Let’s talk about sex, anonymously: New York writers Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan and Hillary Jordan on their new anthology of unattributed erotica
“We all have this conversation about who can write what,” Jordan says. “This collection asks, does it matter?”
“I think everyone in some way is an outsider”: Kate Cayley on short stories, literary tradition, and why she would be hesitant to read a novel she had written
“Art is a way of remembering what it is like to be alive when you may have forgotten,” says Cayley.
A.C. Wise channels unease and melancholy in her story collection The Ghost Sequences
In this suite of sixteen uncanny tales, memory and loss are manifest in the spectres that haunt various characters.
The annual anthology series Best Canadian Stories celebrates fifty years of showcasing Canada’s proficiency and variety in the literary form
“The function of it was the pleasure of the work for readers, and the value to writers was to show them how good they had to get,” says longtime series editor John Metcalf.
Labyrinthine nightmares: “Treading the Maze” by Lisa Tuttle
Tuttle’s brand of quiet horror is at once a rejoinder to a genre that leans heavily on masculine aggression and a means to achieve effects more unsettling than an explicit presentation could ever be.
Stalking the self: “Consequences” by Willa Cather
Cather’s use of a close third-person narration lends her story an uncanny element of unease and creepiness.
The most wild, homely narrative: “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe
Poe’s 1843 tale is not only one of the greatest horror stories ever written; it is also a pristine example of internal integrity in the short form.
Shashi Bhat blurs the line between novels and short fiction in her new book, The Most Precious Substance on Earth
Though Bhat’s new book is described as her second novel, the individual pieces comprise all the attributes of linked stories.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 31: “Precious Bane” by Gerald Murnane
A Borgesian story about literary posterity and the fickleness of memory, from an Australian master.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 30: “Gazebo” by Raymond Carver
A powerful monument to what the short form is capable of from “the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century.”