In honor of all of the breathless praise accompanying the release of HBO’s new crime noir series True Detective, The Atlantic is urging readers to revisit two short stories by Nicolas Pizzolatto, the show’s creator. The stories appeared in the magazine ten years ago, when Pizzolatto was an MFA student at the University of Arkansas, and they explore themes that would later mark the HBO series. Chief among those is gender and the relationship between men and women. Pizzolatto is a radically ... [READ MORE]
NOTEBOOK
Online Fiction Interview: April Wilder
The stories in April Wilder's debut collection, This is Not an Accident, inhabit, in her words, "the territory of the American absurd," and each first page is like the edge of a cliff. A story might begin, say, in a defensive driving class or in a kitchen with the grandchildren, and then it careens off, suspending the reader in that place where falling feels like flying. Take "Creative Writer Instructor Evaluation Form," which we were so lucky to publish as this month's Web Exclusive; the way it ... [READ MORE]
Bourbon and Milk: Dead Kitties and Shallow Graves
Bourbon and Milk is an ongoing series that dives into the perplexing spaces parenting sometimes pushes us, and explores the unexpected ways writers may grow in them. If you’re interested in joining the conversation or contributing a Bourbon and Milk post, query Giuseppe at giuseppe@americanshortfiction.org. One of our two cats died recently—Mr. Melo. He was the older of the pair, and the first pet my wife and I ever adopted. We spent his entire last day in vet offices before finally ... [READ MORE]
On Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus
For all intents and purposes, Leaving the Sea is Ben Marcus’s first “true” short story collection. Arriving almost twenty years after his debut, The Age of Wire and String, the stories demonstrate an impressive and almost un-stomachable ability to jump from one style to the next, yet they're watermarked with voices so uniquely Marcus's own. When I had the chance to speak with him over the phone, I fanboyed-out about this dexterity and acuity, his stylistic hopscotching. “In some ways,” he said, ... [READ MORE]
Inside the Issue: Kellie Wells reads from “A Unified Theory of Human Behavior”
The young heroine of Kellie Wells' "A Unified Theory of Human Behavior," the opening story in Issue 56 of American Short Fiction, observes the world around her with an affecting mixture of sorrow and humor. "Kellie Wells," writes the wonderful Matt Bell, "will break your heart with a sentence, with a story, with the irrepressible smile at her wit that lights across your face even as on the page sadness swells and grief abounds." The story chronicles a young girl's tangled efforts to make sense ... [READ MORE]
Along for the Ride: At the Waffle House with Mary Miller
The table at which I wait for Mary Miller in a Waffle House off US-183 in Austin is disappointingly well-kept. It’s my first experience with a Waffle House, so I expected and hoped for a table with spilled sugar crystals, the surface sticky with syrup. That the table has been recently wiped clean is briefly, marginally disappointing, and I feel slightly robbed of the desired authenticity. What I believe is the authentic Waffle House experience is how Mary Miller depicts it in the first few pages ... [READ MORE]