If you remove technology and industry, anything remotely modern about human beings, what sort of animal are we? What is the shape of our heart, after all? To explore these questions, Min Han went back to the Stone Age for August's Web Exclusive, "Ara's Man." We talked with the debut author about telling a universal story set in another world, about the importance of travel, and how bullshit it is that there aren't more stories where early females occupy the significant roles (that archaeology ... [READ MORE]
NOTEBOOK
ASF Goes Back to School: Back Issues for the College Classroom
In recent years, we shipped over 300 free back issues of American Short Fiction to colleges and universities including Rowan University, the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin, Towson University, Missouri State University, and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. If you’re a creative writing instructor who’s teaching a workshop at a U.S. college or university this fall, we’d be happy to send you a box of back issues to use in your classroom. These could be a teaching tool, or a ... [READ MORE]
The Internal Conversation Is Constant: An Interview with Danielle Lazarin
Danielle Lazarin’s debut story collection Back Talk (Penguin Books, 2018) features women grappling with what they—often deliberately—leave unsaid and displays the intricacies of the desires and rages that live inside those silences. Hailed as “beautifully crafted” by the New York Times, Back Talk is a story collection that lingers long after a first read, not only for its beautiful prose and unforgettable characters but for its quiet, powerful tensions. Here, Lazarin discusses her title story, ... [READ MORE]
Bourbon and Milk: Response Training
I sit at my desk at home in my New Jersey suburb, writing poems about gun violence, and I hear police sirens. My first thought is that there is a shooter at my daughters’ high school three blocks away. Since the Newtown massacre, police presence, sirens, and lockdowns are a feature of my daughters’ lives. Kids accept this new reality. My girls tell me that they are used to being told to “shelter in place”—which means there is no active danger—and they often can decode when a “lockdown drill” ... [READ MORE]
The 2019 Insider Prize, Fiction Honoree: “Mother’s Son” by F.R. Martinez, Selected by Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates has a long history with prisons—she’s sprinkled them throughout her stories, tweeted about their poor conditions, and edited a collection of stories by incarcerated men and women. At least one of her novels is banned in some facilities. So she was the perfect judge for American Short Fiction’s 2019 Insider Prize, our contest for incarcerated writers. In the fiction category, she selected “Mother’s Son” by F.R. Martinez, calling it “intense, lyrical, nostalgic — a kind of prose ... [READ MORE]
The 2019 Insider Prize, Memoir Honoree: “Bucknaked Gurney Unit” by Kevin Murphy, Selected by Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates has a long history with prisons—she’s sprinkled them throughout her stories, tweeted about their poor conditions, and edited a collection of stories by incarcerated men and women. At least one of her novels is banned in some facilities. So she was the perfect judge for American Short Fiction’s 2019 Insider Prize, our contest for incarcerated writers. In the memoir category, she selected “Bucknaked Gurney Unit,” by Kevin Murphy, writing that his “memoir of humiliation and the ... [READ MORE]