Find out what lit mags are looking for by reading the best of what they publish, once weekly. Time. There’s too little of it. Work, family, friends—everywhere you turn, obligations. And on top of all that, you want to write and publish short stories. But how do you spend your precious writing time? You just keep compiling that running list of H.L. Menken quotes. Toward what end? Seriously, it’s like you want to fail… “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear

A tiny thing can do a lot of harm when it’s sharp enough… One of the benefits that comes with my random scouring of the internet for great, new short stories to profile is the manner of introduction I get to “new” authors. They’re new to me, but many of them are well established, with story collections published and, in many cases, acclaimed novels that I just haven’t crossed paths with. There’s something magical about being bowled over by a story unexpectedly. Of having that

Author of “Death of a Hotel Manager” in The Baltimore Review Welcome back to our Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A. Check out our archives for access to great short stories published through this year, including this posting from May: an appreciation of Gordon Brown’s rabble-rousing “Death of a Hotel Manager” (650 words) in The Baltimore Review. I strongly recommend reading this great, very short, short story, if you haven’t already, before dipping into this interview. Gordon grew

“Did you really not see me there?” Why does Short Story Shoutout fixate on new short stories, you might be wondering? Especially when there are so many exemplary works out there, written across hundreds of years by acclaimed masters of the craft, all of them having withstood the test of time. The simple answer is that we’re putting aside stories of old so that we can focus on today’s world and how the short story form is evolving to accommodate everything that springs from it

Author of “The Fishless Cycle” in Reed Magazine Welcome back to our Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A. Check out our archives for access to great short stories published through this year. E. P. Tuazon is a Filipino American writer from Los Angeles (and October is Filipino American History month.) You’ll remember E.P. from our May Shoutout of their fantastic short story “The Fishless Cycle” (4,150 words) published in Reed Magazine. I strongly recommend reading this amazing story (

“All the colors are brighter when the snow’s on.” How are we drawn into great short stories? Often it’s line by line. Consider “Deer Heart” (3,650 words) by Noah Davis in The Idaho Review’s latest: Paragraph one: “Five does follow the crease of the mountain toward the ravine.” Who / what is Five? Can we assume there are four more? Already working on the puzzle, which is engaging. Does carries a natural emphasis, as if Five is doing what the narrator expects it to, so there’s

Author of “Ancestral Milk” in The Rumpus Magazine Welcome back to our Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A. Check out our archives for access to great short stories published across the last half-year-plus, including this posting from June: an appreciation of Paige Kaptuch’s great, great grandmother of a story “Ancestral Milk” (5,300 words) in The Rumpus Magazine. I strongly recommend reading this amazing piece (via the link above), if you haven’t already, before reading this intervi

Give voice to what evades understanding. That’s what language can do. And love. Rearrange themselves to soften the blows. When I’m writing a short story, I try to keep the telling as clear and simple as possible. I’m always mindful that if I tax my audience too much, they might shut down and stop reading. I want to create enough space for individual story beats, lines of dialogue, specific details to stand out when they need to. That said, I don’t know that I ask myself enoug

Author of “Van Cleef” in BULL Literary Magazine Welcome back to our Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A. Check out our archives for access to great short stories published across the last half-year-plus, including this posting from May: an appreciation of Caroline Giudice’s genre-bending romance “Van Cleef” (3,100 words) in BULL Literary Magazine. I strongly recommend reading this great short story (via the link above), if you haven’t already, before dipping into this interview. Car

Jenny hugs me tight enough to pop my new head clean off. Across my screenwriting years, I was always in hot pursuit of the elusive, undeniably high concept script idea: something with an immediately intriguing premise that could be described in a sentence or two (aka the “elevator pitch”). It’s what every producer was chasing. And every producer was necessarily being chased by every screenwriter. High concept is often derided as being cheap or easy, especially in the world of

Author of “Mud Season” in Split Lip Magazine Welcome back to our Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A. Check out our archives for access to great short stories published across the last half-year-plus, including this posting from February: an appreciation of Amelia Valasek’s eerie opus “Mud Season” in Split Lip Magazine. Amelia Valasek is an Idahoan, the holder of a Masters of Art in Technical Writing and Communication. If you haven’t read “Mud Season” yet, check it out at the link a

“Hi Mister Fussypants,” I exhale, reaching for the baby. To my mind, there are two main ways to analyze a short story. The first is through an emotional read. Does the story engage you, does it reach you, does it move you? The second is via a technical read. How is it structured, what literary devices are deployed, does the story work? It goes without saying that without an emotional appeal, without heart, you’re dead in the water. But the same goes for the technical. If the

Author of “Fear Theory” in X-R-A-Y Magazine Welcome back to our Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A. Check out our archives for access to great short stories published across the last half-year-plus, including this posting from March: an appreciation of Lizzie Challen Hubbard’s horror-adjacent thrill ride “Fear Theory” in X-R-A-Y Magazine. Lizzie writes fiction and poetry in the United Kingdom. Her work was included in Desperate Literature’s Eleven Stories compilation for 2024 and h

“We once spent time building the man and now we just quietly wait for him to surrender.” What’s the word to start this week’s story appreciation? Is it courage? It might be. Insane would also work. Maybe it’s a phrase: a cultural nose-thumbing. No, it’s more straight forward than that. I think it’s ballsy… Nope. I’ve got it! Chutzpa. When I started reading “Comedy, Italian Style” (7,500 words) in The Brooklyn Review, I actually gasped out loud. I never thought I’d be in a sit

Author of “The Golden Apples of Little River, Alabama” in The Kenyon Review Welcome back to our Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A. Check out our archives for access to great short stories published across the last half-year-plus, including this posting from July: an appreciation of Kate Tooley’s fully engaging “The Golden Apples of Little River, Alabama” in The Kenyon Review. Other work of Kate’s has appeared in Witness, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Passages North, Pithead Chapel an

Sometimes the mind creates memories to help us see things more clearly. When I ask writers what they think the most vital element in a short story is, the one that comes up before all others—before setting, plot, central conflict, theme, point-of-view, pacing—is character. If a story is going to reach readers emotionally, it needs to come by way of a proxy; a stand-in for you. This character, whether it’s a person, a pig who befriends a spider, a Black Beauty of a horse, a wo

Author of “The Four Winds” in Blackbird Journal Welcome back to our Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A. Check out our archives for access to great short stories published across the last half-year-plus, including this posting from March: an appreciation of Grace Spulak’s riveting “The Four Winds” in Blackbird Journal. A writer and attorney based in her home state of New Mexico, Grace holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a JD from Harvard Law School. Her work

“God knows my heart, no matter what you think you know.” When I finished reading Kate Lister Campbell’s “Ape Opus” (7,100 words) in Salamander Magazine last week, I had a premonition: I saw it featured in the next Best American Short Stories anthology. From my keyboard to God’s…I want to type “ears,” but I guess modem? God’s ISP? The connection was obvious: This story of a woman’s religious epiphany, a full-on miracle, lining up squarely with my vision of Lister Campbell’s st

Author of “Breadcrumbs” in Hayden’s Ferry Review Welcome back to our new Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A. Check out our archives for access to great short stories published across the last half-year-plus, including this posting from May: an appreciation of Andrew Plimpton’s spellbinding “Breadcrumbs” in Hayden’s Ferry Review. Andrew lives in Western Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Dalhousie Review, Heavy Feather Review, and The Write Launch.

“My head turns sound into taste and color.” “Manatees Don’t Dream of Electric Boats” (3,000 words) by Bethany Bruno in The Journal’s latest issue gives readers a vibrant, near-term sci-fi take on environmentalism. Its title is a nod to Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (on which the 1982 film Blade Runner was based.) There’s some overlapping story-DNA between the two in how animals fare in a world shared with humans. by Julia Joppien on Unsplash