“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]
NOTEBOOK
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]
Web Exclusive Interview: Joy Baglio
Though our Web Exclusive "Belly of the Beast" was published on Halloween, it's a timeless story, drawing on folk tale traditions of employing monsters to contend with painful human realities. In this case, a spouse grows distant, frightening, and dangerous, lost (literally) inside of a beast. It's a tender and desperate story that accommodates any number of ways in which our partners can abandon us. We talked with author Joy Baglio recently about the flash form, the Master Switch of Life, and ... [READ MORE]
ASF Celebrates Black Writers
As Black History Month 2020 nears an end, we asked members of our staff compile a list of their favorite short fiction by Black writers. For this list, our scope was broad. After all, while Black History Month has its roots in American history, it's not an exclusively American endeavor. Canada celebrates along with us during February, but in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the Netherlands, Black History Month is aligned with the start of the school year in October. So, rather than give our ... [READ MORE]
Say Hello to Amanda Faraone, Our New Development & Communications Director
Our little team here at American Short Fiction has just grown by one: this month we're welcoming the wonderful Amanda Faraone on board as our new development and communications director. As a fiction writer, literary programmer, and seasoned communications and development professional, Faraone brings valuable experience to the table, and we're so grateful and excited to have her on our team. I recently emailed Faraone a few questions so that you, too, can get to know her. — Nate Brown: First, ... [READ MORE]
Further Thoughts on Revision or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the “Beast Christ”
In 2018, I published an essay that collected some of my thoughts about what writers should think about prior to submitting their work to literary journals. That piece was based on a talk I'd given that year at the Muse and the Marketplace conference in Boston. I returned to the Muse in the spring of 2019 and delivered a sequel to that talk, one in which I was able to include a few more thoughts (and expand upon previous ones) on revision. That initial essay was long, maybe too long, but I felt ... [READ MORE]