We’re now in the throes of Short Story Month, a gleeful celebration of fiction writing with a word limit. Short stories are typically classified as any work amounting to fewer than 7,500 words, but of course, there’s much more to the form than that.
Working within a smaller frame, writers mustn’t meander; short stories often rely on economical descriptions of settings, spare dialogue exchanged between characters, and single scenes rather than years-long plots, although the latter isn’t entirely unheard of, either.
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A successful short story should, like any story, present a conflict that in some way or another resolves. Pretty, picturesque settings aren’t reason enough to construct, or engage with a work of fiction; they should also possess a few other traits, according to Kelly Luce, an editor who doles out the career-catapulting O. Henry Prizes. (For example, they should not relate a real-life drug experience, no matter how revelatory, and they should probably veer away from Dumpsters as motifs.)
The below short stories -- and abridged novel chapters -- thankfully, do neither, and we love them all the more for it.
1. “Jubilee” by Kirstin Valdez Quade
Published in Guernica In short: A college student attends a party her father was invited to cater.
2. “Beneath the National Palace of Culture” by Garth Greenwell
Published in Vice In short: An abridged excerpt from Greenwell’s novel, about unrequited sexual obsession.
Published in Crazyhorse In short: A Kansas sheriff plays cops and robbers with his rowdy sons.
Happy reading!
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