“Miss Snowfall” by Sofia Samatar
In Fallow, a group of people, like the Amish, or perhaps more precisely the Mennonites, build a new Noah’s arc, leave the Earth (which has been poisoned), and drift through…
Life Is a Joke and Death Is the Punchline
a cat to feed named Mr. Butts.
The Great Silence
Ted Chiang’s very short story, “The Great Silence” adds another set of questions to these speculations. Why, he asks, are we so interested in finding intelligence in the stars and…
Ted Chiang Uses Science to Illuminate the Human Condition
I think science and religion could more peacefully coexist if we could agree that they are trying to answer different questions; science is investigating the question, “how does the universe…
I’m an Award-Winning Short Story Writer and I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Either
What I’d forgotten: the way I could hold a short story in my head for the entire composition of it, how the first mysterious intimations — a sentence, an image, an exchange…
Why Are Men So bad at writing sex?
Male authors dominate the Bad Sex in Fiction awards, and it’s no coincidence
Appeasing the Beasts of Remembering
“I am the Avenging Echo,” Barhydt said. “I am the Beast of Remembering.” He gave the man a gentle slap on the side of the head and walked to the…
The 7 Scariest Little Girls in Literature
What makes the scary little girl so sensational? Films, especially, come back to the vacant-eyed and terrifying child again and again: from Wednesday Addams to the Shining twins, they stare…
Behold the Winners of the 280-Character Story Contest
Two weeks ago, we asked you to write 280-character short stories, in honor of the unasked-for, unappreciated, and frankly awful increase in Twitter’s tweet length restrictions. Uncannily, we wound up…
280-Character Story Contest
microfictions, illustrated {read}