Writers, take note: today is the last day to enter Flavorwire’s first-ever short fiction contest. In honor of May’s National Short Story Month, we’re offering a prize of $500 for one outstanding short story. To enter, simply send a story of 5,000 words or less — in the body of a message, not as an attachment — along with a brief author bio and all relevant contact information to flavorwirefiction@gmail.com before midnight tonight. Flavorwire Literary Editor Emily Temple will judge all entries and announce the results on the 24th. We’ll publish the winning story, along with a handful of honorable mentions, on Flavorwire throughout the final week of May. … Read More
short stories
Announcing Flavorwire’s First Short Fiction Contest
Flavorwire is thrilled to announce its first-ever short fiction contest. In honor of May’s National Short Story Month, we’re offering a prize of $500 for one outstanding short story. To enter, simply send a story of 5,000 words or less — in the body of a message, not as an attachment — along with a brief author bio and all relevant contact information to flavorwirefiction@gmail.com by Friday, May 17. Flavorwire Literary Editor Emily Temple will judge all entries and announce the results on the 24th. We’ll publish the winning story, along with a handful of honorable mentions, on Flavorwire throughout the final week of May. … Read More
10 (More) Wonderful Short Stories to Read for Free Online
Around this time last year, we gave you a list of a few of our all-time favorite short stories that were available to read online for free. By now, we expect that you’ve read them all, so we thought it was high time to collect a few more. After the jump, ten more short stories that you can read for free — on your phone on the train, while pretending to work, printed out with a cup of tea on the couch — all of them guaranteed to be great (and a few that were suggested by readers on our first go-around). But of course, the Internet abounds with these, so if you’ve a generous spirit, you could even add to our list in the comments. Happy reading. … Read More
10 Wonderful Short Films Based on Famous Short Stories
Here at Flavorpill, we’re total suckers for short stories — in any form. The idea of short stories being used as source material for films — even feature films — is nothing new (hello, Brokeback Mountain), but this week, PWxyz pointed us towards a gorgeous short film we had never seen before, based on one of our favorite short stories, Franz Kafka’s “A Country Doctor.” Inspired, we dug up a few more wonderful short films based on short stories, both professional and amateur, which could serve either to accent your understanding of a story, or, you know, let you off easy. After all, there’s nothing lower-effort than kicking back and watching videos online. Even if they’re literary. Click through to check out the films, and let us know which short story you’d love to see in short film form in the comments. … Read More
Interactive Reading: Storigami
Bored of your usual rectangular reading material? Or even just bored at your desk? featherproof books, one of the most inventive and interesting indie presses around (and the publisher of two of our very favorite books of 2010 – Lindsay Hunter’s Daddy’s and Patrick Somerville’s The Universe in Miniature in Miniature), and purveyors of several free downloadable “mini-books”, have pioneered a whole new way to read short stories: in origami form. Hence, though we’re sure you’ve already gotten there, storigami. Fair warning: they’re kind of hard. We don’t remember origami being this hard, but maybe our minds were just more pliable when we were children. Or was it the paper that was more pliable? No matter. We suggest starting with The Fox – it’s the easiest, and may wake up some decades-dormant origami muscles. Plus, much like pistachios, stories just taste better if you have to work a little bit to get at them. No one really likes pre-shelled pistachios. If you think you’re up to the challenge, just print out the images, follow the instructions, and then read and let the stories – wait for it – unfold. … Read More
Daily Dose Pick: T.C. Boyle’s Wild Child
Boundary-pushing author T.C. Boyle’s latest short-story collection offers a strong combination of varied genres and literary inquiries.
Though the 14 selected pieces in Wild Child and Other Stories have little to do with one another — apart from all sharing Boyle’s interrogative imagination — the book’s overall effect is like looking at a subtly distorted mirror. Stories range from the title piece’s un-sentimentalized retelling of the tale of a feral boy found in late 18th-century France to a Borges-worthy look at practical existentialism in “Sin Dolor” and the teardown of typical pet/owner relationships in “Thirteen Hundred Rats.” … Read More
John Hughes in Very, Very Short Form
Though the creative output of John Hughes had slowed to a crawl in the decade preceding his death in August at age 59, the iconic director’s alter ego JL Hudson wasn’t taking to retirement quite so easily. Penning screenplays, essays, and fiction for his own amusement, some of his later writing — imbued with the same irreverent, sly but tender narrative quality as his film work — saw the light of day as a series called Very, Very Short Stories (some only four brief paragraphs in length). Excerpts after the… Read More
Electric Literature Gets Animated
Newcomer lit mag Electric Literature wowed us with its first issue last summer; the periodical has since released a second issue featuring writers-we-love Lydia Davis and Pasha Malla, plus an animated video series to boot. Expanding on its ethos of _bringing literary geekdom back to pop culture, Electric Literature engages readers old and new with outreach into other art forms and across multiple platforms. Peep artist Jonathan Ashley’s animation, taken from a single sentence out of Stephen O’Connor’s epic story in the current issue (also excerpted after the… Read More
Exclusive: James Lasdun Shares His Favorite Short Story Bedfellows
“I’m in love with you,” she’d told him matter-of-factly, “and it’s beginning to hurt.”
So goes a climactic moment in the story that gives James Lasdun’s new collection, It’s Beginning to Hurt, its name. The story in question is barely three pages long, but Lasdun writes like an iceberg, meaning that those three pages represent just the one-eighth we can see floating above the water. Here’s what The Rumpus had to say about the collection: “The delivery of a revelation, the subtle gesture that shifts the reality of everything that has come before—these are Lasdun’s bread and butter, giving his stories their understated… Read More
Breathing Deeply with Lydia Peelle: Short Stories of Things Past
Lydia Peelle’s debut story collection assembles eight rough-cut narrative gems, of which two have already garnered Pushcart Prizes and one more an O. Henry Short Story Award. Not bad for a fresh voice on the scene. A native of Boston, Peelle now lives in Nashville, the city center of an agrarian swath of Tennessee where most of the tales are… Read More
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