by Erin Vachon In Patricia Bidar’s debut novelette Wild Plums [ELJ Editions, 2024], Maya moves to Oregon with an older partner, an English professor at a liberal arts school for women. She’s adapting to a slower life, trying to be useful in a new...
Robert Shapard’s collection, Bare Ana and Other Stories, will be released by Regal House Publishing in February. Winner of the 2022 W.S. Porter Prize, this full-length collection brings to life an array of flash and short-short stories that are by...
I’ve been a fan of Constance Malloy’s for quite some time now. I always look forward to her posts on The Burning Hearth, and her memoir Tornado Dreams speaks to trauma and the path to healing with great courage and hope. Her latest book Born of...
Michael Czyzniejewski, who is the interviews editor at the flash fiction magazine Smokelong Quarterly, has written four collections of short stories. His most recent is The Amnesiac in the Maze (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023), which writer Mark...
Hi Ra’Niqua. It’s a time for you. Your first collection, flash fiction, For What Ails You, comes out from ELJ Press on November 6, and not too much after, there’s the matter of the twins you are carrying coming out. Congratulations on all of it....
Wolfsong (ELJ Editions 2023), Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s first full-length publication, is a gorgeous hybrid collection of flash fiction and CNF stories capturing formative moments in girls’ and women’s lives. There is pain in these stories. And...
I think I found John Fulton's short story collections somewhere in my early writing days; after reading stories by Carver, Baxter, Bausch, Jean Thompson, and Tobias Wolff. I've always found a warmth and a beating heart in John's stories, a way of...
Myna Chang’s new flash collection, The Potential of Radio and Rain (out now from CutBank Books), is a revelation on the ferocity of human need set against the epic forces of nature. Her sentences snap as fast as a cyclone, whipping misfit...
Avee Chaudhuri: Children at play seems to be of recurring interest in the collection. There are all these powerful and evocative instances and sentiments of children at play, and the chapbook's longest piece is “The Rumpelstiltskin Understudies,...
Sarah Freligh’s new collection, A Brief Natural History of Women, will be released in June by Harbor Editions. These flash and micro stories explore the rust-shot reality of women and girls perpetually trapped in a harsh place and time. Each...
Jolene McIlwain's Sidle Creek, a collection of flash and short stories, is amazingly balanced between characters we care about and the joy and conflict in the natural world. This book will take you into the heart of the natural world, where it's...
Sometimes you read a single story by a writer, and you become a fan for life. This happened when I read Andrew's story "Hole" in his first collection, The Theory of Light and Matter. In my early writing days, Porter's stories were a fantastic way...