Matthew Baker's second collection of short stories, Why Visit America (out now from Henry Holt), 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. The stories quickly cohere into a comprehensive map of … [Read more...] about Every Possible Landform, Weather Condition, and Natural Disaster: An Interview with Matthew Baker
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 … [Read more...] about Announcing the 2020 Winners of the Insider Prize
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. “I’m not coming,” she says, her voice dwarfed by the echo of gate announcements. Louise is scheduled to attend a conference at the village’s … [Read more...] about I Hold a Wolf by the Ears
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. As one of our assistant editors, he regularly read submission to the journal, wrote copious feedback for authors, and helped determine which stories would ultimately appear in our print edition. So, when we made the decision to bring on another web editor this spring, Adam was a natural choice for the role. This month, he joins our longtime web editor Erin McReynolds as our website's co-editor, and … [Read more...] about Everything Old Is New Again: An Interview With Co-Web Editor Adam Soto
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 … [Read more...] about In Nature
What We Have Learned: An Interview with Clare Beams
Clare Beams’s Bard Fiction Prize-winning story collection We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books, 2016) 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. Beams possesses an astonishing depth of imagination and clarity of vision, and she guides us compassionately through this collection that … [Read more...] about What We Have Learned: An Interview with Clare Beams