short stories
Posted inBlog Post, Books, Uncategorized

The Summer People of Shirley Jackson and Kelly Link

by Carrie Frye

Black Cardigan is a great newsletter by writer-editor Carrie Frye, who shares dispatches from her reading life. We’re thrilled to share some of them on Longreads. Go here to sign up for her latest updates. * * * There’s a wonderful, creepy Shirley Jackson story—you may already know it—called “The Summer People.” It’s about a couple from New York […]

Posted inFiction, Quotes

Honeymooning with Elizabeth Taylor, and Crying All the While: The Fiction of Margot Hentoff

by Anna Wiener

The Harper’s digital archive is a small and unsung national treasure, at least as far as I’m concerned; I’ve spent countless hours sifting through old issues, scanning for early work from familiar names and tracking down forgotten gems from authors whose bylines have largely faded. One such writer is Margot Hentoff, whose short story “Where Do […]

Posted inFiction, Quotes

Angela Carter on Myth and Deception in Hollywood

by Anna Wiener

Angela Carter’s short story “The Merchant of Shadows” first appeared in The London Review of Books in 1989. Set in Hollywood, the narrator is a young, male student conducting research on a famed but mysterious director. The story bends and twists, ricocheting between dark comedy, deep camp, and Carter’s signature surreal, Gothic sensibility. Carter was an ardent fan […]

Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes

‘Perhaps Lucia Berlin Will Begin to Gain the Attention She Deserves’

by Sari Botton

Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s Work in Progress site has excerpted the first story from A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, the newly released collection of short fiction by the late Lucia Berlin–who died in 2004, and was largely overlooked while she was alive. In the book’s foreword, author Lydia Davis writes, “Perhaps, with the […]