'Tis the season: to ask for books and buy books with abandon. So, we've asked our ASF staff to share what books they're gifting to their friends and family, what books they want to be gifted, and what short story collections they think you should just go ahead and get for yourself. Andrew Bales Give: With Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Wave Books has perfected the stocking stuffer. At 99 pages, it's an unassuming book—a faintly cosmic blue cover with a white square on the ... [READ MORE]
NOTEBOOK
Inside the Issue: Rachel Swearingen on Postcards, Nostalgia and History
American Short Fiction's 56th issue contains Rachel Swearingen's jewel of a story, "The Night Between Us," an echoing and lyric meditation on the landscape of fear and isolation. The piece, inspired by a line about eating postcards in Mary Reufle's poem "Like a Daffodil," presents a charming but damaged character afraid to leave her apartment and cede control to a dark, messy world. Melinda Moustakis describes the story as written with "sensuous brevity and beautiful longing." Reading it is an ... [READ MORE]
Inside the Issue: Kevin Wilson reads from “The Horror We Made”
The new issue of American Short Fiction contains a wonderful story by Kevin Wilson about, as Bret Anthony Johnston puts it, "that moment in your teens when everything seems both possible and doomed." In a few casual, funny, accessible scenes, Wilson conjures this delicate moment in all its brimming, about-to-spill-over fullness, all its wonder and vividness and heart. Here, in a podcast produced by our assistant editor Andrew Bales, is Kevin Wilson reading a few pages of the "The Horror We ... [READ MORE]
Inside the Issue: Anis Mojgani illustrates Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Disappearing”
In "The Disappearing," Joyce Carol Oates examines the way time can unravel both our relationships and our selves. The story chronicles the fading of a marriage from the wife's perspective, but we are left uncertain as to whether it is her husband or she herself who is gradually disappearing. We asked poet and artist Anis Mojgani to illustrate the story for us. Here, alongside some excerpts from "The Disappearing," is his beautiful and moving response. "Alone with her husband in ... [READ MORE]
Online Fiction: Interview with Monica McFawn
This month we're excited to bring you Monica McFawn's captivating “Ornament and Crime,” the story of a family surviving the tyranny of a father's taste for minimalism. It's a sharp-witted tale that manages to bend something as lofty as aesthetics into strange, tender moments. Monica lives in Michigan, where she teaches writing at Grand Valley State University. Her stories have appeared in places like The Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Web Conjunctions, and Gargoyle. Her collection ... [READ MORE]
Inside the Issue: The Roots of “Are You My Mother?”
"Are You My Mother?"--the clever gem that concludes our new issue, by Short(er)-Fiction-prize runner-up Sabrina Orah Mark--has what we might think of as a famous grandmother. A great many of us were raised on P.D. Eastman's classic children's book of the same title. Eastman's book, first published in 1960, is a widely adored story about the search for love and belonging. Mark's story takes this allegory and drags it into the lonely, fragmented, rootless, go-it-alone context of modern adult ... [READ MORE]