When Atticus Books first invited me to submit thoughts on the short story, I immediately formed grand plans. I was going to write such an impassioned and persuasive essay that the masses were going to remember. For a brief moment, I was going to personally lead the...
Jayne Anne Phillips, a former writing instructor of mine at Rutgers-Newark, and a fantastic writer of the short form, referred to the “flash” piece as “one-page fiction.” (She made these pieces famous in her impossibly good Black Tickets.) I don’t think she liked the...
It is well known that the short story was invented by the Man in the Moon for two important reasons worth reminding ourselves of no matter where we live or what we’re made of: the first is that the Man in the Moon always found it difficult to finish a novel because of...
With stories whose endings are visible from the first sentence, or inferable from the length of web browser scrollbars, I don’t release my awareness of real time as I do with narratives long enough to settle into an illusion of merging with them. Instead I become...
In June 2004, I searched for 7 Eccles Street in Dublin. I never found it. I didn't find it because it's no longer there, the victim of nuns who extended a maternity hospital. I looked for the address because James Joyce made it famous in Ulysses, and Ulysses made me...
Imagine the scene in that Florida hotel room in the hour after Seymour Glass rid himself of half of his skull. Or picture how Hulga managed to get out of the barn and make it home once Manly Pointer took off with her prosthetic leg. And what did he do with the leg,...
Flash fiction is different. You don’t see it all too much, but when you do it stands out. Rather than a full-length short story that focuses on character and plot and motivation and verisimilitude and all that annoying shit they teach you as highly important in MFA...
What I love most about the short story is that you can do things that you can’t in a novel. Especially the short-short. Italo Calvino’s “All At One Point,” is one of my favorites. Who would read a whole novel about the fact that all matter and creation used to exist...
I remember reading somewhere, about five years ago, that more than half of all Americans between the ages of twenty and forty reported being in a band. The commentariat felt that this boded ill for the future of the music industry, having more participants than...
For the past couple of years, I’ve been working on the long form and haven’t written much short fiction. But whenever I feel like I need to step away from the novel I’ve been immersed and possibly bogged down in for months and recharge the imagination, I find that...