Category Archives: Short Stories
Flash Friday: Botox at Whitman-Walker
Botox at Whitman-Walker I once went to the Whitman-Walker Clinic with Billy so he could get his Botox injections. The clinic was only a few blocks from his apartment, but he said he wasn’t feeling great and didn’t think he … Continue reading →
Paper Airplanes
My short story Paper Airplanes has been published by Day One, a weekly literary magazine run by Amazon. I’m very happy that the story has finally found a home. First draft to final version took three years. In that time … Continue reading →
A New Man
A New Man Then there was this time Donnie and I sold drugs out of the Motel 6 on Georgia Avenue. We didn’t mean it to happen, but Donnie was staying there so he could be near his brother, Winchester, … Continue reading →
Paper Airplanes
My short story Paper Airplanes has been published by Day One, a weekly literary magazine run by Amazon. I’m very happy that the story has finally found a home. First draft to final version took three years. In that span … Continue reading →
Where Stories Come From: Failed Poems
I’m a short-story writer by temperament and inclination. By temperament, I mean what grabs my imagination is usually the stuff of short stories: a line of dialogue, a chance meeting, a curious detail – small moments after which things are … Continue reading →
Best Small Fictions 2017
My review of Best Small Fictions 2017 is up on the SmokeLong Quarterly site. As with all book reviews, there’s a bit of culling that has to be done when writing about an anthology of stories. A typical review doesn’t … Continue reading →
Don’t Be Afraid of Your Characters
A while back I wrote the blog post Don’t Be Afraid to Tell Your Story. In it I discussed the way Roxane Gay plunges into a story without much, if any, background, and how that makes her work powerfully captivating. … Continue reading →
Desert Boys
Topicality can kill otherwise good fiction. Politics, current events, new technologies might make a story seem immediate and important, but can also quickly date it, making it seem naive or, worse, irrelevant. Then there’s the danger of didacticism. Essays barely … Continue reading →
The Emerald Light in the Air
Baldly speaking, most of Donald Antrim’s characters in the collection The Emerald Light in the Air suffer from some form of mental instability, clinical depression or bipolar disorder. Men and women on the verge of a nervous breakdown is a … Continue reading →
How Short Can a Story Be?
Hemingway’s apocryphal six-word story – “For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.” — is justly famous. Not because he supposedly wrote it in mere seconds on a cocktail napkin in order to win a bet, but because it shows that a … Continue reading →
Stefen Styrsky 