An anthology of flash fiction and conversations on craft with South Asian writers This is a unique collection of flash fiction, writing prompts, and interviews by and about talented writers of South Asian heritage. The stories range from math problems to the moon, from food to families, and everything that makes people want to share […]
This brilliant new collection by Jude Higgins showcases her mastery of condensed storytelling. Subtle, nuanced, and full of depth, Clearly Defined Clouds is run through with dreams and magic, the unexpected and the playful (see the Greek god piloting a paraglider). Higgins’ characters are peculiar, intelligent, flawed, and seeking. There’s an exquisite balance of richness and white […]
From the internationally bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies comes an exquisitely crafted work of fiction. In these short stories Jhumpa Lahiri sets her gaze on the eternally beautiful city of Rome, illuminating the frailties of the human condition and dissecting lives lived on the margins. A man recalls a summer party that awakens an […]
A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. A professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until […]
The nation’s favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its fourteenth year Inspired by Giles Gordon and David Hughes’s Best Short Stories series, which ran to ten volumes between 1986 and 1995, Best British Short Stories this year reaches its thirteenth volume. Best British Short Stories 2024 showcases an excellent and varied selection […]
Princesses who never wanted to be rescued… debutantes who are unwilling to keep quiet about politics just to preserve their marriage prospects… fairy tale characters who question key motivations in their own, now-famous stories… The protagonists of Sara Maitland’s remarkable short fiction all seem to be bursting at the seams of their own characterisation, challenging our […]
Two teenage girls fixated on each other’s bodies enter into a destructive competition; a woman’s encounter with her ex forces her to reflect on the women’s group that saved her; a couple’s future is called into question after the damp expert they hire for their bathroom offers them free counselling; an older man’s buried grief […]
DESCRIPTION: A fleet of fake men called ‘blots’ is unleashed onto the dating apps of San Francisco, intent upon conning vulnerable women out of their data, in the exquisite title story Out There. Companion story Big Sur focuses on the reality of the blots’ personal experiences. A sculptor, trapped in a skyscraper restaurant when a […]
DESCRIPTION: “It’s only for two weeks. I parrot my mum’s words. I’m safe here, there’s nothing to fear, it’s just me and my nan. A chance to bond again after all those years. It’s not as if my dad is going to pop round for tea, that I’ll go downstairs and find him sat at his […]
DESCRIPTION: Ambitious and playful, darkly humorous and imaginative, these strikingly original stories move effortlessly between the realistic and the fantastical, as their outsider characters explore what it’s like to be human in the twenty-first century. Whether about our relationship with the environment and animals, technology, social media, loneliness, or the enormity of time, they reflect […]