Join us this summer for a first-ever, limited-entry manuscript consultation and virtual craft series from the editors of American Short Fiction. Each registrant will receive detailed feedback on their submitted story and attend a series of three live virtual seminars focused on honing and refining their work with an editor's eye. Regular registration ($425) will close on June 15th. Note: Applications will be accepted on a first come, first served basis. This is not a juried application … [Read more...] about Register Now: 2021 Short Story Summer Camp
Fiction
The Vacant Field
I stood at the edge of a vacant field. Police who were not dressed as police were looking in the field for things that were dangerous. These were items left by a woman who was not dressed as a terrorist and who also was not one. She did wear a uniform. She was no longer there in the field. An officer picked up a wrench and threw it in my direction. I protested, “You threw that wrench right at me.” He didn’t respond. I repeated. “He threw that wrench right at me!” Nobody heard me. The … [Read more...] about The Vacant Field
Bread Week
1. Your father calls you train wreck, as in, HEY, wake up, train wreck, bud, you’re falling asleep—beady, bootblack eyes narrowed on you from the Hemingway chair in the basement. Your mother is memorizing two-letter words, your baby boy squeezing the dog’s fur, and gentle, gentle, your wife is saying, practice gentle on the giraffe. I don’t very well like the taste of rubber, says Paul Hollywood––suaven, yeasty fellow in a collar on TV. Your son likes rubber. Rubber rings––Rings of … [Read more...] about Bread Week
Ember
American Short Fiction · Ember by Pascha Sotolongo Chuchi marvels at the sparks brightening this darkest night, and I guess they are kind of pretty. You look up, let your eyes water against the cold, and can’t tell the embers from the stars. We don’t have a tree this year, so maybe smoldering flakes of the Brownsburg Public Library are as close to Christmas lights as we’re gonna get. Chuchi tilts his head all the way back, mouth open, and the orangey glow illuminates his features. Little swirls … [Read more...] about Ember
The North
My uncle was driving us north, where the enemy planes hadn’t yet attacked. He took turns drinking from a bottle with the man sitting up front. My parents and I were squeezed in the back. My mother closed her eyes and held me close. My father kept biting his lips. “Drink up,” my uncle said, passing the bottle to my father. My father returned the bottle untouched. Everybody else we knew had already left the city. My uncle was the only person still in town with a car. I didn’t know why we … [Read more...] about The North
Every Possible Landform, Weather Condition, and Natural Disaster: An Interview with Matthew Baker
Matthew Baker's second collection of short stories, Why Visit America (out now from Henry Holt), takes ambitious aim at this country's societal and political systems. Each story arrives through some manner of warped lens—a lens in which America, at first, appears very unfamiliar. New technologies, new borders, new pandemics. But the deeper into these stories you read, the more you recognize similar dangers at play in our own United States. The stories quickly cohere into a comprehensive map of … [Read more...] about Every Possible Landform, Weather Condition, and Natural Disaster: An Interview with Matthew Baker