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.

Spring 2021 Edition

The editors are thrilled to announce the release of the Spring 2021 Edition, designed by the acclaimed artist Jeffrey Gibson, with contributions from Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Millhauser, PEN/Hemingway Award-winner Tommy Orange, and 2020 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition-winner Deborah Forbes, among others.

Five Questions with Jeffrey Gibson

Why did you accept the invitation to design the Spring 2021 edition of All-Story?
It was an opportunity that I’ve not had previously, and I’m working on a book project for which I’ll be the editor. So I’ve been paying a lot of attention to print material lately, and I thought this would be a perfect chance to have some fun with the format of a publication. 

Teeth
Miles Greaves

As a special online supplement to the Winter 2018/2019 issue, the editors present the prizewinning story from the 2018 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition, as judged by Colum McCann.

To get to work I had to cross the mouth of an alley, and as it neared me my armpits would pucker, because every day—out of the vibrating, leftmost limit of my leftmost eye—I would see a woman standing there, staring out of the alley, across the street, at a window in an opposing apartment building. The woman stared so energetically that crossing the line of her vision was like crossing the beam of a hose, and I would feel its pressure run along the length of my cheek, like a grandmother’s finger. The woman also stood, always, up to her ankles in a butter-colored puddle, and if a camera had grown out of my left ear, and if it had taken one photo of that woman each day as I passed, and if we had fanned those Polaroids out over a . . .