Zoetrope: All-Story is a finalist for the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction, the highest honor due an American periodical, for the stories “The Grotesques” by Sarah Hall and “24, Alhaji Williams Street” by ’Pemi Aguda...
The editors are thrilled to announce the release of the Winter 2020/2021 edition, designed by the acclaimed artist Deborah Roberts, with contributions from National Book Award finalists Elizabeth McCracken and Jim Shepard, among others.
Many thanks to all who entered the 2020 Short Fiction Competition. We appreciate the opportunity to read such bright and brilliant new work. From more than 2,200 submissions, guest judge Téa Obreht has announced results.
When I was a girl I had a doll that was my size. She had a wardrobe that matched my own. When I wore the rabbit-fur muff and the rabbit-fur hat and went ice-skating, she’d wear them, too, and she’d sit beside my limousine driver, watching me. Sometimes I’d tell Michel that my doll had to sit on his lap, and while I skated in circles I’d wave to her, and Michel, thinking I was waving to him, would wave back. When it grew dark, I wouldn’t want to go home. I wouldn’t want to go back to my apartment where the heat was always on high and coming out of the vent, continually making the drapes in my room shudder. Michel would appear at the railing holding my doll, and he’d call for me, telling me that it was time to leave, that Central Park was not a place for a ten-year-old girl at night.
“Your NouNou is preparing your dinner,” he’d say . . .
