think of it as our thing. And though initially our interactions were limited—she’d sit in her rocker or on my lap cooing or giggling as my voice bounced off the walls [...]
- [Inside the Issue: "Annie Radcliffe, You Are Loved" Playlist ](https://americanshortfiction.org/annie-radcliffe-you-are-loved-playlist-2/) - One of our favorite short stories in the world right now happens to be Barrett Swanson's "Annie Radcliffe, You Are Loved," published in our newest issue of American Short Fiction. Narrated from the perspective of three characters who are strangers to each other--a drug-addled PhD student in Applied Semiotics, a God-fearing boy watching his atheist father die of cancer, and a chubby high schooler [...]
- [In Our Defense](https://americanshortfiction.org/inourdefense/) - So help us, we spread her remains in a minnow bucket. It shouldn’t have come to that, but there was a law against scattering ashes in the lake, and we had to be clandestine out in the boat, the rope tossed casually over the side, the sooty remainder of her trickling out through the sieve holes. We played her favorite music: Sinatra, Bennett—old-timey, feel-good stuff—and sipped G&Ts as we plowed through the chop. [...]
- [Jaimy Gordon Interviews Matthew Neill Null](https://americanshortfiction.org/jaimy-gordon-interviews-matthew-neill-null/) - "The Slow Lean of Time," Matthew Neill Null's sweeping account of the hazardous lives of the 19th Century drovers who steered giant logs down West Virginia's rivers, contains what might be the most genuinely shocking moment of any short story I've read this year. This despite the fact that Null, whose story we were pleased to publish in Issue 57 of American Short Fiction, describes the world his characters inhabit from such a high vantage point that we see them as smallish players moving across an expansive historical landscape. [...]
- [Creative Writing Instructor <br> Evaluation Form](https://americanshortfiction.org/creative-writing-instructor-evaluation-form/) - 1. The instructor is organized. □ Strongly Agree □ Agree □ Undecided □ Disagree □ Strongly Disagree 2. The instructor seems generally knowledgeable, at least about the subject she teaches. □ Strongly Agree □ Agree □ Undecided □ Disagree □ Strongly Disagree
- [An Interview with Marie-Helene Bertino](https://americanshortfiction.org/interview-marie-helene-bertino/) - I first met Marie-Helene Bertino last summer, when she was my workshop instructor at the One Story Workshop for Writers. In person, she is meticulous, charming, and bright. And her writing is the same. Her short story, “Carry Me Home, Sisters of Saint Joseph,” was first published in Issue 47 of American Short Fiction. Her second book, 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas, will be published this August by Crown. [...]
- [Inside the Issue: An Excerpt from "Zone of Mutuality," by Karl Taro Greenfeld](https://americanshortfiction.org/inside-issue-excerpt-zone-mutuality-karl-taro-greenfeld/) - In "Zone of Mutuality," the final story in Issue 58 of American Short Fiction, Karl Taro Greenfeld introduces us to Dwayne, a young man settling uneasily in to a perennial professional disappointment that threatens to swamp the rest of his life as well. […]
- [Marchers](https://americanshortfiction.org/marchers/) - I knew the first time I saw him marching among the other children, this would be the first of a decade’s worth of parades I’d sit through, cheering, waving, catching float candy for later. Turns out I was right. In the past twelve years, Toby moved from Cub Scouts to soccer to marching band, and now here he is, Mr. Drum Major of Mewborn High School, keeping his classmates lockstep in maroon polyester, proud and strong, arm pumping the pole, leading the way down Main Street. [...]
- [Bourbon and Milk: "Are You the Mother?"  ](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-milk-mother/) - “Mama,” my three-year-old son says a hundred times a day, right before he asks for something—a hug, a glass of milk, a kiss, a Netflix show, a toy that I have hidden up high because he whacked me with it—and I respond immediately, instinctively. I hear Mama and I think, me. I don’t even think it, really. I turn automatically, just as I have for my whole life at the sound of my name. [...]
- [American Short Fiction Prize: Winners Announced!](https://americanshortfiction.org/american-short-fiction-prize-winners-announced/) - We are pleased to announce the prize winners for our 2014 American Short Fiction Contest. We'd like to thank everyone who participated in the contest. We were overwhelmed by the breadth and quality of the stories you submitted. Reading through them, we were surprised again and again by the versatility and potential of the short story form. See what stories our contest judge, Amy Hempel, chose as winners, after the jump. […]
- [Inside the Issue: Tia Clark Reads from "Nutcracker"](https://americanshortfiction.org/inside-issue-tia-clark-reads-nutcracker/) - Tia Clark's story, "Nutcracker," opens our current issue. Set in a Modell's Sporting Goods store in one of New York City's shabbier suburbs, the story is told in the sharp, funny, and frequently affecting voice of a teenaged girl trying to define herself at the edge of a brave new world of independence and sexuality. [...]
- [The Wormhole](https://americanshortfiction.org/wormhole/) - Dear Janice Gibbs, Here is my submission to El Giraffe. “Gruesome Horrors to Whisper in the Dusk” is a series of soul-chilling tales containing beneficial lessons for students such as ourselves. I know that you have high expectations and exacting standards: after all, El Giraffe used to be two pages bound with staples, and now that you are Editor-In-Chief, it is fifteen pages bound with string. This year I bet people might start to like it, or even read it, especially if it has tales that glue people to their desks with suspense. [...]
- [Until It Isn't: An Interview with Antonya Nelson](https://americanshortfiction.org/isnt-interview-antonya-nelson/) - Antonya Nelson's eleventh book, Funny Once, was published this past May by Bloomsbury. The collection includes the story "Winter in Yalta," which appears in the most recent issue of American Short Fiction. Over a slew of emails, she took some time to talk to me, among other things, about the origins of her love of reading, obsessive fascinations, and the difference between therapy and writing fiction. [...]
- [Inside the Issue: Rob Roensch reads from "The Zoo and the World"](https://americanshortfiction.org/inside-issue-rob-roensch-reads-zoo-world/) - "The Zoo and the World," Rob Roensch's story in the Spring 2014 issue of American Short Fiction, is narrated by a man who has come to rely on his own exceptional competence, but finds himself suddenly out of his element. A rare animal trader, he has learned to value life as both a momentary, beautiful apparition […]
- [Deadline Extended: ASF Short Story Contest](https://americanshortfiction.org/contest-extended/) - We are pleased to announce that the ASF Short Story Contest deadline has been extended to June 15th. This year we are honored to have Amy Hempel as our guest judge. The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication in our Fall issue. One runner-up will receive $500 and all entries will be considered for publication. We look forward to reading your work. (Note: Original deadline was June 1st.)
- [The Other Woman](https://americanshortfiction.org/woman/) - It would end in disaster, everyone said, and everyone was right, but everyone was on the outside of the situation and therefore did not know everything. She was on the inside, living with a man and in love with another woman, loving the man but not being sure anymore she should live with him, loving the extravagant Italian meals he cooked and the way he stood frowning when he painted in the corner of their living room that served as his studio [...]
- [Things American: Control Magic](https://americanshortfiction.org/control-magic/) - It’s 7 A.M. on a Saturday in October 2012. I'm twenty-eight-years-old and yelling “Idiot,” “Fucking terrible,” and “What were you thinking?” into my steering wheel. I’m driving home from Time Warp Comics, where I’ve just lost a Magic tournament. And not just lost, but lost lost: eighteenth out of twenty-five at the midnight release for the newest set, Return to Ravnica. [...]
- [If You Lived Here: An Interview with Jennine Capó Crucet](https://americanshortfiction.org/lived-interview-jennine-capo-crucet-2/) - The second interview in the "If You Lived Here" blog series is with Jennine Capó Crucet, author of the short fiction collection How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. How to Leave Hialeah is a beautiful and detailed map of the crowded beaches and neighborhoods of Miami as seen through the lives of the people who call them home. Her new novel, Magic City Relic, is forthcoming for St. Martin's Press in 2015.
- [Karen Russell Donates Her Sleep](https://americanshortfiction.org/karen-russell-donates-sleep/) - Amidst a busy semester teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, literary wunderkind Karen Russell talks to Vincent Scarpa about the inspiration of strange constraints, how a novella might work like a Florida thundershower, and her new ebook, Sleep Donation, out now from Atavist Books.
- [Review: Douglas Coupland's Worst. Person. Ever.](https://americanshortfiction.org/douglas-couplands-worst-person-ever/) - In perhaps one of the only reviews of Douglas Coupland's Worst.Person.Ever. that doesn't either eviscerate the book or conflate the author with his narrator, Erin McReynolds writes: "What’s impressive about WPE—whatever your feeling for its lewd sense of humor—is the confidence with which the hits come, so that the misses don’t feel like misses so much as a plot gone wild for the express purpose of portraying a world gone mad."
- [Things American: The Boys Of My Youth (Baseball Seasons 1989-2014)](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-boys-youth-baseball-seasons-1989-2014/) - “Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings. And then as soon as the chill rains come it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone, when you need it most.”—A. Bartlett Giamatti […]
- [Ramona](https://americanshortfiction.org/ramona/) - Ramona used to say, “When it's on the outside I feel self-conscious.” We did overnights at her house that summer. After finishing the sixth grade, we had stopped calling them sleepovers. Ramona had a full-sized bed, but I still felt scrunched up next to her when we were in it. We didn't press into each other while we slept, but I think I felt pushed up against her because of what I knew about her heart. About how sometimes it flipped and somersaulted and somehow ended up on the outside of her skin, resting there on the wrong side of her body for a few seconds like a wild bird afraid to fly away but so eager to do it. [...]
- [Spreading the Literary Love](https://americanshortfiction.org/spreading-lit-love/) - A while back, Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist, was on KUT, our local NPR station, talking about how important it is to be engaged and active in your creative community. One quote of his that stuck with me was this: "You have to be a fan to have fans." [...]
- [The Magic of Helen Oyeyemi’s Mirrors](https://americanshortfiction.org/magic-helen-oyeyemis-mirrors/) - Toward the beginning of Helen Oyeyemi’s fourth and latest novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, narrator Boy Novak Whitman offers us a dictionary-style definition of the word “mirror.” Mirrors and other reflective surfaces pop up constantly throughout Oyeyemi’s novel, taunting and teasing many of her characters. They have the ability to highlight the onlooker’s secrets and inner fears, to bewitch, to entrance, to bring out one’s multifaceted—and, at times, conflicting—self. [...]
- [Short Story Contest Open for Submissions](https://americanshortfiction.org/short-story-contest-open-submissions/) - We are excited to announce that the ASF Short Story Contest opened for submissions on February 26th. This year we are honored to have Amy Hempel as our guest judge. Submissions will be accepted through the end of May. Contest submissions will be accepted through our regular manager, Submittable.
- [Things American: Nic Pizzolatto’s Women Before <em>True Detective</em>](https://americanshortfiction.org/true-detective-nic-pizzolattos-women/) - In honor of all of the breathless praise accompanying the release of HBO’s new crime noir series True Detective, The Atlantic is urging readers to revisit two short stories by Nicolas Pizzolatto, the show’s creator. The stories appeared in the magazine ten years ago, when Pizzolatto was an MFA student at the University of Arkansas [...]
- [Inside the Issue: Kellie Wells reads from “A Unified Theory of Human Behavior”](https://americanshortfiction.org/inside-issue-kellie-wells-reads-unified-theory-human-behavior/) - The young heroine of Kellie Wells' "A Unified Theory of Human Behavior," the opening story in Issue 56 of American Short Fiction, observes the world around her with an affecting mixture of sorrow and humor. "Kellie Wells," writes the wonderful Matt Bell, "will break your heart with a sentence, with a story, with the irrepressible smile at her wit that lights across your face even as on the page sadness swells and grief abounds." […]
- [On <em>Leaving the Sea</em> by Ben Marcus](https://americanshortfiction.org/leaving-the-sea-ben-marcus/) - In his fourth book, Leaving the Sea, Ben Marcus finds a vein between "leveraging grammar as a medium for the making of art," as he wrote in "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know it," in Harper's nine years ago, and the sweet spot of the familiar, with its recognizable humor, alienation, and longing.
- [Along for the Ride: At the Waffle House with Mary Miller](https://americanshortfiction.org/along-ride-waffle-house-mary-miller/) - The table at which I wait for Mary Miller in a Waffle House off US-183 in Austin is disappointingly well-kept. It’s my first experience with a Waffle House, so I expected and hoped for a table with spilled sugar crystals, the surface sticky with syrup. What I believe is the authentic Waffle House experience is how Mary Miller depicts it [...]
- [Online Fiction: Interview with S. P. Tenhoff](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-s-p-tenhoff/) - In this month’s fiction feature, S. P. Tenhoff does to a border what Wallace Stevens did to a blackbird—he lets it write him. Mr. Tenhoff’s "Ten Views of the Border" outlines the bewilderment of a newly divided populace by detailing a scandalous cross-border birth, two intricately mirrored origin stories, and the troubling circumstances of a woman whose very existence seems the hinge on which the border depends. [...]
- [Things American: Authentic Desire & the Root of Sexuality in HBO's "Girls"](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-authentic-desire-root-sexuality-hbos-girls/) - What if I said I do not believe in desire? As the holidays wind down, and with them the inundation of images of midnight smooches on New Year’s Eve and nuclear families unwrapping presents by the tree, I am always left with that seasonal-depression-idea that I’ve somehow failed to live up to the status quo—those unreachable expectations. [...]
- [Ghost Water](https://americanshortfiction.org/im-a-web-exclusive-two/) - I go to Lee’s bar downtown where loose dogs dart in the street. I love on my horn, and those dogs go wild. They claw up the hood and piss hot butter on the windshield. A girl yells directions so I can park. The girl opens my door and asks if she can watch my
- [Inside the Issue: An Interview with Ryan MacDonald](https://americanshortfiction.org/inside-issue-interview-ryan-macdonald/) - Ryan MacDonald's American Short(er) Fiction Prize-winning story explores the relationship between a father and his four-year-old daughter with refreshing honesty. The economy and disarming humor of the piece soften the punch of what is actually an unsentimental look at the natural limitations of our love. You can read the story, "The Observable Characteristics of Organisms,"
- [Online Fiction: Interview with Tien-Yi Lee](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-tien-yi-lee/) - This month, we present Tien-Yi Lee’s “Penetration”—and we couldn’t be more thrilled. It’s a challenging piece, about damage irrevocable and endured, but rewarding, too, and very, very beautiful. It’s one of those stories that stills the world for a moment, and leaves you, we hope, in the hush of something complicated and new.
- [Penetration](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-penetration/) - Jack has been at it for thirty-six minutes. Sulie knows, because it’s been windy all night, and the power snapped off and reset the clock radio to twelve, and the red numbers are flashing in the reflection of his horn-rimmed glasses whenever he lifts his head to breathe. (He’s made it down there, and still,
- [Online Fiction: Interview with Aubrey Hirsch](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-aubrey-hirsch/) - Ever play that game Two Truths and a Lie? Well, this month’s web exclusive is a little like that. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, Aubrey Hirsch’s “Albert Arnold Gore” will keep you guessing. Rendered in clear, keen prose, this set of three linked shorts offers portraits that are inventive and intriguing—and ultimately poignant and revealing.
- [Albert Arnold Gore](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-aubrey-hirsch-albert-arnold-gore/) - Albert Arnold Gore Sr. Al loses his first race in 1930. The election is for county superintendent of schools, and he loses by a margin so wide that the shame and anger send him back to the farm in Possum Hollow. The farm has fallen into disrepair since he last saw it. His father tells
- [Inside the Issue: Kevin Wilson reads from “The Horror We Made”](https://americanshortfiction.org/inside-the-issue-kevin-wilson-reads-from-the-horror-we-made-2/) - The new issue of American Short Fiction contains a wonderful story by Kevin Wilson about, as Bret Anthony Johnston puts it, "that moment in your teens when everything seems both possible and doomed." In a few casual, funny, accessible scenes, Wilson conjures [...]
- [ASF's Holiday Gift/Get/Just Go Buy It Guide](https://americanshortfiction.org/asfs-holiday-giftget-guide/) - Yep, that holiday gift-buying paralysis should be setting in right...about...now. Don't panic! 'Tis the season: to ask for books and buy books with abandon. So, we've asked our ASF staff to share with us what books they're gifting to their friends and family, what books they want to be gifted, and what short story collections they think you should just go out and get for yourself.
- [The Observable Characteristics of Organisms](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-observable-characteristics-of-organisms/) - In the zoo we accomplish many things. The animals are always fed and locked in their cages. Habitats are hosed down well and visitors have a decent view, even though the animals sit completely still most of the time. My daughter has a low tolerance for such things. She is four and has a low
- [Ornament and Crime](https://americanshortfiction.org/ornament-and-crime/) - My father has died and in my hand are his remains—ashes pressed and fired into a small, flattish cube—and I’m laboring to insert him into something so he sits flush. He always wished to be a geometric form (so often did he rail against “the tyranny of the organic”) so I could tell myself he’d
- [Inside the Issue: Anis Mojgani illustrates Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Disappearing”](https://americanshortfiction.org/inside-the-issue-anis-mojgani-illustrates-joyce-carol-oates-the-disappearing-2/) - In "The Disappearing," Joyce Carol Oates examines the way time can unravel both our relationships and our selves. The story chronicles the fading of a marriage from the wife's perspective, but we are left uncertain as to whether it is her husband or she herself who is gradually disappearing. We asked poet and artist Anis Mojgani
- [Online Fiction: Interview with Monica McFawn
](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-with-monica-mcfawn
/) - This month we're excited to bring you Monica McFawn's captivating “Ornament and Crime,” the story of a family surviving the tyranny of a father's taste for minimalism. It's a sharp-witted tale that manages to bend something as lofty as aesthetics into strange, tender moments. Monica lives in Michigan, where she teaches writing at Grand Valley State University. [...]
- [We're Back!](https://americanshortfiction.org/american-short-fiction-is-back/) - We're thrilled to announce the newest issue of American Short Fiction . In a beautifully redesigned issue you’ll find seven new stories filled with hashtags and horror, with resilient hearts and purposefully broken arms. We think you'll feel compelled, like we did, to read them aloud. Buy the new issue or subscribe. And continue to check in here, as we’ll be offering sneak peeks into the stories [...]
- [Inside the Issue: The Roots of "Are You My Mother?"](https://americanshortfiction.org/issue-56-preview-sabrina-orah-mark-are-you-my-mother/) - "Are You My Mother?"--the clever gem that concludes our new issue, by Short(er)-Fiction-prize-winner Sabrina Orah Mark--has what we might think of as a famous grandmother. A great many of us were raised on P.D. Eastman's classic children's book of the same title. Eastman's book, first published in 1960, is a widely adored story about the search for love and belonging. Mark's story takes this allegory and drags it [...]
- [ASF Alumni: Laura van den Berg](https://americanshortfiction.org/asf-alumni-laura-van-den-berg/) - Laura van den Berg has published three short stories in American Short Fiction. In November, her second collection of stories, the scintillating The Isle of Youth, will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book has elicited raves in advance of its publication. Kirkus Review calls The Isle of Youth “mesmerizing.” Publishers Weekly says, “If ever there was a writer going places, it’s Laura van den Berg.” [...]
- [Things American: Sonallah Ibrahim's Fiction of Politics and Emptiness](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-americansonallah-ibrahim/) - I first came across Sonallah Ibrahim when I was living in Cairo in 2011. My partner and I had hired a tutor to study Egyptian short fiction. Our Arabic, while functional, is by no means solid enough to embark on the task of reading an entire novel, but short stories were manageable. One evening, over cups of loose tea, we stammered through the opening of one of Ibrahim’s more recent novels, Stealth.
- [Scary Stories 101](https://americanshortfiction.org/scary-stories-101/) - Here at American Short Fiction, we're split down the middle regarding our feelings for Halloween. Some of us want to get into costume, but just as many want to go into hiding. Thankfully, one thing we can all agree on is that we enjoy a good horror story. Below, in alphabetical order, are our staff's [...]
- [Notably](https://americanshortfiction.org/notably/) - Huge congrats to the authors whose ASF stories were recognized as notables, or distinguished reads, in the most recent Best American Short Stories and Best American Non Required Reading anthologies.
- [Notably](https://americanshortfiction.org/notably-2/) - Huge congrats to the authors whose ASF stories were recognized as notables, or distinguished reads, in the most recent Best American Short Stories and Best American Non Required Reading anthologies: Laura van den Berg, Robert Boswell, Maggie Shipstead, Roxane Gay, and James DeWille.
- [Things American: Egyptian Revolution Reading](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-the-fiction-of-egyptian-revolutions/) - There was something slightly unsatisfying about the classes on the politics and history of the Middle East that I took as an undergraduate. Something about the texture of life? The truth beneath the truth? I couldn’t articulate that feeling, but I picked up Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy, a dense family epic that spans the two world wars. I didn’t put it down for two weeks [...]
- [Spray Painted Drums](https://americanshortfiction.org/spray-painted-drums/) - The parade went so well. We were tasked with saving the town and for all we care, it worked great. Three towns around us held ceremonies and wrote sprawling gross musical numbers and basically begged the higher-ups to let them keep their charter and residents but we had the best idea of all, which was a parade [...]
- [Things American: NFL Preview](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-nfl-preview/) - Welcome to American Short Fiction's NFL Preview. To mark the beginning of the 16-week season, we've asked writers and editors from around the country to comment on the their teams, through the filter of fiction. Follow the links to see who gets the Barry Hannah treatment and which team is more like Joan Didion's [...]
- [Online Fiction: Interview with Amelia Gray](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-with-amelia-gray/) - This month's online fiction features a story by Amelia Gray, written to accompany a track on White Dresses, the latest album from Portland indy favorites, Loch Lomond. Packed into a tight 500 words, "Spray Painted Drums" thrums with all the hope, fervor, chaos, humor, invention, possibility [...]
- [Bourbon and Milk: Profitable Forgetting](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-and-milk-profitable-forgetting/) - For the first eighteen months of parenthood, even the most ridiculously simple daily routines—changing Z’s diaper, feeding her a bottle, putting her down for a nap—carried a weighty significance. This is my daughter, I often found myself repeating beneath my breath as I brought a wet wipe to her skin [...]
- [ASF Alumni: Jean Thompson](https://americanshortfiction.org/asf-alumni-an-interview-with-jean-thompson/) - Since Jean Thompson was first published in American Short Fiction in the Winter 1993 issue, her short story collection Who Do You Love was nominated for The National Book Award, and in 2002, her novel, Wide Blue Yonder), was named a New York Times Notable Book and Chicago Tribune Best Fiction selection. Her newest novel, The Humanity Project (Blue Rider Press, March 2013) [...]
- [Nova](https://americanshortfiction.org/nova/) - I am the woman in your television having a great time. Behind me, the starry night projected onto green screen. I point to Ursa Major, Andromeda, make my way towards Mercury, until finally I announce the zodiacs for the day. But numbers are down, ratings low. We have been worrying about this for months. Now
- [Things Buffalo: My New Skin](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-buffalo-my-new-skin/) - Kim Chinquee, a writer, professor, and editor based in Buffalo, dips into Lake Erie and other past waters.
- [Online Fiction: Interview with Hannah Pass](https://americanshortfiction.org/online-fiction-interview-with-hannah-pass/) - This month, we're bringing you a story about an astrological forecaster whose television ratings are falling. Hannah Pass's "Nova" is a world of glitz, glitter, fiber-optic star charts and unsavory old men, a place where networks air shows on adolescent bartending and on hypnotherapy for insomniacs. But at its heart, "Nova" is a story about [...]
- [What We're Reading](https://americanshortfiction.org/what-were-reading-2/) - At the close of each month, we ask members of our ASF staff to share books that have recently graduated from their TBR piles, along with a GIF that relates to their experience of the book, in whatever way.
- [Bourbon and Milk: Guilt Cocktails](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-and-milk-guilt-cocktails/) - Recently, after nearly a full year of under-employment, an unexpected job opportunity popped up in Houston. We were living in Austin, so I’m not talking about a trek across the world, but we had a house, a kid in daycare, and my wife was poised to start a new job of her own. We had less than a week to decide. [...]
- [I Read Dead People: Eudora Welty and Failure, "First Love"](https://americanshortfiction.org/i-read-dead-people-eudora-welty-and-failure-first-love/) - The opening of “First Love” is the best prose Eudora Welty ever wrote. In its welcome sweep, we perceive the “red percussion” of Indian fires in the distance, the mute wheel of gulls, travelers picking through the “glassy tunnels of the Trace” in the “strange drugged fall of snow,” and the “somnambulist” river lifting from its bed in subconscious craving for travel, for new geography. The world is frozen by an epic, battering cold, as if the arctic has dipped its white paw into Mississippi. [...]
- [Things American: An Introduction to Buffalo](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-an-introduction-to-buffalo/) - This week, three writers from Buffalo share with us their experience of living, learning, and writing in the city.
- [Things American: Yeah <del>Science</del> Breaking Bad!](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-yeah-science-breaking-bad/) - Like many, many others, we dived into the k-hole that is breaking down Breaking Bad. What follows is a series of gchat conversations between Jess Stoner and Carmiel Banasky about the show, its fiction connections, and our obsession.
- [Things American: The Buffalo Sentence (Federman, Coetzee, Creeley).](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-the-buffalo-sentence-federman-coetzee-creeley/) - Ted Pelton, publisher of Starcherone Books, explores the city's former writers and their experiments in and meditations on the sentence.
- [Things American: From Post-Black to Postmortem--The Tragic Death of Trayvon Martin](https://americanshortfiction.org/things-american-from-post-black-to-postmortem-the-tragic-death-of-trayvon-martin/) - Trayvon Martin’s death and George Zimmerman’s acquittal are further proof that Obama’s two-term presidency and the spike in interracial marriage have not magically transformed America into some post-racial Shangri-la free of the demons of prejudice and discrimination. The country is post-black, as cultural critic Touré demonstrates in his book Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? Blacks, he
- [Online Fiction: Interview with Anthony Abboreno](https://americanshortfiction.org/im-a-news-two/) - Mary Miller interviews Anthony Abboreno, the author of "Filler," the first fiction post on our website in over a year. Abboreno's story is about the complicated relationship between children and their parents' expectations. There are lobsters with personalities, an ex-wife who loves New Year's Eve, and a man who tries to do his best, but falls short. "Filler" covers a lot of territory in few words.
- [If You Lived Here: An Interview with Danielle Evans](https://americanshortfiction.org/if-you-lived-here-an-interview-with-danielle-evans/) - In “If You Lived Here,” a blog series of author interviews, some questions, not all, will focus on place, being displaced and the places in the story that “marry a hurt like that.” The hope is that these questions will lead to other places and other questions. The first interview is with Danielle Evans, author of the acclaimed short story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self [...]
- [Camera-Flash Contest Winners ](https://americanshortfiction.org/im-a-notebook-three/) - We are pleased to announce the contest winner and finalists from our Camera-Flash Fiction Contest. This spring, we invited you to write quick fiction based on one of eight vintage photographs we handed out at the AWP conference.
- [ASF Alumni: An Interview with Matt Bell](https://americanshortfiction.org/interview-with-matt-bell/) - With two chapbooks, a short story collection and a novella in flash under his belt, Matt Bell has quietly been turning heads for years, accumulating acolytes and critical acclaim with his heady brand of visionary lyrical surrealism. Bell, along with the celebrated likes of Karen Russell, Aimee Bender, and Téa Obreht, is among a generation of young writers working far outside the bounds of mimesis to create a new kind of mythology more fully equipped to describe an increasingly absurd and disconcerting reality. Bell’s anxiously awaited debut novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, out this month from Soho, is the haunting and hypnotic fever-dream of a newlywed husband whose plan to forge a family in this remote landscape is complicated by forces lurking beyond or beneath each of the elemental surfaces named in its appropriately epic title, including a giant squid, a pissed off bear, and the nearly bottomless labyrinthine grief of his wife, whose power to sing whole worlds into being may not be enough to give her husband what he wants. Matt generously took time out from a brief break on his current tour in support of the novel to talk to us about it via email. [...]
- [Filler](https://americanshortfiction.org/im-a-web-exclusive-three/) - My daughter is still young enough to draw pictures of fairies on all of her school notebooks, but at other times her oldness is startling. For example, when she was the flower girl at her mother’s second wedding, she explained to me that she needed her underwear to match her dress, in case her dress
- [Bourbon and Milk: An Introduction](https://americanshortfiction.org/bourbon-and-milk-an-introduction/) - Bourbon and Milk features lessons, observations, and conversations by and with writers living out there in one of the most perplexing outposts of the human condition – parenthood. In this monthly series, Contributing Editor Giuseppe Taurino will dive into the dark spaces where parenting sometimes pushes us, and explore the unexpected ways writers may grow
- [The Swimmers](https://americanshortfiction.org/i-am-web-exclusive-four/) - In the beginning, I think everyone was afraid. You can imagine how startling it was the day the fingertips of that enormous hand came up out of the sands of Punta del Este and reached for the sun. Reached for it in a grasp, as if it were trying to crush the sun in its fist.
- [More than a Name on the Masthead](https://americanshortfiction.org/more-than-a-masthead/) - There are many ways to end the sentence, "American Short Fiction is _________." ASF is its traditional blurb. ASF is stories that take a different way home. ASF is supported by readers and subscribers, and has been since 1991. But we also want to draw attention to the fact that ASF is [...]
- [I Read Dead People: Abraham Cahan, "The Imported Bridegroom"](https://americanshortfiction.org/i-read-dead-people-abraham-cahan-the-imported-bridegroom/) - We’re all familiar with the names that light up the great wandering way of American short fiction. No doubt this space will feature stories by many of them in the coming years. But I wanted to begin the series quietly, with a writer who, while important in his day, may be new to many readers, because I like the idea that this column will be a place of discovery [...]
- [Web Exclusive Author Interview: An Introduction to Kelly Ramsey](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-author-interview-an-introduction-to-kelly-ramsey/) - Two thousand twelve is here and with it a phenomenal new installment of our online fiction series.Charting new territory in both content and form, our January 2012 web exclusive, “An Introduction to Cosmography, Parts 1 through 5” by Kelly Ramsey, is the perfect send-off for our voyage into the wilds of a new year. And
- [Web Exclusive Author Interview: David Schuman](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-with-david-schuman/) - What can I say about our April web exclusive, “Squirrel" by David Schuman? I might say that it’s that rare sort of story that conveys with equal grace the featherlight details of daily life and the ponderous mysteries of this crazy planet. I might say that it’s beautifully written, with sentences that’ll cut right you right
- [Local Folk: Reading with Barbara Galletly](https://americanshortfiction.org/local-folk-reading-with-barbara-galletly/) - Barbara Galletly is new to the Austin literary scene. Coming to us from Los Angeles and New York, where she worked for a nonprofit bookstore and a literary agency respectively, Barbara is now pursuing her master’s degree at the University of Texas. When she stumbled into Domy Books on East Cesar Chavez, she was impressed by
- [Web Exclusive Author Interview: Sal Pane](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-author-interview-sal-pane/) - Just in time for NBA playoff season, our May web-exclusive story, “John Starks” by Salvatore Pane, is here. And what a story it is. “John Starks” is a basketball story. It’s a tale of competition, regret, forgiveness. Folks, this is a story about NBA Jam and dunking in the face of life’s adversities. In other words, this is
- [Summer Film Club: Annie Proulx](https://americanshortfiction.org/summer-film-club-annie-proulx/) - “Brokeback Mountain,” by Annie Proulx How to Make a Great Film Adaptation: 1. Find a brilliant but terse short story, preferably one with unconventional subject matter. 2. Convince a collaborator to help adapt it into a short, word-for-word screenplay. (Bonus points if your collaborator is the most acclaimed writer in the story’s genre.) 3. Send
- [Web Exclusive Author Interview: Venita Blackburn](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-author-interview-venita-blackburn/) - What’s the best way to start off the shortest month of the year? By reading a short-short story, of course! Lucky for you, our February web exclusive is here, and it is excellent. “Scars” by Venita Blackburn is a funny, fantastical, touching story about the wounds inflicted by life and love, and what it takes
- [Local Folk: Reading with Kester Smith](https://americanshortfiction.org/local-folk-reading-with-kester-smith/) - Craving a great spring read, but don’t have anything specific in mind? Can’t stop thinking about that book you read last year, but don’t remember the title? You shamefully SparkNoted your way through your high school reading curriculum, and now you deeply regret it? For all these problems and more, Kester Smith is your guy.
- [Local Folk: Reading with Elizabeth Crane](https://americanshortfiction.org/local-folk-reading-with-elizabeth-cran/) - One of our favorite local writers, Elizabeth Crane, is about to break new ground. With her distinctive experimental style and quirky, charming voice, Crane has authored three remarkable collections of short stories—When the Messenger is Hot, All This Heavenly Glory, and You Must Be This Happy to Enter. Now, she’s excited to publish her first novel We
- [ASF Presents: Jess Stoner, Justin Sirois, War, Memory, Fiction](https://americanshortfiction.org/asf-presents-jess-stoner-justin-sirois-war-memory-fiction/) - We’re super stoked about what’s happening tomorrow, April 18, at 7 p.m. at Domy, y’all—Jess Stoner and Justin Sirois are reading from their new books, neither of which we could put down. Jess’s I Have Blinded Myself Writing This is a striking work of fiction that explores memory, telling the story of a woman who loses part of her
- [Local Folk: Reading with Owen Egerton](https://americanshortfiction.org/local-folk-reading-with-owen-egerton/) - Owen Egerton, longtime friend of American Short Fiction, is on a crazy book tour. (Crazy awesome!) How so? He’s touring via train with his whole family. He’s in San Francisco tonight (June 20), presenting his Best of God show at the Balboa Theater. Go show him some love, Bay Area. He will make you
- [Web Exclusive Author Interview: Casey Hannan](https://americanshortfiction.org/400/) - If our June web exclusive were a cocktail, the recipe for it might look something like this: Start with one good sentence. Add bourbon, water, ghosts. Measure carefully, with control. Pour over ice and enjoy, savoring each word. This month’s feature, "Ghost Water" by Casey Hannan, is definitely a story to be savored. Sharp yet sweet, rich
- [Web Exclusive Author Interview with Randi Ewing](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-interview-with-randi-ewing/) - With summer’s heat now fully upon us, it’s fitting that our July web-exclusive story, by Randi Ewing, is titled “The Swimmers.” But this is not your typical summertime tale of sunbathing and beaches. No, “The Swimmers” tackles something more magical even than that. Rendered in language that’s both intimate and vivid, “The Swimmers” is a
- [An Introduction to Cosmography, Parts 1 through 5](https://americanshortfiction.org/an-introduction-to-cosmography-parts-1-through-5/) - The First Voyage of Amerigo Vespucci In the beginning, so much depended upon pine nuts and morels. No, not buffalo as you’ve been taught—those came much later. In the beginning, it was the giant beaver whose shadow darkened the North American food chain, and who lugged his heavy beaver tail from state to would-be state
- [Squirrel](https://americanshortfiction.org/327/) - It was in the grass. He thought it was dead. It seemed as if it had been there for a while, like the grass had grown around its body. But it wasn’t dead. It quivered as he drew near. “Go climb a tree,” he said to it. He nudged it with the edge of his flip-flop.
- [Outlander](https://americanshortfiction.org/outlander/) - She was new to the city and unwittingly dressed, floral prints in the dead of winter. She worked as a waitress at a bar in the basement, biding her time. He lived in the apartment above hers. A brownstone down on its luck. She shared with four other roommates, perpetually in and out of love, and
- [John Starks](https://americanshortfiction.org/im-a-web-exclusive-one/) - There’s a glitch in NBA Jam only John Starks knows about. He sits in the dark in his duplex, the gummy carpet littered with empty forties and dead blunts. He selects his old squad, the New York Knicks, and chooses himself as the playable character. He looks at his face onscreen—grinning fifty years earlier—and taps in
- [Like an Original Response](https://americanshortfiction.org/i-am-a-web-exclusive-five/) - Hedy loved Polly, the parrot at Trader Bob’s airport bar. Hedy went directly there every day after work at the Terminal A newsstand. Hedy loved the way Polly echoed desire, like a mirror. So when she went there once again to sit across from Polly—to hear Polly say back to her “you are the bee’s knees,
- [Interview with Randall Brown](https://americanshortfiction.org/interview-with-randall-brown/) - Y’all know what time it is? That’s right—it’s time to introduce the latest story in ASF‘s web exclusive series! This month, we’re pleased as punch to present to you Randall Brown’s “Like An Original Response.” It’s a compact yet evocative story that’s as smart as it is fun to read. It’s an exemplary piece of flash
- [Pushcart News](https://americanshortfiction.org/im-a-news-one/) - Congratulations to Elizabeth Ellen, whose story, "Teen Culture," published in ASF's Summer 2012 issue won a Puschart Prize!
- [Announcing the Winners of the American Short(er) Fiction Prize!](https://americanshortfiction.org/announcing-the-winners-of-the-american-shorter-fiction-prize/) - American Short Fiction is pleased to announce the winners of the 2012 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. Contest winners will be published in the fall issue. Our first-place winner is Ryan MacDonald, for "The Observable Characteristics of Organisms." Our second-place winner is Sabrina Orah Mark, for "Are You My Mother?"
- [Summer Film Club: Steven Millhauser](https://americanshortfiction.org/summer-film-club-steven-millhauser/) - In this biweekly series, Editorial Assistant Alyssa reviews popular short stories and their film adaptations. We’ll explore what works in each medium and what doesn’t, and how exactly the allure of literature can translate to film. Alyssa (who has no formal training in film) would like to issue one big standing Spoiler Alert now. Hoo
- [Web Exclusive Author Interview: Ravi Mangla](https://americanshortfiction.org/web-exclusive-author-interview-ravi-mangla/) - Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to present our March 2012 web exclusive: “Outlander” by Ravi Mangla. We love “Outlander” for its quiet mystery, incisive language, and slow-working charm. It’s a mere slip of a story, but one that lingers, enchants, stays. So, go on—read “Outlander” on the ASF website, and check out our interview with the
- [Summer Film Club: Raymond Carver](https://americanshortfiction.org/summer-film-club-raymond-carver/) - In this weekly series, Intern Alyssa, your fearless reader, will review popular short stories and their film adaptations. We’ll explore what works in each medium and what doesn’t, and how exactly the allure of literature can translate to film. Alyssa has no formal training in film, unless subscribing to Netflix and following Roger Ebert on
- [Summer Film Club: Julio Cortazar](https://americanshortfiction.org/summer-film-club-julio-cortazar/) - In this weekly series, Intern Alyssa, your fearless reader, will review popular short stories and their film adaptations. We’ll explore what works in each medium and what doesn’t, and how exactly the allure of literature can translate to film. Alyssa has no formal training in film, unless subscribing to Netflix and following Roger Ebert on

## Pages

- [The Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/submityourwork/the-shorter-fiction-prize/) - THE SHORT(ER) FICTION PRIZE We are thrilled to announce that the brilliant Bret Anthony Johnston—internationally bestselling author of We Burn Daylight and Remember Me Like This and director of the Michener Center for Writers—will judge the 2026 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,500 words. The first-place winner will receive a
- [MFA for All](https://americanshortfiction.org/mfa-for-all/) - MFA for ALL MFA for All was born from our desire to create a space where MFA-quality instruction is widely accessible to writers no matter their age, background, location, or financial situation. MFA for All is not a degree-granting program—it is a community-rich online educational experience led by top-notch faculty, free of the significant hurdles
- [STORE](https://americanshortfiction.org/store/) - STORE ***An important note about international orders: at this time, we are no longer shipping single issues, T-shirts, or other merchandise outside of the U.S. We will still be offering international subscriptions, available here.*** ASF LOGO POCKET T-SHIRT $35 Comfort Colors® pocket T-shirt with American Short Fiction logo in a soft-washed material. 100% ring-spun cotton
- [Current Issue](https://americanshortfiction.org/current-issue/) - ISSUE 82 Featuring new stories by Lydi Conklin, Annie Liontas, Kyle McCarthy, Carrie R. Moore, KJ Nakazawa-Kern, and Colleen Rosenfeld. Lydi Conklin, "Sorry About the Wolf" I studied your pictures for hours. Hours over weeks, because it took that long to arrange a date. Not because of you, because of me—in the aftermath of my
- [The Insider Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/submityourwork/the-insider-prize/) - THE INSIDER PRIZE Each year, American Short Fiction proudly hosts the Insider Prize, a writing award that recognizes excellent work by incarcerated writers in Texas. Launched in 2017 in collaboration with writer and American Short Fiction Advisory Board member Deb Olin Unferth and coordinated by American Short Fiction assistant editors Emily Chammah and Maurice Chammah,
- [Story Sessions](https://americanshortfiction.org/story-sessions/) - STORY SESSIONS Join ASF for the second installment of Story Sessions, a literary series that brings exceptional authors together for a freewheeling discussion about the power of stories and the ways we share them, on September 12, 2025, at Huston-Tillotson University from 6 – 8:00 p.m. We’re thrilled to welcome the National Book Award-winning novelist
- [MFA for All FAQs](https://americanshortfiction.org/mfa-for-all-faqs/) - MFA for ALL FAQs Thanks for your interest in MFA for All! Here are some answers to our most frequently asked questions: How will the class run? Each class consists of two linked 2-hour lectures on Zoom Webinar, two weeks apart. Each lecture will have a 10-minute break. The instructor will determine the style and
- [Subscriber Login](https://americanshortfiction.org/subscriber-login/) - American Short Fiction subscriber login
- [ABOUT](https://americanshortfiction.org/about/) - ABOUT American Short Fiction is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit literary organization based in Austin, Texas, that promotes the art form of the short story in a nationally-distributed triquarterly print magazine, via ASF Online, and through live events and literary programming. Founded in 1991 by Laura Furman at the University of Texas at Austin in cooperation with
- [SUBSCRIBE](https://americanshortfiction.org/subscribe/) - SUBSCRIBE When you subscribe to American Short Fiction, you’re supporting great writers while ensuring that you’ll get each new issue before it sells out. As an independent, non-profit literary journal, we depend on regular readers and subscribers like you. American Short Fiction publishes three times a year. Please note: We publish three issues a year. Depending on
- [BACK ISSUES](https://americanshortfiction.org/backissues/) - BACK ISSUES Issue 81: Guest-edited by Fernando A. Flores, featuring new stories by Yvette DeChavez, Julián Delgado Lopera, Carribean Fragoza, Alejandro Heredia, Carmen Maria Machado, Ruben Reyes Jr., and Gerardo Sámano Córdova. Issue 80: Featuring new stories by Matthew Lawrence Garcia, Laura Grothaus, Joshua Henkin, John McManus, JoAnna Novak, Peter Orner, Lucy Tan, and
- [THE STARS AT NIGHT](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-stars-at-night/) - THE STARS AT NIGHT 2025 Join us for American Short Fiction’s grand party, The Stars at Night, on Friday, May 2, 2025, at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum in Austin. This year’s program will honor Joy Williams as the Literary Star for her extraordinary body of work, Carrie R. Moore as the Constellation Star
- [STARS 2025 RAFFLE](https://americanshortfiction.org/raffle-packages-stars-2025/) - RAFFLE PACKAGES 2025 During the Stars at Night 2025, our annual literary showcase and gala taking place this year on May 2 in Austin, we will present a live raffle of exclusive cultural packages that feature special only-in-Texas experiences and products. This year’s program will honor Joy Williams as the Literary Star for her extraordinary body of
- [The Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/submityourwork/the-halifax-ranch-fiction-prize/) - The Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize We’re so pleased to announce that our judge for this year’s Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize will be Eric Puchner, author of the 2025 New York Times bestselling novel Dream State as well as the novel Model Home, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Puchner lives in Baltimore, where he is
- [Thank You (Stars at Night 2025)](https://americanshortfiction.org/thank-you-stars-at-night-2025/) - THANK YOU Dear friend, Thank you so much for purchasing a ticket to The Stars at Night 2025! You will receive an email soon with the details of your transaction. Please keep an eye on your spam and junk folders so you don't miss it. We feel so lucky to have you as a supporter!
- [Subscriber Logout](https://americanshortfiction.org/subscriber-logout/) - Subscriber Logout
- [SUBMISSIONS](https://americanshortfiction.org/submityourwork/) - SUBMIT YOUR WORK We have separate guidelines for our short story contests and regular submissions. We run two short story contests a year, the American Short(er) Fiction contest in the winter/spring, and The Halifax Ranch Prize for Fiction in the spring/summer, plus the Insider Prize for incarcerated writers in Texas. Please check our homepage for current
- [MFA for All Coming Soon!](https://americanshortfiction.org/mfa-for-all-coming-soon/) - MFA for ALL MFA for All was born from our desire to create a space where MFA-quality instruction is widely accessible to writers no matter their age, background, location, or financial situation. MFA for All is not a degree-granting program—it is a community-rich online educational experience led by top-notch faculty, free of the significant hurdles
- [MORE EVENTS](https://americanshortfiction.org/more-events/) - MORE EVENTS Each year, you can find American Short Fiction staffers representing the magazine in Austin and around the country at the Association of Writing Programs conference, at the Texas Book Festival, the Brooklyn Book Festival, and regional conferences and festivals throughout the country. As we plan future events, readings, conference, and festival appearances, we'll
- [WORKSHOP](https://americanshortfiction.org/workshop/) - AMERICAN SHORT FICTION WORKSHOP This year, we're excited to host the American Short Fiction Workshop, from Thursday, May 25, to Monday, May 29, in Austin, Texas, and led by New York Times bestselling novelist Kristen Arnett and acclaimed author and No Tokens Founding Editor T Kira Māhealani Madden. Participants will attend daily fiction workshops, one-on-one meetings
- [2023 Tuition Balance Page](https://americanshortfiction.org/2023-tuition-balance-page/) - AMERICAN SHORT FICTION WORKSHOP Please pay your tuition balance here: — More details including lodging information, Covid-19 and safety policies, and our participant handbook to follow. We are blocking off rooms at a hotel, but feel free to start looking on your own. Workshops will be held at the American Short Fiction
- [Reservations & Payment Page](https://americanshortfiction.org/workshop/fellows-tuition-payments/) - AMERICAN SHORT FICTION WORKSHOP Admitted fellows can reserve their place in the 2023 ASF Summer Workshop by making a secure, online deposit of $400 by clicking the "Pay Deposit" button below. Please make your deposit no later than April 7, 2023. — Admitted fellows can pay their balance of $500 securely online by clicking the
- [General Reservations & Payment Page](https://americanshortfiction.org/workshop/general-reservations/) - AMERICAN SHORT FICTION WORKSHOP Admitted writers can reserve their spot in the ASF Workshop by making a secure, online deposit of $400 by clicking the "Pay Deposit" button below. Please make your deposit no later than April 7, 2023. — Admitted writers can finalize their spot in the ASF Workshop by making a final, secure,
- [Tuition Balance Payment Page](https://americanshortfiction.org/workshop/tuition-balance-payment-page/) - AMERICAN SHORT FICTION WORKSHOP If you have questions or need assistance, please contact us at workshop[at]americanshortfiction.org.
- [Newsletter](https://americanshortfiction.org/newsletter/) - Subscribe
- [Winter 2023 Short Story Workshop with Stacey Swann](https://americanshortfiction.org/winter-2023-short-story-workshop-with-stacey-swann/) - CLASSES Winter 2023 Short Story Workshop with Stacey Swann In this 8-week short story workshop held at ASF Headquarters in East Austin, participants will join an intimate group (capped at 12) led by Stacey Swann, author of the novel Olympus, Texas and former editor of American Short Fiction. In addition to formal workshop discussions focusing on each participant’s work, Swann will begin every class
- [DONATE](https://americanshortfiction.org/donate/) - DONATE Make a Tax-Deductible Charitable Gift to American Short Fiction: Since we printed our first issue in 1991, American Short Fiction has become a nationally celebrated journal. Stories from our pages have been honored with both praise and prizes, including publication in Best American Short Stories, Best American Non-Required Reading, O. Henry Prize Stories, and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. In 2019,
- [THE STARS AT NIGHT 2016](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-stars-at-night/the-stars-at-night-2016/) - THE STARS AT NIGHT 2016 Please note that this event has passed. Please visit our Stars at Night page for information about this year's event. Join us on the night of Thursday, November 3rd, for the first annual The Stars at Night, a beer-and-boots gala celebrating ASF's 25th anniversary, our Texas heritage, and our city's writers and those
- [Thank You (Stars at Night 2021)](https://americanshortfiction.org/12731-2/) - THANK YOU Dear friend, Thank you so much for purchasing a ticket to The Stars at Night 2021! You will receive an email soon with the details of your transaction. Please keep an eye on your spam and junk folders so you don't miss it. We feel so lucky to have you as a supporter!
- [Thank You (Short Story Summer Camp)](https://americanshortfiction.org/thank-you-short-story-summer-camp/) - THANK YOU Dear friend, Thank you so much for registering for Short Story Summer Camp 2021! You will receive an email soon with the details of your transaction. Please keep an eye on your spam and junk folders so you don't miss it. We feel so honored that you'd share your work and time with
- [Thank you for your subscription!](https://americanshortfiction.org/thank-you-for-your-subscription/) - Dear friend, Thank you so much for your subscription to American Short Fiction! You will receive an email soon with the details of your transaction and instructions on how to access your account. Please keep an eye on your spam and junk folders so you don’t miss it. We feel so lucky to have you
- [Thank you!](https://americanshortfiction.org/thank-you/) - THANK YOU Dear friend, Thank you so much for your donation! You will receive an email soon with the details of your transaction. Please keep an eye on your spam and junk folders so you don't miss it. We feel so lucky to have you as a supporter! Love + fiction, Adeena Reitberger & Rebecca
- [Sold Out](https://americanshortfiction.org/sold-out/) - SOLD OUT We're sorry, but this item is currently sold out. Return to the store.
- [The Constellation Challenge](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-constellation-project/) - THE CONSTELLATION CHALLENGE This November, American Short Fiction invites you on a journey to reach out to your chosen family and grow your constellation of influences. As part of a month-long postcard-writing challenge, we’ll share daily prompts from our honorees Jamaica Kincaid, C Pam Zhang, Selena Anderson, and Charlotte Gullick and invite you to send
- [THE STARS AT NIGHT 2019](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-stars-at-night/the-stars-at-night-2019/) - THE STARS AT NIGHT 2019 Please note that this event has passed. Please visit our Stars at Night page for information about this year's event. Join us on Thursday, October 17th, for our 4th annual The Stars at Night, a bright Texas evening of brilliant company, joyful honky-tonk, and literary splendor. Come for the country
- [THE STARS AT NIGHT 2018](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-stars-at-night/the-stars-at-night-2018/) - THE STARS AT NIGHT 2018 Please note that this event has passed. Please visit our Stars at Night page for information about this year's event. Join us on Thursday, October 11th, for The Stars at Night 2018, a bright Texas evening of songwriting, honky-tonk, and literary splendor. Come for the live country music and readings,
- [THE STARS AT NIGHT 2017](https://americanshortfiction.org/the-stars-at-night/the-stars-at-night-2017/) - THE STARS AT NIGHT 2017 Please note that this event has passed. Please visit our Stars at Night page for information about this year's event. Join us on the night of Thursday, November 2nd, for our second annual The Stars at Night, a beer-and-boots gala celebrating American Short Fiction, our Texas heritage, and our city's
- [Regular Submissions](https://americanshortfiction.org/submityourwork/regular-submissions/) - SUBMIT YOUR WORK We have separate guidelines for our short story contests and regular submissions. We run two short story contests a year, the American Short(er) Fiction contest in the winter/spring, and The Halifax Ranch Prize for Fiction in the spring/summer, plus the Insider Prize for incarcerated writers in Texas. Please check our homepage for current
- [Donation Confirmation](https://americanshortfiction.org/donation-confirmation/) - Thank you for your donation! You may print this page or save it as a PDF for your records. For your convenience, a donation receipt has also been sent to your email address. [give_receipt]
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## Categories

- [Uncategorized](https://americanshortfiction.org/category/uncategorized/)
- [NOTEBOOK](https://americanshortfiction.org/category/notebook/)
- [WEB EXCLUSIVES](https://americanshortfiction.org/category/web-exclusives/)
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- [NEWS](https://americanshortfiction.org/category/news/)
- [ASF Alumni](https://americanshortfiction.org/category/asf-alumni/)
- [NOTEBOOK FEATURE](https://americanshortfiction.org/category/front-feature/)
- [THINGS AMERICAN](https://americanshortfiction.org/category/things-american/)
- [I READ DEAD PEOPLE](https://americanshortfiction.org/category/notebook/i-read-dead-people/)
- [BOURBON AND MILK](https://americanshortfiction.org/category/bourbon-and-milk/)
- [Web Exclusive Interview](https://americanshortfiction.org/category/notebook/web-exclusive-interview/)
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## Tags

- [Randi Ewing](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/randi-ewing/)
- [The Swimmers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-swimmers/)
- [Web Exclusive](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/web-exclusive/)
- [Casey Hannan](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/casey-hannan/)
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- [John Starks](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/john-starks/)
- [Web Exclusives](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/web-exclusives-2/)
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- [Justin Sirois](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/justin-sirois/)
- [Scars](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/scars/)
- [Venita Blackburn](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/venita-blackburn/)
- [American Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/american-shorter-fiction-prize/)
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- [The Humanity Project](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-humanity-project/)
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- [Joyce Carol Oates](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/joyce-carol-oates/)
- [Summer Film Club](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/summer-film-club/)
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- [Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/before-you-suffocate-your-own-fool-self/)
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- [Meg Wolitzer](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/meg-wolitzer/)
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- [The Flamethrowers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-flamethrowers/)
- [David Gilbert](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/david-gilbert/)
- [And Sons](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/and-sons/)
- [Scott McCloud](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/scott-mccloud/)
- [reading](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/reading/)
- [#fridayreads](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fridayreads/)
- [friday](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/friday/)
- [Astrology](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/astrology/)
- [Astronomy](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/astronomy/)
- [Nova](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/nova/)
- [Stars](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/stars/)
- [Planets](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/planets/)
- [Moons](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/moons/)
- [Kevin Wilson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kevin-wilson/)
- [Issue 56](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/issue-56/)
- [Alexander Lumans](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alexander-lumans/)
- [S. P. Tenhoff](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/s-p-tenhoff/)
- [podcast](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/podcast/)
- [Kellie Wells](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kellie-wells/)
- [April Wilder](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/april-wilder/)
- [Ben Marcus](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ben-marcus/)
- [Leaving the Sea](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/leaving-the-sea/)
- [Stories](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/stories/)
- [Review](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/review/)
- [Vincent Scarpa](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/vincent-scarpa/)
- [This is Not an Accident](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/this-is-not-an-accident/)
- [Absurdity](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/absurdity/)
- [Keith Lesmeister](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/keith-lesmeister/)
- [Imaginary Enemies](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/imaginary-enemies/)
- [True Detective](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/true-detective/)
- [Maurice Chammah](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/maurice-chammah/)
- [War](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/war/)
- [Inadequacy](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/inadequacy/)
- [Sarah Gerkensmeyer](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sarah-gerkensmeyer/)
- [Ramona](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ramona/)
- [Douglas Coupland](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/douglas-coupland/)
- [Generation X](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/generation-x/)
- [Doogie Howser](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/doogie-howser/)
- [Terry Gilliam](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/terry-gilliam/)
- [Erin McReynolds](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/erin-mcreynolds/)
- [Karen Russell](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/karen-russell/)
- [Sleep Donation](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sleep-donation/)
- [drafting](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/drafting/)
- [metaphors](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/metaphors/)
- [naturalism](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/naturalism/)
- [embodiment](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/embodiment/)
- [adolescence](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/adolescence/)
- [Magic: The Gathering](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/magic-the-gathering/)
- [Failure](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/failure/)
- [Kim Addonizio](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kim-addonizio/)
- [The Other Woman](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-other-woman/)
- [Relationships](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/relationships/)
- [essays](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/essays/)
- [poems](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/poems/)
- [short fiction](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/short-fiction/)
- [Alison McCabe](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alison-mccabe/)
- [Heirloom](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/heirloom/)
- [Old Age](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/old-age/)
- [Alcoholism](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alcoholism/)
- [Amber Sparks](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/amber-sparks/)
- [The Janitor in Space](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-janitor-in-space/)
- [Kathleen Founds](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kathleen-founds/)
- [The Wormhole](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-wormhole/)
- [Tia Clark](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/tia-clark/)
- [Issue 57](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/issue-57/)
- [bourbon and milk](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/bourbon-and-milk-2/)
- [alyssa knickerbocker](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alyssa-knickerbocker/)
- [American Short Fiction Contest](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/american-short-fiction-contest/)
- [contest winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/contest-winners/)
- [Marie-Helene Bertino](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/marie-helene-bertino/)
- [Karl Taro Greenfeld](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/karl-taro-greenfeld/)
- [Issue 58](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/issue-58/)
- [Inside the Issue](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/inside-the-issue/)
- [Erica Plouffe Lazure](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/erica-plouffe-lazure/)
- [Marchers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/marchers/)
- [Marching Bands](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/marching-bands/)
- [Shad Queen](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/shad-queen/)
- [Sex Scandals](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sex-scandals/)
- [Pancakes](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/pancakes/)
- [Bret Anthony Johnston](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/bret-anthony-johnston/)
- [Remember Me Like This](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/remember-me-like-this/)
- [Andrew Bales](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/andrew-bales/)
- [C.M. Barnes](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/c-m-barnes/)
- [Fiction](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fiction/)
- ["In Our Defense](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/in-our-defense/)
- [Matthew Neill Null](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/matthew-neill-null/)
- [Jaimy Gordon](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jaimy-gordon/)
- [Deer](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/deer/)
- [Doe](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/doe/)
- [Edge Habitat](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/edge-habitat/)
- [Helen Hooper](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/helen-hooper/)
- [All the Girls We Knew in the Suburbs](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/all-the-girls-we-knew-in-the-suburbs/)
- [Christmas](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/christmas/)
- [Hanukkah](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hanukkah/)
- [The Grinch](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-grinch/)
- [High School](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/high-school/)
- [Sex](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sex/)
- [The Supervillain Stalled in His Lair](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-supervillain-stalled-in-his-lair/)
- [Lincoln Michel](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lincoln-michel/)
- [Supervillains](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/supervillains/)
- [Superheroes](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/superheroes/)
- [Humor](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/humor/)
- [Comics](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/comics/)
- [Anxiety](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/anxiety/)
- [Courtney Sender](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/courtney-sender/)
- [siblings](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/siblings/)
- [solidarity](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/solidarity/)
- [death](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/death/)
- [Moon](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/moon/)
- [sisters](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sisters/)
- [fat girls](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fat-girls/)
- [thin girls](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/thin-girls/)
- [illness](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/illness/)
- [writing](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/writing/)
- [MFA](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mfa/)
- [Jake Wolff](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jake-wolff/)
- [House Fire](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/house-fire/)
- [Alarm Clock](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alarm-clock/)
- [PhD Programs](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/phd-programs/)
- [Fire](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fire/)
- [Sherlock Holmes](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sherlock-holmes/)
- [The Battle](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-battle/)
- [David Naimon](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/david-naimon/)
- [Russia](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/russia/)
- [Vodka](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/vodka/)
- [Pine Brandy](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/pine-brandy/)
- [Submarines](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/submarines/)
- [the Arctic](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-arctic/)
- [Online Exclusive Interview](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/online-exclusive-interview/)
- [Technology](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/technology/)
- [Loneliness](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/loneliness/)
- [Genre](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/genre/)
- [Famous Writers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/famous-writers/)
- [Between the Covers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/between-the-covers/)
- [co-authorship](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/co-authorship/)
- [sadness](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sadness/)
- [Jaws](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jaws/)
- [Sharks](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sharks/)
- [Terese Svoboda](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/terese-svoboda/)
- [Family](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/family/)
- [Road Trip](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/road-trip/)
- [Baltimore](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/baltimore/)
- [Baltimore Uprising](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/baltimore-uprising/)
- [Freddie Gray](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/freddie-gray/)
- [Protests](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/protests/)
- [Jane Delury](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jane-delury/)
- [Michael Downs](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/michael-downs/)
- [Derek Ebert](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/derek-ebert/)
- [Kenneth Morrison](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kenneth-morrison/)
- [Kiki Petrosino](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kiki-petrosino/)
- [Lia Purpura](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lia-purpura/)
- [Deborah Rudacille](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/deborah-rudacille/)
- [D. Watkins](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/d-watkins/)
- [Khaliah Williams](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/khaliah-williams/)
- [American Short(er) Fiction Contest](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/american-shorter-fiction-contest/)
- [Jennifer Murvin](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jennifer-murvin/)
- [Emily Geminder](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/emily-geminder/)
- [Stuart Dybek](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/stuart-dybek/)
- [The Tobacconist](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-tobacconist/)
- [Love](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/love/)
- [Lust](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lust/)
- [Marriage](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/marriage/)
- [Fatherhood](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fatherhood/)
- [Fantasies](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fantasies/)
- [Sons](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sons/)
- [Anna Noyes](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/anna-noyes/)
- [Audio](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/audio/)
- [Hilary Leichter](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hilary-leichter/)
- [statue of limitations](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/statue-of-limitations/)
- [statues](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/statues/)
- [sculpture](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sculpture/)
- [art](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/art/)
- [prison](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/prison/)
- [imprisonment](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/imprisonment/)
- [James Salter](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/james-salter/)
- [Cara Blue Adams](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/cara-blue-adams/)
- [Geoff Becker](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/geoff-becker/)
- [Matt Bell](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/matt-bell/)
- [Maud Casey](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/maud-casey/)
- [Alan Cheuse](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alan-cheuse/)
- [Lydia Conklin](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lydia-conklin/)
- [Timothy Denevi](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/timothy-denevi/)
- [Samar Farah Fitzgerald](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/samar-farah-fitzgerald/)
- [Kaitlyn Greenidge](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kaitlyn-greenidge/)
- [Lauren Groff](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lauren-groff/)
- [Jennifer Haigh](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jennifer-haigh/)
- [Edward Hirsch](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/edward-hirsch/)
- [Michael Kimball](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/michael-kimball/)
- [Alexander Maksik](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alexander-maksik/)
- [Andrew Malan Milward](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/andrew-malan-milward/)
- [Stuart Nadler](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/stuart-nadler/)
- [Lisa Page](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lisa-page/)
- [George Pelecanos](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/george-pelecanos/)
- [David James Poissant](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/david-james-poissant/)
- [Jamie Quatro](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jamie-quatro/)
- [Rob Roensch](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/rob-roensch/)
- [Valerie Trueblood](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/valerie-trueblood/)
- [Brad Watson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/brad-watson/)
- [Nate Brown](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/nate-brown/)
- [Sofia Stambolieva](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sofia-stambolieva/)
- [Ships](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ships/)
- [Hunter S. Thompson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hunter-s-thompson/)
- [Ken Kesey](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ken-kesey/)
- [Tom Wolfe](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/tom-wolfe/)
- [Allen Ginsburg](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/allen-ginsburg/)
- [Hell's Angels](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hells-angels/)
- [La Honda](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/la-honda/)
- [Rape](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/rape/)
- [Drugs](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/drugs/)
- [LSD](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lsd/)
- [Marijuana](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/marijuana/)
- [Acid](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/acid/)
- [Counterculture](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/counterculture/)
- [Sofi Stambo](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sofi-stambo/)
- [ASF Alumni](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/asf-alumni/)
- [Hannah Pass](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hannah-pass/)
- [Web Exclusive Interview](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/web-exclusive-interview/)
- [Cam Terwilliger](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/cam-terwilliger/)
- [The Five Star Hotel of Bangkok](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-five-star-hotel-of-bangkok/)
- [Thailand](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/thailand/)
- [Expats](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/expats/)
- [Travel](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/travel/)
- [Doomed Relationships](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/doomed-relationships/)
- [Cancer](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/cancer/)
- [Distance](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/distance/)
- [Five Star Hotel of Bankok](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/five-star-hotel-of-bankok/)
- [Editorial Outtakes](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/editorial-outtakes/)
- [Benjamin Markovits](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/benjamin-markovits/)
- [Detroit](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/detroit/)
- [You Don't Have to Live Like This](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/you-dont-have-to-live-like-this/)
- [Contemporary Novels](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/contemporary-novels/)
- [Isab Hassan](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/isab-hassan/)
- [postmodernism](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/postmodernism/)
- [Egypt](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/egypt/)
- [India](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/india/)
- [Sydney](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sydney/)
- [the Gap](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-gap/)
- [Arthur Stace](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/arthur-stace/)
- [ghost stories](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ghost-stories/)
- [portent](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/portent/)
- [specter](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/specter/)
- [Anatolia](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/anatolia/)
- [ihab hassan](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ihab-hassan/)
- [three](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/three/)
- [ASF Lit Crawl](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/asf-lit-crawl/)
- [Alexandra Kleeman](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alexandra-kleeman/)
- [Skip Horack](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/skip-horack/)
- [Elizabeth McCracken](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/elizabeth-mccracken/)
- [Ben Markovits](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ben-markovits/)
- [The Suicide of Claire Bishop](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-suicide-of-claire-bishop/)
- [Prologue](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/prologue/)
- [revision](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/revision/)
- [parenting](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/parenting/)
- [nightcap](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/nightcap/)
- [honeymoon](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/honeymoon/)
- [divorce](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/divorce/)
- [hallucination](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hallucination/)
- [island](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/island/)
- [selkies](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/selkies/)
- [mermaids](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mermaids/)
- [sirens](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sirens/)
- [a guide to sirens](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/a-guide-to-sirens/)
- [memory](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/memory/)
- [mortality](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mortality/)
- [Angela Flournoy](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/angela-flournoy/)
- [The Turner House](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-turner-house/)
- [Novels](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/novels/)
- [National Book Award](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/national-book-award/)
- [5 Under 35](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/5-under-35/)
- [prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/prize/)
- [Shorter Fiction Contest](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/shorter-fiction-contest/)
- [lee conell](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lee-conell/)
- [island tours](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/island-tours/)
- [flying space pony](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/flying-space-pony/)
- [magic realism](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/magic-realism/)
- [fabulism](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fabulism/)
- [Kate Gavino](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kate-gavino/)
- [Devin Symons](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/devin-symons/)
- [artists](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/artists/)
- [sketching](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sketching/)
- [Last Night's Reading](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/last-nights-reading/)
- [Awesome Astronaut](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/awesome-astronaut/)
- [give](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/give/)
- [donate](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/donate/)
- [#GivingTuesday](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/givingtuesday/)
- [fundraising](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fundraising/)
- [Issue 33](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/issue-33/)
- [Matthew Salesses](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/matthew-salesses/)
- [Children](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/children/)
- [Authors](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/authors/)
- [bus drivers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/bus-drivers/)
- [missing persons](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/missing-persons/)
- [acid throwers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/acid-throwers/)
- [leslie parry](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/leslie-parry/)
- [short story collections](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/short-story-collections/)
- [Upright Beasts](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/upright-beasts/)
- [The Unfinished World](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-unfinished-world/)
- [slipstream](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/slipstream/)
- [autofiction](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/autofiction/)
- [readers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/readers/)
- [publishing](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/publishing/)
- [books](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/books/)
- [Leona Theis](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/leona-theis/)
- [CJ Hauser](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/cj-hauser/)
- [missing girl](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/missing-girl/)
- [night bus](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/night-bus/)
- [kyle langston](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kyle-langston/)
- [winston](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/winston/)
- [Alex Espinoza](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alex-espinoza/)
- [Susan Straight](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/susan-straight/)
- [Sonya Larson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sonya-larson/)
- [Anne Carson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/anne-carson/)
- [Mecca Jamilah Sullivan](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mecca-jamilah-sullivan/)
- [Jamaica Kincaid](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jamaica-kincaid/)
- [Stacey Swann](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/stacey-swann/)
- [John Weir](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/john-weir/)
- [God](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/god/)
- [Moses](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/moses/)
- [Jennifer De Leon](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jennifer-de-leon/)
- [Junot Díaz](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/junot-diaz/)
- [Natashia Deón](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/natashia-deon/)
- [Joshua Furst](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/joshua-furst/)
- [William S. Burroughs](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/william-s-burroughs/)
- [Vanessa Hua](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/vanessa-hua/)
- [Jeannette Walls](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jeannette-walls/)
- [Darth Vader](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/darth-vader/)
- [Mia Alvar](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mia-alvar/)
- [William S. Burroughs Jr.](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/william-s-burroughs-jr/)
- [scanlan](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/scanlan/)
- [short story](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/short-story/)
- [hungry valley](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hungry-valley/)
- [horses](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/horses/)
- [farm](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/farm/)
- [Tony Tulathimutte](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/tony-tulathimutte/)
- [Private Citizens](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/private-citizens/)
- [debut novel](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/debut-novel/)
- [novelists](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/novelists/)
- [Jennifer duBois](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jennifer-dubois/)
- [San Francisco](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/san-francisco/)
- [millennial generation](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/millennial-generation/)
- [Nat Baldwin](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/nat-baldwin/)
- [Bernie Sanders](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/bernie-sanders/)
- [Mission Creek Festival](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mission-creek-festival/)
- [Iowa City](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/iowa-city/)
- [Politics](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/politics/)
- [Music](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/music/)
- [Dirty Projectors](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/dirty-projectors/)
- [Bass](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/bass/)
- [kathryn scanlan](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kathryn-scanlan/)
- [terrence malick](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/terrence-malick/)
- [marilynne robinson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/marilynne-robinson/)
- [Cthulhu](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/cthulhu/)
- [Svalbard](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/svalbard/)
- [supernatural horror](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/supernatural-horror/)
- [H.P. Lovecraft](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/h-p-lovecraft/)
- [apocalypse](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/apocalypse/)
- [smartphones](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/smartphones/)
- [Alzheimer's](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alzheimers/)
- [polar bears](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/polar-bears/)
- [Michel Houellebecq](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/michel-houellebecq/)
- [Barry Lopez](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/barry-lopez/)
- [The Revenant](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-revenant/)
- [The Martian](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-martian/)
- [Mad Max: Fury Road](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mad-max-fury-road/)
- [wilderness](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/wilderness/)
- [glaciers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/glaciers/)
- [reindeer](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/reindeer/)
- [ruins](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ruins/)
- [Justin Bieber](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/justin-bieber/)
- [Adele](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/adele/)
- [Alessia Cara](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alessia-cara/)
- [twenty one pilots](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/twenty-one-pilots/)
- [Elder Things](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/elder-things/)
- [Shoggoths](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/shoggoths/)
- [2016 Presidential Election](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/2016-presidential-election/)
- [Arctic Dreams](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/arctic-dreams/)
- [At the Mountains of Madness](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/at-the-mountains-of-madness/)
- [Necronomicon](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/necronomicon/)
- [The Dunwich Horror](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-dunwich-horror/)
- [stockholm](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/stockholm/)
- [sweden](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sweden/)
- [Jensen Beach](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jensen-beach/)
- [Victor LaValle](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/victor-lavalle/)
- [mother](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mother/)
- [loss](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/loss/)
- [obesity](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/obesity/)
- [gravedigger](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/gravedigger/)
- [Benjamin Warner](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/benjamin-warner/)
- [Thirst](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/thirst/)
- [Deleted Scenes](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/deleted-scenes/)
- [suzanne morrison](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/suzanne-morrison/)
- [mothers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mothers/)
- [baseball](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/baseball/)
- [fathers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fathers/)
- [Benjamin Hale](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/benjamin-hale/)
- [The Fat Artist](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-fat-artist/)
- [Marquez](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/marquez/)
- [Kafka](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kafka/)
- [Tolkien](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/tolkien/)
- [McCarthy](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mccarthy/)
- [Catton](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/catton/)
- [Alex Dezen](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alex-dezen/)
- [Yves Klein](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/yves-klein/)
- [Nicholson Baker](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/nicholson-baker/)
- [Tolstoy](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/tolstoy/)
- [Borges](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/borges/)
- [Dostoyevsky](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/dostoyevsky/)
- [Caliban](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/caliban/)
- [Frankenstein](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/frankenstein/)
- [Bulgakov](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/bulgakov/)
- [Jesus](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jesus/)
- [Chimpanzees](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/chimpanzees/)
- [Chris Burden](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/chris-burden/)
- [Damien Hirst](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/damien-hirst/)
- [Wim Delvoye](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/wim-delvoye/)
- [Tracey Emin](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/tracey-emin/)
- [Karen Finley](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/karen-finley/)
- [Dash Snow](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/dash-snow/)
- [William Grimes](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/william-grimes/)
- [Duchamp](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/duchamp/)
- [O'Connor](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/oconnor/)
- [Dickens](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/dickens/)
- [Barbara J. King](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/barbara-j-king/)
- [Beethoven](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/beethoven/)
- [Carl Sagan](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/carl-sagan/)
- [Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fear-loathing-in-las-vegas/)
- [Las Vegas](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/las-vegas/)
- [American Dream](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/american-dream/)
- [Ruben Salazar](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ruben-salazar/)
- [Oscar Acosta](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/oscar-acosta/)
- [Strange Rumblings in Aztlan](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/strange-rumblings-in-aztlan/)
- [Gonzo](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/gonzo/)
- [The Gonzo Tapes](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-gonzo-tapes/)
- [Raoul Duke](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/raoul-duke/)
- [Rolling Stone](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/rolling-stone/)
- [M. Thomas Gammarino](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/m-thomas-gammarino/)
- [King of the Worlds](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/king-of-the-worlds/)
- [Edits](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/edits/)
- [Emma Straub](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/emma-straub/)
- [Modern Lovers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/modern-lovers/)
- [Summer Reading](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/summer-reading/)
- [Brooklyn](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/brooklyn/)
- [New York](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/new-york/)
- [Anabel Graff](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/anabel-graff/)
- [Daniel LoPilato](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/daniel-lopilato/)
- [America](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/america/)
- [Amelia Gray](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/amelia-gray/)
- [Emily Kiernan](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/emily-kiernan/)
- [Erin Somers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/erin-somers/)
- [Winners](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/winners/)
- [Sara Majka](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sara-majka/)
- [Cities I've Never Lived In](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/cities-ive-never-lived-in/)
- [Callie Collins](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/callie-collins/)
- [Story Collection](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/story-collection/)
- [Kathryn Savage](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kathryn-savage/)
- [asteroids](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/asteroids/)
- [oxnard](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/oxnard/)
- [Xhenet Aliu](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/xhenet-aliu/)
- [Jennine Capó Crucet](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jennine-capo-crucet/)
- [Eugene Cross](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/eugene-cross/)
- [Sophie Rosenblum](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sophie-rosenblum/)
- [Laura van den Berg](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/laura-van-den-berg/)
- [Miah Arnold](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/miah-arnold/)
- [Ru Freeman](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ru-freeman/)
- [Manuel Gonzales](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/manuel-gonzales/)
- [Shann Ray](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/shann-ray/)
- [Alexi Zentner](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alexi-zentner/)
- [Giuseppe Taurino](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/giuseppe-taurino/)
- [Jan Ellison](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jan-ellison/)
- [Rachel Howell](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/rachel-howell/)
- [A Small Indiscretion](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/a-small-indiscretion/)
- [suspense](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/suspense/)
- [literary thriller](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/literary-thriller/)
- [compassion](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/compassion/)
- [photographs](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/photographs/)
- [Whitney Terrell](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/whitney-terrell/)
- [Zac Gall](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/zac-gall/)
- [Iraq](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/iraq/)
- [The Good Lieutenant](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-good-lieutenant/)
- [journalism](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/journalism/)
- [Emma](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/emma/)
- [Kansas](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kansas/)
- [LGBTQ](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lgbtq/)
- [Pride](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/pride/)
- [Gay](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/gay/)
- [Lesbian](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lesbian/)
- [Bisexual](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/bisexual/)
- [Transgender](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/transgender/)
- [Agender](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/agender/)
- [Sexuality](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sexuality/)
- [Adeena Reitberger](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/adeena-reitberger/)
- [Chinelo Okparanta](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/chinelo-okparanta/)
- [Hanya Yanagihara](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hanya-yanagihara/)
- [Alysia Abbot](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alysia-abbot/)
- [Rose Tremain](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/rose-tremain/)
- [Justin Torres](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/justin-torres/)
- [Anna North](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/anna-north/)
- [Maggie Nelson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/maggie-nelson/)
- [Alison Bechdel](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alison-bechdel/)
- [Carson McCullers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/carson-mccullers/)
- [Ocean Vuong](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ocean-vuong/)
- [Jill McDonough](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jill-mcdonough/)
- [E.M. Forster](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/e-m-forster/)
- [Rebecca Markovits](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/rebecca-markovits/)
- [Colm Tóibín](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/colm-toibin/)
- [Ellen Bryant Voigt](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ellen-bryant-voigt/)
- [Stephen Dobyns](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/stephen-dobyns/)
- [Heather McHugh](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/heather-mchugh/)
- [Kevin McIlvoy](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kevin-mcilvoy/)
- [Maurice Manning](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/maurice-manning/)
- [Van Jordan](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/van-jordan/)
- [Rodney Jones](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/rodney-jones/)
- [Gabrielle Calvocoressi](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/gabrielle-calvocoressi/)
- [Robert Boswell](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/robert-boswell/)
- [Antonya Nelson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/antonya-nelson/)
- [Tony Hoagland](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/tony-hoagland/)
- [Alan Shapiro](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/alan-shapiro/)
- [Trollope](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/trollope/)
- [Rose Gowen](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/rose-gowen/)
- [Bipolar disorder](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/bipolar-disorder/)
- [depression](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/depression/)
- [hospital](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hospital/)
- [therapy](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/therapy/)
- [medication](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/medication/)
- [lithium](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lithium/)
- [synthroid](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/synthroid/)
- [David Foster Wallace](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/david-foster-wallace/)
- [Amy Bloom](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/amy-bloom/)
- [Esmé Weijun Wang](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/esme-weijun-wang/)
- [Marya Hornbacher](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/marya-hornbacher/)
- [treatment](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/treatment/)
- [healing](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/healing/)
- [Bryan Washington](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/bryan-washington/)
- [Lockwood](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lockwood/)
- [Kevin Barry](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kevin-barry/)
- [Web exclusive fiction](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/web-exclusive-fiction/)
- [choose your own](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/choose-your-own/)
- [choose your own adventure](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/choose-your-own-adventure/)
- [dating](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/dating/)
- [fear](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fear/)
- [The Stars at Night Gala](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-stars-at-night-gala/)
- [25th Birthday](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/25th-birthday/)
- [Amanda Emil Anderson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/amanda-emil-anderson/)
- [Christina Ward-Niven](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/christina-ward-niven/)
- [Austin](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/austin/)
- [Texas](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/texas/)
- [Helena](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/helena/)
- [Montana](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/montana/)
- [moving](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/moving/)
- [Spanish](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/spanish/)
- [daughters](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/daughters/)
- [whiskey](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/whiskey/)
- [flying](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/flying/)
- [jobs](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jobs/)
- [2016 election](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/2016-election/)
- [The Key Bearer's Parents](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-key-bearers-parents/)
- [parents](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/parents/)
- [Merrill Feitell](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/merrill-feitell/)
- ["The Cupcake Factory](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-cupcake-factory/)
- [pastries](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/pastries/)
- [smoking](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/smoking/)
- [Joshua Rivkin](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/joshua-rivkin/)
- [Lacy Johnson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lacy-johnson/)
- [Greg Brown](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/greg-brown/)
- [Inauguration](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/inauguration/)
- [Trump](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/trump/)
- [Kids](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kids/)
- [Casey Fleming](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/casey-fleming/)
- [Lacy M. Johnson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lacy-m-johnson/)
- [Doom](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/doom/)
- [Erin McGraw](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/erin-mcgraw/)
- [Siân Griffiths](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sian-griffiths/)
- [trouble](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/trouble/)
- [election](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/election/)
- [Mike Scalise](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mike-scalise/)
- [Memoir](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/memoir/)
- [Tumor](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/tumor/)
- [Acromegaly](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/acromegaly/)
- [Nonfiction](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/nonfiction/)
- [Darin Strauss](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/darin-strauss/)
- [friends](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/friends/)
- [Bret Anthony Johnson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/bret-anthony-johnson/)
- [Smith Henderson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/smith-henderson/)
- [Sunday Times](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sunday-times/)
- [Short Stories](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/short-stories/)
- [Always Happy Hour](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/always-happy-hour/)
- [MFK Fisher](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mfk-fisher/)
- [The Arrangement](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-arrangement/)
- [Ashley Warlick](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ashley-warlick/)
- [Food](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/food/)
- [Foodies](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/foodies/)
- [Cooking](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/cooking/)
- [Eating](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/eating/)
- [Desire](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/desire/)
- [Biography](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/biography/)
- [Novel](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/novel/)
- [Appetites](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/appetites/)
- [dystopia](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/dystopia/)
- [Libby Flores](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/libby-flores/)
- [Blair Donahue](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/blair-donahue/)
- [Claire Robbins](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/claire-robbins/)
- [Shawn Wen](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/shawn-wen/)
- [Marcel Marceau](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/marcel-marceau/)
- [Back issues](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/back-issues/)
- [back to school](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/back-to-school/)
- [giveaway](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/giveaway/)
- [fall](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fall/)
- [autumn](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/autumn/)
- [feminism](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/feminism/)
- [chekhov](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/chekhov/)
- [geoff dyer](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/geoff-dyer/)
- [hillary rodham clinton](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hillary-rodham-clinton/)
- [Insider Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/insider-prize/)
- [incarcerated writers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/incarcerated-writers/)
- [The Stars at Night](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-stars-at-night/)
- [Dan Chaon](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/dan-chaon/)
- [Joe Bratcher III](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/joe-bratcher-iii/)
- [Anushka Jasraj](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/anushka-jasraj/)
- [awards](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/awards/)
- [beer](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/beer/)
- [boots](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/boots/)
- [country music](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/country-music/)
- [American Short Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/american-short-fiction-prize/)
- [Michaela Hansen](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/michaela-hansen/)
- [Wendy Rawlings](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/wendy-rawlings/)
- [Emily Chammah](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/emily-chammah/)
- [Deb Olin Unferth](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/deb-olin-unferth/)
- [Audubon](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/audubon/)
- [birds](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/birds/)
- [Anton DiSclafani](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/anton-disclafani/)
- [queer fiction](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/queer-fiction/)
- [fairytales](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fairytales/)
- [grief](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/grief/)
- [richard mirabella](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/richard-mirabella/)
- [Tote](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/tote/)
- [support](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/support/)
- [donations](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/donations/)
- [restaurants](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/restaurants/)
- [dining](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/dining/)
- [historical fiction](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/historical-fiction/)
- [James Han Mattson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/james-han-mattson/)
- [violence](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/violence/)
- [multiple points of view](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/multiple-points-of-view/)
- [narrators](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/narrators/)
- [Ricky Graves](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ricky-graves/)
- [Halifax Ranch Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/halifax-ranch-prize/)
- [ZZ Packer](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/zz-packer/)
- [cutter wood](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/cutter-wood/)
- [true crime](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/true-crime/)
- [crime](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/crime/)
- [Iowa](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/iowa/)
- [Florida](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/florida/)
- [murder](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/murder/)
- [Jamel Brinkley](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jamel-brinkley/)
- [Aaron Teel](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/aaron-teel/)
- [Barbara Bourland](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/barbara-bourland/)
- [I'll Eat When I'm Dead](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ill-eat-when-im-dead/)
- [on quitting](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/on-quitting/)
- [great American novel](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/great-american-novel/)
- [short story month](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/short-story-month/)
- [May](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/may/)
- [Don Lee](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/don-lee/)
- [Mary Helen Specht](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mary-helen-specht/)
- [Nina McConigley](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/nina-mcconigley/)
- [Akil Kumarasamy](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/akil-kumarasamy/)
- [Caitlin Horrocks](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/caitlin-horrocks/)
- [women](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/women/)
- [metoo](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/metoo/)
- [Short(er) Fiction Prize](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/shorter-fiction-prize/)
- [contests](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/contests/)
- [Elin Hawkinson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/elin-hawkinson/)
- [Ariel Berry](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ariel-berry/)
- [Horace Wells](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/horace-wells/)
- [Acre Books](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/acre-books/)
- [Hartford](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hartford/)
- [Towson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/towson/)
- [Knausgaard](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/knausgaard/)
- [social media](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/social-media/)
- [Clinton](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/clinton/)
- [Fake Like Me](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fake-like-me/)
- [News](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/news/)
- [Best of the Net 2017](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/best-of-the-net-2017/)
- [Allegra Hyde](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/allegra-hyde/)
- [Daisy Johnson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/daisy-johnson/)
- ["Endangered](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/endangered/)
- [" "A Bruise the Size and Shape of a Fist](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/a-bruise-the-size-and-shape-of-a-fist/)
- [corey flintoff](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/corey-flintoff/)
- [dreams](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/dreams/)
- [Dave Housley](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/dave-housley/)
- [Barrelhouse](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/barrelhouse/)
- [Vampires](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/vampires/)
- [hippies](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hippies/)
- [canada](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/canada/)
- [bus](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/bus/)
- [dinosaurs](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/dinosaurs/)
- [Boston](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/boston/)
- [Paul Auster](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/paul-auster/)
- [Toni Morrison](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/toni-morrison/)
- [Denis Johnson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/denis-johnson/)
- [Cormac McCarthy](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/cormac-mccarthy/)
- [James Baldwin](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/james-baldwin/)
- [cultural appropriation](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/cultural-appropriation/)
- [editing](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/editing/)
- [ellipses](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ellipses/)
- [adjectives](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/adjectives/)
- [racism](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/racism/)
- [acceptance](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/acceptance/)
- [rejection](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/rejection/)
- [Jenny Zhang](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jenny-zhang/)
- [pleasure](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/pleasure/)
- [Jack Kaulfus](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jack-kaulfus/)
- [Nicole Beckley](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/nicole-beckley/)
- [trans identity](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/trans-identity/)
- [identity](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/identity/)
- [sci-fi](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sci-fi/)
- [story collections](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/story-collections/)
- [debuts](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/debuts/)
- [writers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/writers/)
- [Zora Neale Hurston](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/zora-neale-hurston/)
- [Solmaz Sharif](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/solmaz-sharif/)
- [Rickey Laurentiis](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/rickey-laurentiis/)
- [Lionel Shriver](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lionel-shriver/)
- [Tim Barris](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/tim-barris/)
- [Sublevel magazine](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sublevel-magazine/)
- [F. Scott Fitzgerald](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/f-scott-fitzgerald/)
- [Fitzgerald Festival](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fitzgerald-festival/)
- [Muse and the Marketplace](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/muse-and-the-marketplace/)
- [Barrelhouse magazine](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/barrelhouse-magazine/)
- [Conversations and Connections conference](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/conversations-and-connections-conference/)
- [story submission](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/story-submission/)
- [semiotics](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/semiotics/)
- [apes](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/apes/)
- [ajectives](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ajectives/)
- [dialect](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/dialect/)
- [James Baldiwn](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/james-baldiwn/)
- [Mary Gaitskill](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mary-gaitskill/)
- [John Gardner](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/john-gardner/)
- [Ted Thompson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ted-thompson/)
- [Fuckhead](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fuckhead/)
- [Barracoon](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/barracoon/)
- [Kossola](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kossola/)
- [empathy](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/empathy/)
- [Narcissus](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/narcissus/)
- [Lucy Tan](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lucy-tan/)
- [What We Were Promised](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/what-we-were-promised/)
- [Shanghai](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/shanghai/)
- [karl ove knausgaard](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/karl-ove-knausgaard/)
- [debut](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/debut/)
- [philippines](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/philippines/)
- [Nathan Go](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/nathan-go/)
- ["The Blind Oracle of Mactan"](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-blind-oracle-of-mactan/)
- [Stars at Night](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/stars-at-night/)
- [Gala](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/gala/)
- [Fernando A. Flores](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fernando-a-flores/)
- [S. Kirk Walsh](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/s-kirk-walsh/)
- [honkytonk](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/honkytonk/)
- [The Balcony](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-balcony/)
- [France](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/france/)
- [Bilingualism](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/bilingualism/)
- [Language](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/language/)
- [Kelly Luce](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kelly-luce/)
- [Heliotrope](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/heliotrope/)
- [Tyler Stoddard Smith](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/tyler-stoddard-smith/)
- [The Land of Steady Habits](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-land-of-steady-habits/)
- [film adaptations](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/film-adaptations/)
- [Nicole Holofcener](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/nicole-holofcener/)
- [Netflix](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/netflix/)
- [NPR](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/npr/)
- [C. Morgan Babst](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/c-morgan-babst/)
- [the Floating World](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-floating-world/)
- [Hurricane Katrina](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hurricane-katrina/)
- [New Orleans](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/new-orleans/)
- [cutting](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/cutting/)
- [clowns](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/clowns/)
- [serial killers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/serial-killers/)
- [Crystal Hana Kim](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/crystal-hana-kim/)
- [If You Leave Me](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/if-you-leave-me/)
- [Editorial Outtake](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/editorial-outtake/)
- [Korea](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/korea/)
- [romance](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/romance/)
- [animals](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/animals/)
- [Giving](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/giving/)
- [year-end giving](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/year-end-giving/)
- [year-end campaign](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/year-end-campaign/)
- [gifts](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/gifts/)
- [holidays](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/holidays/)
- [Fundly](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/fundly/)
- [short story collection](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/short-story-collection/)
- [Snowden Wright](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/snowden-wright/)
- [American Pop](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/american-pop/)
- [gilded age](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/gilded-age/)
- [tycoons](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/tycoons/)
- [second novels](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/second-novels/)
- [culture](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/culture/)
- [society](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/society/)
- [panopticon](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/panopticon/)
- [meaning](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/meaning/)
- [terror](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/terror/)
- [etymology](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/etymology/)
- [empowerment](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/empowerment/)
- [systemic racism](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/systemic-racism/)
- [Black Lives Matter](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/black-lives-matter/)
- [Ella Shohat](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/ella-shohat/)
- [Claudia Rankine](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/claudia-rankine/)
- [Chandra Talpade Mohanty](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/chandra-talpade-mohanty/)
- [Saidiya V. Hartman](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/saidiya-v-hartman/)
- [Angela Pelster](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/angela-pelster/)
- [Joseph Beuys](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/joseph-beuys/)
- [Lydia Yuknavitch](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lydia-yuknavitch/)
- [environmentalism](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/environmentalism/)
- [conservation](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/conservation/)
- [oil](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/oil/)
- [BP](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/bp/)
- [Gulf Coast](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/gulf-coast/)
- [Zach Powers](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/zach-powers/)
- [Savannah](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/savannah/)
- [writing advice](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/writing-advice/)
- [Keenan Walsh](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/keenan-walsh/)
- [Hajar Bali](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hajar-bali/)
- [flood](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/flood/)
- [The Spectators](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-spectators/)
- [This American Life](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/this-american-life/)
- [Jerry Springer](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jerry-springer/)
- [talk shows](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/talk-shows/)
- [AIDS](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/aids/)
- [New York City](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/new-york-city/)
- [Rube-Goldberg](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/rube-goldberg/)
- [Nabokov](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/nabokov/)
- [Marilyn Manson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/marilyn-manson/)
- [Columbine](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/columbine/)
- [school shootings](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/school-shootings/)
- [Cartwheel](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/cartwheel/)
- [A Partial History of Lost Causes](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/a-partial-history-of-lost-causes/)
- [The Collected Schizophrenias](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-collected-schizophrenias/)
- [mental illness](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mental-illness/)
- [mental health](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mental-health/)
- [Amy Hempel](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/amy-hempel/)
- [Lit City at the LINE](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lit-city-at-the-line/)
- [Rebecca Makkai](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/rebecca-makkai/)
- [Paul Lisicky](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/paul-lisicky/)
- [Richard Z. Santos](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/richard-z-santos/)
- [readings](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/readings/)
- [salon](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/salon/)
- [events](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/events/)
- [event](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/event/)
- [Polly Rosenwaike](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/polly-rosenwaike/)
- [Austin Bat Cave](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/austin-bat-cave/)
- [titles](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/titles/)
- [Kay Ryan](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kay-ryan/)
- [A.M. Homes](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/a-m-homes/)
- [Eric Puchner](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/eric-puchner/)
- [Edward P. Jones](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/edward-p-jones/)
- [Michigan Quarterly Review](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/michigan-quarterly-review/)
- [Jai Chakrabarti](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jai-chakrabarti/)
- [Lindsey Drager](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lindsey-drager/)
- [Hannah Zaheer](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hannah-zaheer/)
- [Rebecca Townley](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/rebecca-townley/)
- [Sabrina Orah Mark](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/sabrina-orah-mark/)
- [Jana Horn](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/jana-horn/)
- [Edward Carey](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/edward-carey/)
- [Kirkus](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kirkus/)
- [Wild Milk](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/wild-milk/)
- [poetry](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/poetry/)
- [prose](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/prose/)
- [Joseph Campbell](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/joseph-campbell/)
- [The Power of Myth](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/the-power-of-myth/)
- [Mordechai Rosenstein](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mordechai-rosenstein/)
- [Vladimir Nabokov](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/vladimir-nabokov/)
- [Patti Smith](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/patti-smith/)
- [Roger Miller](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/roger-miller/)
- [Hasidic violin](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/hasidic-violin/)
- [PT Anderson](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/pt-anderson/)
- [Reginald McKnight](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/reginald-mcknight/)
- [Bruno Schulz](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/bruno-schulz/)
- [Amber Dermont](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/amber-dermont/)
- [Yusef Komunyakaa](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/yusef-komunyakaa/)
- [Kate Zambreno](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kate-zambreno/)
- [Kristen Iskandrian](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/kristen-iskandrian/)
- [Christine Schutt](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/christine-schutt/)
- [Lydia Davis](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lydia-davis/)
- [Mary Ruefle](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/mary-ruefle/)
- [Danny Khlalastchi](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/danny-khlalastchi/)
- [Samuel Beckett](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/samuel-beckett/)
- [Donald Barthelme](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/donald-barthelme/)
- [Leonora Carrington](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/leonora-carrington/)
- [Franz Kafka](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/franz-kafka/)
- [Gertrude Stein](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/gertrude-stein/)
- [Adrienne Kennedy](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/adrienne-kennedy/)
- [Anne Boyer](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/anne-boyer/)
- [Oni Buchanan](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/oni-buchanan/)
- [Lucie Brock-Broido](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/lucie-brock-broido/)
- [F.R. Martinez](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/f-r-martinez/)
- [Prisoners](https://americanshortfiction.org/tag/prisoners/)