The Short Fiction Competition is open for entries! The judge is the dazzling Tommy Orange, whose debut novel, There There, won the 2019 PEN/Hemingway Award, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was among the most acclaimed books of the year...
The editors are thrilled to announce the release of the Summer 2019 edition, designed by the seminal punk photographer Ruby Ray, with contributions from BBC National Short Story Award-winner Sarah Hall and the late Christopher Isherwood, among others...
Three stories from our 2018 catalog have been selected for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories 2019 anthology...
“To Get Rich Is Glorious” was awarded first prize in the 2017 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition, as judged by Maile Meloy.
Water Poured Out on the Ground
A girl, it’s announced. The mother weeps openly and, unable to look, feels a leady heaviness fill her bones. It is late and raining. A cold December day, 1980. The father leaves the room to smoke outside. Beneath the hospital’s awning, he watches the ground, where thin streams of water flow downhill away from him, like his daughter will. All daughters naturally do.
Back in the room, the grandmother holds the baby and, gazing into that blank, red face, names her Hang Chun Fu. It is an old woman’s nostalgia and wishfulness to want it all for this little girl.
She will be an only child—no . . .
