ASF is back with a new issue brimming with exquisite fiction. Behind Elizabeth Chiles‘ gorgeous cover photo you’ll find wonderful stories, including:
Joyce Carol Oates‘ “The Disappearing”
Kevin Wilson’s “The Horror We Made”
Rachel Swearingen‘s “The Night Between Us”
Barrett Swanson’s “Annie Radcliffe, You Are Loved”
Kellie Wells‘ “A Unified Theory of Human Behavior”
and the stories that won our Short(er) Fiction Contest: Ryan MacDonald’s “The Observable Characteristics of Organisms” and Sabrina Orah Mark’s “Are You My Mother.”
But you don’t have to take our word for it:
“The Night Between Us, with its sensuous brevity and beautiful longing, will conjure up those old loves and aching regrets that cross immeasurable distances to whisper to you in the dark.” — Melinda Moustakis, author of the Flannery O’Connor award-winning collection, Bear Down Bear North
“Kellie Wells 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. In ‘A Unified Theory of Human Behavior,’ the narrator offers her own ‘unknowable engine’ of cause and effect, of the way in which we move from sadness to hope to love, acknowledging the possible error in behaving as if these are somehow separate desinations” —Matt Bell, author of In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, How They Were Found, and Cataclysm Baby
“Kevin Wilson’s ‘The Horror We Made’ is one of those rare stories that terrifies you with its beauty. He has captured that moment in your teens when everything seems both possible and doomed, when the world is thrilling alive with feeling and strangeness and the heady, ephemeral friendships of youth, that moment when you want nothing more than to have someone watch you stab your happiness with a fake knife. I loved this story, and I envy readers coming to it for the first time.” —Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Corpus Christi: Stories and Naming the World And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer
“In ‘Annie Radcliffe, You Are Loved,’ Barrett Swanson writes with skill and ease, creating a world that is so sure of itself an entire page is blacked out. It is a story in which words like ‘yabohs,’ ‘Daisy Dukes,’ ‘syllogism,’ and ‘smutty blandishments’ don’t clash. ‘Annie Radcliffe, You Are Loved’ is the reason why literary magazines are important, and why I’m thrilled that American Short Fiction is back doing what it has always done best.” —Mary Miller, author of Big World, and the forthcoming novel The Last Days of California
Buy the new issue or subscribe. And continue to check in here, as we’ll be offering sneak peeks into the stories through playlists, audio companions to the stories, and other nifty extras.