Short Story. Fiction Podcasts. Paris Review Editor Lorin Stein’s Book Bag: Ann Beattie, Ken Kalfus, and Other Short Stories. Come with me through 117 pages of euphemisms, bureaucracy, and mayhem.
Oops, April 15th… Why do they call it a tax “return”? The cable company doesn’t call its bill a “waste-of-time return.” Or is the IRS saying that, since government prints the money, we’re supposed to return it to where it came from? Anyway… Got up bright and early this morning—by freelance-writer standards—around 10:30 AM. Freelance Writer, Let Me Point Out Some Further IRS Abuses of the English Language… I have a file cabinet.
At least no tipping is expected. Googled “File Income Tax”… Found a lot of ads offering to do this for free. Scrolled Down… Until I came to irs.gov/Filing, which I take to be the real thing. Clicked… And got a page with the IRS logo. I’m easily distracted when doing my taxes, aren’t you? Page with Crest Was Titled… “Do I Need to File a Tax Return?” Had thought there was a law about that. The IRS wanted me to answer some questions. Clicked Some More… Got “Your Rights as a Taxpayer.” Address Is Requested… Short Stories You Should Read - elliott holt. Five Chapters. Selected Shorts: Selected Shorts. Untitled. Classic Short Stories. This is a listing of the stories by author with mention of the books that the stories were taken from or mention of the person who so graciously supplied the story to Classic Short Stories.
Bravo!! We have also added a word count for those who have a limited amount of time and would prefer to gauge the length of the story to the amount of time they have. Thomas Bailey Aldrich Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, Marjorie Daw, FAMILY BOOK OF BEST LOVED SHORT STORIES 189-207 (1954) Word Count: 7419. Honore de Balzac de Balzac, Honore, A Passion in the Desert, A TREASURY OF SHORT STORIES 60-69 (1947) Word Count: 5565.
Ambrose Bierce Bierce, Ambrose, Beyond the Wall, submitted by Annalee Elliot (1999) Word Count: 3448. Paul Bowles Bowles, Paul, In the Red Room, submitted by Cathy Word Count: 3690. Willa Cather Cather, Willa, Paul's Case, ANTHOLOGY OF FAMOUS AMERICAN STORIES 681-697 (1953) Word Count: 8970. Anton Pavlovich Checkhov Stuart Cloete Richard Connell. 2011's best short stories. Are these hard times for the short story?
Perhaps not so very tough: in his introduction to The Best British Short Stories: 2011 Nicholas Royle mentions the increase in UK-based paper and ink publications regularly publishing short fiction and concludes that "there have been harder times for the short story", and I think he's right. In the introduction to the The Granta Book of the African Short Story, meanwhile, Helon Habila notes that across the continent "the internet is today doing what the newspapers and magazines did to the development of the short story in Europe and America at the start of the industrial age". You won't find any internet-only publications below, simply because this year, all my time was taken up with reading traditionally published collections. A brief survey of the short story. National Short Story Day. 25 Favorite Short Stories. In his Devil’s Dictionary , Ambrose Pierce defined a novel as “a short story padded.”
This is an all too apt description. The inability to prune a story to its essential story is an unfortunate quality shared by many modern writers and the primary reason that bookshelves are filled with bloated novels. The Best Short Story Collections of 2011. A good short story is perhaps as close to perfect as writing can get - with not a sentence to waste or a word to spare.
And what better way to bracket your day (especially in this digital day and age) than with these - the best short fiction collections as chosen by Readings bookseller Alec Patric. SilenceRodney Hall A giant of Australian letters focuses his genius into the newest of forms – flash fiction. Each piece is an ingenious creation, made in collaboration with James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Henry James and other ‘silent’ partners. Thought CrimesTim Richards Australia doesn’t have a more courageous writer. Richards pushes the short form as far as it will go and finds new ways to appal and amaze, disturb and delight. Stories. Reviews. Short Stories. The Best Philippine Short Stories Index. The 10 best short-story collections of the ’00s. Not all the action in the ’00s was in novels and non-fiction books, so here’s a selection of the decade’s best short-form collections.
Pastoralia, George Saunders (2000)George Saunders’ prose is a rare thing: It’s deftly funny while deeply perceptive about human nature. His Pastoralia collects a series of stories set in a vague future that could pop up years from now or tomorrow, a place where consumerism and corporate culture account for nearly all human interaction. It could be kind of a drag, or it could be the latest failed spin on Orwellian fear-mongering, but somehow, in Saunders’ hands, it all becomes hilarious before it becomes despairing. Saunders sees the end of the world in the way we’ve been overrun by a corporatism that creeps like kudzu, and his stories offer hope only in that their protagonists, against all odds, somehow remain human and capable of cracking jokes about it. Best story: The title tale situates two people in a zoo, where they must act like cavemen. Reading the Short Story. Short Stories All the Time. Intro to Fiction Writing.
One Story’ Names the Top 10 Short Stories of All Time. As a fitting finale to National Short Story Month, we asked the talented crew over at One Story to name their ten favorite epigrammatic tales.
Tanya Rey, the managing editor, explained via e-mail that their choices are in no particular order, so anti-Salingerists are advised to not get all huffy just because JD leads the list. Tanya writes, “Certain authors (e.g., Cheever, Moore, Johnson, Barthleme) were nominated more than once, for different stories, so we tried to choose the most ‘classic’ of those stories. This was not exactly a scientific or objective process.” However, we stand behind the choices because they’re some of our favorites as well. What do you think, dear readers? “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor” by JD Salinger “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor” was originally published in 1950 in the New Yorker to great acclaim; it was later included in the collection Nine Stories. Short Stories. The 50 Best Short Stories of All Time. Chris Priestley's top 10 scary short stories for Halloween.
Ever since he was a teenager, Chris Priestley has loved unsettling and creepy stories, with fond memories of buying comics like House of Mystery and Strange Tales, watching classic BBC adaptations of MR James stories every Christmas and reading all manner of assorted weirdness from Edgar Allan Poe to Ray Bradbury.
He is the author of the Tales of Terror series which won the Dracula Society's Children of the Night Award for best book with a Gothic horror theme, and his latest book. Mister Creecher, picks up where Frankenstein left off. "When I was a teenager in the 1970s we did not really have books written especially for the teen market. When we felt like moving on from children's books, we moved into accessible adult fiction. I read some fantasy - Robert E Howard's Conan series for example - but I was always much more interested in SF and horror. 1. This is a superbly creepy and grotesque short story by the great Graham Greene. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Saki is a curious writer. 10.