He wakes in the landscape of his childhood, the karst. The house is surrounded by stone that dissolves in water, limestone that becomes fissured and hazardous because of its own weakness. The clints are the parts left standing. Grykes are the absences between. It is in the grykes you find life: hart’s tongue fern, butterfly orchid, primrose. Sheltering in the sinkholes. This is a place of constant change. Changing stone. Changing light. As a child, he would go out at morning and all around ... [READ MORE]
NOTEBOOK
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]
2020 American Short(er) Fiction Prize Winners
We are thrilled to announce the winners for this year's American Short(er) Fiction Prize, judged by Deb Olin Unferth. Thank you to everyone who submitted—reading your work during this time has been a bright spot for us. Congratulations to the winners! _____ First-Place Prize: "Ricky" by Whitney Collins Judge Deb Olin Unferth writes, "Hilarious, rageful, sorrowful, and yet somehow adorable, this satiric story is full of energy and personality to spare." "Ricky" will be published in an ... [READ MORE]
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]
Appointment
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, unwinding my scarf and piling my layers on an empty swivel chair beside the stylist’s station. The crumpled clothes looked shabby in the gleaming, mirrored room, like something you’d find under a bridge. I was wearing pretty much everything I owned. This little jaunt was the first time I’d left the house in weeks, and let me tell you, you could die out there. A band of polar winds high up in the atmosphere held the city hostage, locked in a bitter freeze. I exhaled ... [READ MORE]
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]