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.
NOON is a literary annual edited by Diane Williams, and the latest issue is the 10th. The magazine has been widely and highly praised for qualities that aren’t surprising to readers familiar with Williams’ work: the fiction is often brief, and its remarkable qualities are to be found on the sentence level rather than in the scope of the plot. Gary Lutz is no exception. Read more about the latest from NOON and Lutz after the jump. 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.
This week we’re directing you to One Story #118, “Hurt People” by Cote Smith. One Story is keeping short story love alive by sending subscribers exactly what it says, one story, every three weeks. The magazine is edited by Hannah Tinti — you may have noticed we’re rather fond of her around here — and has published some of our favorite writers: Ben Greenman, Lauren Groff, Nam Le, Kelly Link, Kevin Wilson, and many more. Issue #118 arrived in a very special envelope touting Cote Smith’s publishing debut. Read what we thought of it after the jump. 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. This week, we’re recommending an excerpt of “The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance,” a steampunk short story in the No. 10 issue of McSweeney’s that Slashfilm suggests is an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s new screenplay-in-progress, John Carter of Mars. 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.
This week, we’re recommending Michael Cera’s Pinecone in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #30. Yes, that Michael Cera. Although we love pointing you toward mostly-unknown writers in literary magazines that are not available on Amazon or in your local Barnes & Noble, we are endorsing this story because maybe you decided a long time ago you were over McSweeney’s, or maybe you roll your eyes when a movie star gets literary. If so, get over yourself. 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.
Only this week, we’re not just pointing you to one story. There are no less than nine links to excerpts, stories, and downloads for the 2009 Hugo Award nominations on the website for the 67th World Science Fiction Convention. If that sounds way too geeky for you, check out this list of some past Hugo winners: Michael Chabon, Susanna Clarke, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, J.K. Rowling, Isaac Asimov… the Hugos might presented each year at a giant nerd-con, but the work upon which the awards are bestowed quite often transcends the boundaries of genre.
Read our thoughts on two of the short story nominees, both of which have “monkey” in the title, after the jump.
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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.
When HarperPerennial’s Fifty-Two Stories blog updated this week, and the title and first line or so appeared in our RSS feed, we were pretty certain we had a strong Fiction Fix candidate on our hands. We were pleasantly surprised to click through and discover that the author is Blake Butler, who we’ve previously encountered online as one of the brains behind HTML Giant, “the internet literature magazine blog of the future.”
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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.
Continuing last week’s departure from the formal form of short story, this week’s Fiction Fix is “But Miss Ironbottom, I’m Already Wearing My P.E. Clothes” from new blog J. Cruel. A snottily charming satire of catalog writing, J. Cruel occasionally runs a few paragraphs providing character and narrative to fashion photos from runways and advertising. In this post Miss Ironbottom’s pupil and her offending P.E. outfit come from an American Apparel ad, featuring, according to J. Cruel, a “suspender swimsuit in bicycle-safe, gunpowder-proof silver lamé.” It’s important to rock silver lamé when riding your bike at night; tweed will only get you killed.
Since we ran Fiction Fix on Monday, we’re going to mix it up today and give a little love to poetry. Laura Goode has two poems in the current issue of Fawlt, and both are lovely. We chose to feature Dear Fred because we’re suckers for epistolary literature and Capote references. There was a time when we might have made Paul Varjak a mix tape, too.
“I might have canoodled you under the shadow/ of the Megadeth monolith, might have managed a motion/ picture soundtrack from the fire escape…”
Goode recently sold a YA novel called Sister Mischief to Candlewick Press, pitched as “The L Word meets Saved! meets Eminem’s 8 Mile.” Yeah, we’ll take that over Twilight any day.
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 know we’ve used this space to sing the praises of David Foster Wallace before, but this morning thanks to Gawker we stumbled across “Wiggle Room,” an excerpt from his forthcoming posthumous novel which runs alongside a heady profile on the author in this week’s New Yorker.
The latter we’re still trying to parse. We might revisit it after the Diet Coke buzz kicks in.
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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.
This week, your Fiction Fix is a long out-of-print short story by John Cheever, serialized on Five Chapters (note: start with Monday). The story is set in a charming post-WWI Boston, and follows the love affair between a young insurance agent and an exotic girl who lives across the river in Cambridge, and functions as a trailer for a few Cheever-related volumes out this spring. On her blog, Maud Newton uses Cheever to remind everyone that publishing, particularly of the short story, has suffered seriously before.
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