We’ve heard that nobody reads anymore. In fact, during his reading at this year’s New Yorker Festival, Gary Shteyngart described his upcoming novel as a view of a futuristic, totally illiterate New York — “So, next Tuesday,” he quipped. Ouch. Here at Flavorpill, we know that a healthy dose of legitimate literature is essential to offset all the tweeting and Facebooking we do every day, so fight the good fight and read something. Stephen King’s new short story, “Premium Harmony,” for example.

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Have you consulted the Flavorpill food pyramid lately? You’ll notice that we recommend a weekly dose of Fiction Fix as an essential part of your healthy cultural diet. You may not have time for novels, but short stories are like Flintstones vitamins: quick, fun, and good for you! Read this one, and don’t forget to grab a lollipop on your way out.

This week, Fiction Fix ventures not exactly into oldie-but-goodie territory, but somewhere close by, because we’re featuring Jhumpa Lahiri, America’s unofficial short short laureate. Lahiri’s story, “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar,” is currently Narrative‘s story of the week.  The story comes from Lahiri’s already-classic debut book of stories, Interpreter of Maladies (which she followed up with last year’s Unaccustomed Earth, now out in paperback). Read More »

Have you consulted the Flavorpill food pyramid lately? You’ll notice that we recommend a weekly dose of Fiction Fix as an essential part of your healthy cultural diet. How come? Well, you may not have time for novels, but short stories are like Flintstones vitamins: quick, fun, and good for you! Read this one, and don’t forget to grab a lollipop on your way out.

The New York Review of Books has its third annual fiction issue out this week, and it contains a new story by Claire Messud, authoress of 2006′s much-lauded The Emperor’s Children and wife of New Yorker uber-critic James Wood.  In “Land Divers,” Messud leaves behind the Ivy League flaneurs of her novel for an Australian family on vacation. Read More »

Have you consulted the Flavorpill food pyramid lately? You’ll notice that we recommend a weekly dose of Fiction Fix as an essential part of your healthy cultural diet. How come? Well, you may not have time for novels, but short stories are like Flintstones vitamins: quick, fun, and good for you! Read this one, and don’t forget to grab a lollipop on your way out.

This week’s Fiction Fix comes to us from Fifty Two Stories, a website from Harper Perennial dedicated to posting one new or classic short short every week this year.  A couple of weeks ago, the selection was “Immortal,” a story from My Goat Ate Its Own Legs, Alex Burrett’s new collection of “tales for adults.”  The straightforwardly named story centers on one so-called Immortal and his life in and around an ancient English cottage: Think Tuck Everlasting meets the the parts of the fourth Harry Potter book set in Little Hangleton, the site of Voldemort’s ancestral home (c’mon, you’ve read it, or at least seen the movies).  Burrett’s story totally nails that creepy fairytale aura he’s aiming for:

Every hundred years or so, someone on this planet doesn’t die when they should. They get to a certain age, then stop aging. Our immortal is one of them.

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Have you consulted the Flavorpill food pyramid lately? You’ll notice that we recommend a weekly dose of Fiction Fix as an essential part of your healthy cultural diet. How come? Well, you may not have time for novels, but short stories are like Flintstones vitamins: quick, fun, and good for you! Read this one, and don’t forget to grab a lollipop on your way out.

There’s a new story from Lorrie Moore, master of Midwestern yarns, in this week’s New Yorker. Adapted from Moore’s forthcoming novel, A Gate at the Stairs, “Childcare” introduces us to Tassie, a farm girl who goes away to college, where she has her first brushes with both Chinese food (“These odd Chinese vegetables — fungal and gnomic in their brown sauce — had for me the power of an adventure or a rite, a statement to be savored”) and liberal education:

Twice a week, a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of stunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James’s masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie. Read More »

Have you consulted the Flavorpill food pyramid lately? You’ll notice that we recommend a weekly dose of Fiction Fix as an essential part of your healthy cultural diet. How come? Well, you may not have time for novels, but short stories are like Flintstones vitamins: quick, fun, and good for you! Read this one, and don’t forget to grab a lollipop on your way out.

When’s the last time you saw the word “icebox”? “Idols,” Tim Gautreaux’s short story in this week’s New Yorker, reminds us of the stories we used to read in middle school English classes. We were never sure if their authors were intentionally cultivating an old-fashioned air or they just sounded that way because our school never bothered to update our pre-Cold War textbooks. We’ve got a feeling that Gautreaux, whose third novel, The Missing, came out earlier this year, falls squarely into the “intentional” camp. Read More »

This week, Fiction Fix takes a break from our standard tough-love, “read this or else!” strategy to try a kinder, gentler tack: we recommend you listen to some fiction as read by a hot guy. Lapham’s Quarterly, shamelessly pandering to James Franco’s current obsession with the Beats, enlisted the Spiderman actor (whose own short story collection is forthcoming) to read some Kerouac. The result: Franco’s dulcet tones draw us in to Kerouac’s seminal story of Dean, Carlo, Mary Lou, et. al. Sure, you probably should have read it in high school, but on some level, your 10th grade self must have been holding out for the Hollywood hunk audio version.

Have a listen here, and move on to the complete novel here.

The goal of each installment of the Fiction Fix is to present you with a bite-sized capsule of fiction. Operating under the assumption that novels require the kind of time commitment you may not have, we scour literary magazines and new story collections to recommend one (just one!) short story that is most certainly worth your time.

Jean Thompson, who gets called “America’s Alice Munro” so often that she might as well print up business cards, has a new short story collection, Do Not Deny Me: Stories, out this week. The second story in the collection, “Wilderness,” was featured last year in One Story, a literary magazine after Fiction Fix’s own heart — the brainchild of Hannah Tinti, they send subscribers one complete, excellent, free-standing short story every three weeks. Read More »

The Fiction Fix is your weekly dose of short story. If that’s not your drug of choice, too bad: consider it medicine. Every week, we’ll scour the literary magazines you don’t have time to read, online and in print, and let you know where to find one story worth reading.

We’ve been meaning to tell you about Pasha Malla‘s story collection, The Withdrawal Method, for a while now.It’s good and weird and a little imperfect in that way that writers sometimes are before they hit it exactly right and publish something that blows your mind. Read More »

The Fiction Fix is your weekly dose of short story. If that’s not your drug of choice, too bad: consider it medicine. Every week, we’ll scour the literary magazines you don’t have time to read, online and in print, and let you know where to find one story worth reading.

Oh my god, you guys, it’s National Short Story Month! [crickets] Yeah, for some reason this month gets a bit less love than National Poetry Month. Fortunately, this tragically neglected medium has us to bring you fun and excitement in the form of short fiction each week. Today we point to Fogged Clarity, a nascent online-only mag that is updated once a month [full disclosure: the Clarity was kind enough to publish the work of one of your fine Flavorpill writers a few months back. But you know we wouldn't be pimping this story, written by a person we don't know, if we didn't love it.]

Read on after the jump. Read More »