R.L.Stevenson says: There are, so far as I know, three ways and three only of writing a story. You may take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a character and choose incidents and situations to develop it, or, lastly, you may take a certain atmosphere and get actions and persons …
Have you read a short story written entirely in dialog? The latest issue of New Yorker has one such story by E.L.Doctorow. No quotation marks, no ‘he-said/she-said’s, no explanations or descriptions – just lines and lines of dialog. Stylistically very chic, don’t you think? So he’s there. What—hitting on your wife? No, that won’t happen. …
If you had told me yesterday that I would be recommending a short story set in 2024 with impossible science-fictionesque assumptions and which features a father who encourages his son on his first experience with drugs, I would have laughed at the improbability. But today is different. The Truth and All Its Ugly by Kylie …
Today, I read Departure by Alistair Morgan, a poignant story that appeared in Paris Review last summer and surprise! is available to read online. The story, set in South Africa, is about a couple, Anna and Miles who are checking out the venue for their upcoming wedding. From the start, it is obvious that they …
When I thought about short stories I loved, this is one of the first few that came to my mind. I must have read it, perhaps, a month or two ago, but it lingered in my mind. The hard part was finding it again. I remembered neither the title nor the author, but the story …