[Please note that this event has passed. Keep an eye on this space for information about The Stars at Night 2020, a virtual celebration of literary community!] Join us on the night of Thursday, November 2nd, for our second annual The Stars at Night, a beer-and-boots gala celebrating American Short Fiction, our Texas heritage, and our city's writers and those who champion them. Come for the live country music and dancing (courtesy of the great Weldon Henson and his band!), and stay for the … [Read more...] about The Stars at Night 2017
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017!
We're so pleased to announce that Manuel Muñoz's story, "The Reason Is Because," from ASF Issue #61, has been selected for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017 by Laura Furman and this year's jury panel of Elizabeth McCracken, David Bradley, and Brad Watson. The anthology will be out in September. Congratulations to all the winners! … [Read more...] about The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017!
Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award Winner!
Hooray for Bret Anthony Johnson, whose beautiful elegiac story "Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows About Horses," published in ASF's 25th anniversary issue, was announced as the winner of the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award on April 27th in London. The prize is the richest for a story in the English language. Congrats, Bret! … [Read more...] about Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award Winner!
Announcing our American Short(er) Fiction Contest Winners!
We are delighted to announce that Justin Torres has chosen the winners of our 2017 American Short(er) Fiction Contest. The first-place prize goes to Claire Robbins, for her story “Arms Out.” Of the story, Torres said, "Everything about 'Arms Out' impressed me: the punchy voice, the wayward chronology, the gender troubling. This story is fine and clear and tough and winsome." Claire Robbins is an MFA candidate at Western Michigan University where she teaches creative writing, works in the … [Read more...] about Announcing our American Short(er) Fiction Contest Winners!
Ex Marks the Spot: a Review of Mary Miller’s Always Happy Hour
Always Happy Hour, Mary Miller’s second collection of stories, opens with the strangest dedication I have ever read: "For my exes." Why would one dedicate anything to one’s exes? And not just one ex–not, say, “The One I’m Still Friends With”–but all of them, wholesale? At once blunt and tender, impersonal and twistedly sweet, these three words set a tone for the sixteen stories that follow. Exes–the crowd, the mob, the mass–preoccupy Miller’s aimless heroines. They trail behind the narrative … [Read more...] about Ex Marks the Spot: a Review of Mary Miller’s Always Happy Hour
Things American: Thoughts on Last Night
It felt sad and strange today to be sitting at the helm of a magazine called American Short Fiction. That first word on our masthead, our understanding of what that word means, pulled and pinched and pummeled as it has been over the last few months by our leaders and our pundits and by the new president-elect most of all, took a violent final beating last night, and it was hard, this morning, not to hear a bitter, bruised irony in its syllables. “We’re taking our country back,” cheered an eager … [Read more...] about Things American: Thoughts on Last Night