Inventive. Authentic. Honest. All these words have been used to describe Leesa Cross-Smith’s work, yet the same very well could be said about the author herself. Writer, wife, mother of two, unabashed Christian, she often credits her family and…
Toward a Taxonomy of How Stories Start An invitation. A doorway. A promise to—or even contract with—the reader. There are various ways to think about the opening of a story, but rather than consider what it should be, let’s…
Each year we are privileged to be able to nominate work for anthologies and awards including Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers (Best Debut Short Stories), and…
A friend tells you a story. It makes you pause each time you enter the bathroom, eyes sliding to the linen closet. Each time you pull a fresh bath towel from the shelf, the warm musk of cedar reaching…
Welcome to the July 2020 edition of new fiction we can’t wait to read! Aimee Bender, The Butterfly Lampshade “By the end, the book reveals itself as a meditation on memory, identity, and the sometimes-uncanny relationship between living beings…
I am heaving in the southwestern corner of an open-air outlet mall five days before Christmas. This is the desperate and empty sort of heaving required to stop a sob and close off the valve of emotion. A hiccuping…
The June 2020 edition of new fiction we can’t wait to read! Carlos Manuel Álvarez, The Fallen (translated by Frank Wynne) “A dreamlike yet insightful novel of a family and a country decaying from the inside….The reader is pulled…
Topping our TBRs—new fiction for May, 2020! Dima Alzayat, Alligator & Other Stories “Alzayat’s slim, powerful debut collection showcases the author’s deep empathy and imagination in stories about grief, assimilation, and trauma… This intelligent collection is a force to…
Here are the books we are most looking forward to reading this month! Julia Alvarez, Afterlife “Alvarez’s prose is magnetic as she delves into the intricacies of sisterhood, immigration, and grief, once again proving her mastery as a…
In a 2015 review in The Los Angeles Times, the late Pulitzer Prize–winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold describes an amuse-bouche at Le Comptoir in Koreatown as “a course that takes a cook 10 minutes to plate and that you…
