Short Fiction Competition

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.

Summer 2021 Edition

The editors are thrilled to announce the release of the Summer 2021 edition, designed by the acclaimed filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, with contributions from National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award honoree Thomas Pierce, Story Prize winner Ben Stroud, and filmmaker and producer Sara Driver, among others.

Five Questions with Jim Jarmusch

Why did you accept the invitation to design the Summer 2021 edition of All-Story?
I had been asked previously but was very busy at the time, so I was honored to be asked again. I had seen beautiful issues designed by a lot of people I admire and know—Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, Autumn de Wilde, Julian Casablancas—and I was encouraged by how visually inspiring those issues were. I was happy to be able to design one, too.

Plum Island
Uzma Aslam Khan

As a special online supplement to the Winter 2019/2020 issue, the editors present the prizewinning story from the 2019 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition, as judged by Tommy Orange.

Beach plums bloom in June and ripen in August. Yesterday, I found some in the sand and dropped them in a crooked blue bowl that my love, Ciaran, made when he was a child. This morning, in the kitchen, he slices one in half with a fillet knife. We each take a half and chew, waiting for the flavors to speak. “Salty,” he says at last, “in that other way.”

I think, in a multitude of tongues, Which other way?

Salty means “sexy” in Urdu, yet in a sense that does not translate into English. The word, numkeen, which sounds nothing like salty, is said only of a woman. It implies that he . . .