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 the Texas Center for Writers and NPR’s “The Sound of Writing” broadcast, the magazine quickly gained a national reputation for exemplary fiction. In 2019, the organization won the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, with judges noting that, “[ASF] remains urgent and fresh, its purpose clear: to shake us awake and bring the peculiarity of existence into full focus.” In 2024, ASF was named a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Fiction for the fourth time. In 2022, the magazine launched a new collaboration with Texas Monthly: a semi-regular series of short stories from Texan authors edited by ASF editors and copublished in ASF Online and Texas Monthly‘s print and digital editions. ASF has also won recognition for its work from The Sunday Times’ Short Story Award, CLMP’s Firecracker Award, and AWP’s Small Press Publisher Award. Stories published by ASF are anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best American Non-Required Reading, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere.

Our mission is to be a diverse, inclusive, and discerning publisher of today’s best literary short fiction. We believe that reading and writing are transformative acts and that literature has the power to change the way we see ourselves, our world, and our place in it. We strive to support established and emerging writers and advance the literary arts, both nationally and within our Austin community, and we regularly host events that are free and open to the public.

In the inaugural issue of the magazine, which included Joyce Carol Oates and a young Dagoberto Gilb, Furman wrote of the “shared love and respect for narrative itself” that formed the foundation of American Short Fiction and continued: “We have great faith in our readers. We are sure that, just as we do, they have a love of reading and a desire for the involvement that good writing gives us all.” Our goal here at American Short Fiction is to respect that involvement by offering consistently intelligent, engrossing, and beautiful reading, in print and on this website, and we appreciate your company. “Stories! Stories, stories, stories!” cried the narrator on the final page of that first Spring ’91 issue, in a work by W. D. Wetherell. Stories, indeed.