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.
What beach was this, he wasn’t certain. Rock and sand, a harbor town, and everywhere the sort of pottery he’d combed for as a boy in the 1940s. Let his brothers fill their pockets with sticks and shells, ordinary sea glass: he knew how to look for the curved ridge on the underside of a slice of saucer. Flip it over and find the blue flowers of Holland or China, a century ago or more. All his outgrown fixations had returned to him now that he was old. Once, on the beach outside their summer cottage down the Cape, he had discovered two entire clay pipes, eighteenth century, while his six older brothers sharked and sealed and barked in the water; beyond them he could see, almost, the ghosts of the colonists who had used the harbor as a dump, casting out their broken bowls and mugs so he could find them in his own era, put them in his own pockets. But this wasn’t the Cape, or even Massachusetts. His brothers were mostly dead. That is, they were all of them dead but in . . .
