SHORT FICTION

Welcome to the 2025 short fiction thread! This is where we can gather to discuss all forms of short fiction. By which I mean, broadly speaking, short stories.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, a short story is a "brief fictional prose narrative that is shorter than a novel and that usually deals with only a few characters". For the Oxford online dictionary, it's "a story with a fully developed theme but significantly shorter and less elaborate than a novel". I think those definitions will suffice for our purpose. Basically, if it's short and you feel like discussing it, this is the place to visit.

Links to previous threads:
Short Stories And Microfiction: A Thread | Club Read 2023
SHORT FICTION | Club Read 2024

I am continuing my goal of reading a short story a day and posting a short blurb about them, mainly to remain accountable. Here's the latest, still from The Best American Short Stories 2009. (reposted from my thread)

A Man Like Him by Yiyun Li
Published 2008 in The New Yorker, 16 p.

Teacher Fei is retired and lives with his elderly mother so that she can remain at home despite her dementia. He becomes obsessed with the story of a teenage girl who is suing her father for having an affair.

This story is based on a news article the author followed for several months about a young girl in China who sued to have her father, as a member of the Communist Party, imprisoned for infidelity. The author created a character who was equally fascinated with the case, but for a different reason.

The Briefcase by Rebecca Makkai
Published 2008 in New England Review, 9 p.

A man escapes from a chain gang and impersonates the professor who gets swept up to take his place. Also based on a true event in which a relative of the author's was abducted to make up the numbers in a line of prisoners and is never seen again.

Magic Words by Jill McCorkle
Published 2008 in Narrative Magazine, 9 p.

A woman contemplates her upcoming assignation, as she fools her kids and husband. An elderly woman regrets the estrangement from her son. A violent teen assaults and terrifies those around him. In a mere nine pages, the author depicts three scenarios and how they intersect. At the same time, she explores the usage of the words "please" and to a lesser extent "thank you," from banal throw away niceties to heartfelt connections with others.

I benefited from the author's note about how she came to write the story, which I read afterwards to avoid spoilers. I then went back to the story and skimmed for the key words. A lot going on in 9 pages. Quite tense too.

>3 labfs39: how interesting!

Grave of the Fireflies by Akiyuki Nosaka
Translated by James R. Abrams

A heart-wrenching and deeply personal exploration of loss, survival, and the devastating human toll of war. Set in Japan during the final months of World War II, the story follows the tragic lives of Seita, a teenage boy, and his younger sister, Setsuko, as they struggle to survive in the aftermath of relentless air raids and societal collapse. Inspired by his own experiences during the war, Nosaka captures the unflinching realities of hunger, desperation, and isolation. Nosaka avoids romanticizing the siblings’ plight, instead portraying their slow descent into despair with harrowing precision. The narrative is unrelenting in its portrayal of human suffering, but it also highlights moments of tenderness and love between Seita and Setsuko.

I am not going to copy all the reviews from my thread but Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, January-February 2025 was entertaining as usual and had a few very good stories:

"Enjoy the Silence" by Libby Cudmore plays on the cliches of the genre in a marvelous way. PI Martin Wade is sitting in his office when a damsel in distress walks in and asks him to find a friend she had not seen in awhile. The job is rapped in quickly but before Martin can turn around, the friend is found dead and things start looking uncomfortable for everyone involved. The skeleton of the story is certainly overused in the field but Cudmore manages to give it new clothes that make the story a lot more than it promises on the tin. It is probably the strongest story in the issue - and it is my favorite.

A reprinted story by Charlaine Harris ("The One That Got Away") introduces us to Lily - a private detective with a painful past who is hired to tail a lawyer in Memphis. It looks like an easy job until the lawyer meets the man who is responsible for that painful past. The tailing job soon takes the back seat while Lily deals with the old tragedy. One of the stronger stories in the issue writing-wise.

More on my thread (or in the work itself) :)

And a few from today:

Dead Dog Mans the Lighthouse by Max Franciscovich
short story, fantasy?, 6,134 words, Strange Horizons, 6 Jan 2025, available online

After a dead dog washes next to a lighthouse, the only person living there decides to revive it. Unfortunately that means burning its body -- so a new body is needed. And Marvelie decides to make a human out of it. The problem of course is that the consciousness is that of a dog so living in a body which is not like the ones they know is not the easiest thing (and its mistress is not really the warm kind of a person). The story is told from the viewpoint of the ex-dog - which limits the scope of how much we learn. The dog in the shape of a person (as it introduces itself) believes that it is magic but one wonders if at least part of it is not science (especially when a radio correspondent tell it the story of a missing professor). But the later parts of the story do hint at actual supernatural element. I liked the way the story ended - it may have not resolved all the issues but it did change the life of our dog just enough. Plus an ending with hope is always better than a sugary "all ends well" one.

===
Flame Tree Publishing Newsletter sends 2 flash fiction stories with every month (then it publishes the newsletter online a month later). Subscription here: here (the stories are towards the bottom of each newsletter). This month's stories (there was a topic for this month: Broken Crowns):

Restoration by Rich Larson
short story, fantasy, ~1000 words, Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter, January 2025

A man who is good at fixing old artifacts is transported to the capital to repair an old crown. I half-expected that the end of the story and I still found it very well executed and its shortness helps pull off the ending.

The Saving Bones by Andrew Kozma
short story, fantasy, ~1000 words, Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter, January 2025

The story's first sentence is probably the best way to review it: "Every year the crown was broken, and every year a new crown was forged from a child’s bones." Even with a story that short, there should have been more to it. We get to meet the orphan who is about to die this year but neither her nor the old woman who tries to convince her to participate are convincing. It is a nice setup and opening scene... but that's about it.

Two short stories from Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2020 edition

Sinew and Steel and What They Told by Carrie Vaughn
A nice feel good story, well told.

Little Free Library by Naomi Kritzer
Liked the story, based on a fun idea. Didn’t take much to the writing, which felt a bit flat though not bad.

>5 stretch: you must watch the short film of this story. Friend of mine showed it to me and it was just devastating. that didnt stop me from watching it again and again and passing it on to others.

I read Gina Chung's collection of short stories, Green Frog (2024) which I thought was excellent. One of the stories - Presence - is available online for free here: https://electricliterature.com/presence-by-gina-chung/

>10 rasdhar: That's quite a story, Rasdhar. Her writing is so vivid. I've also signed up for Electric Lit's newsletter. Thank you for sharing.

>11 labfs39: Glad you enjoyed it! And Electric Lit is an interesting website. I like the reading lists they publish, as well as their best of book lists - they usually have books that I don't see mentioned on more mainstream sources.

The Standing Chandelier by Lionel Shriver (2017)

I rarely describe writing with such superlatives, but this is such a brutal story - and I don't mean in the sense of physical violence, but emotional. I am following Lisa's example of reading a short story everyday, and I just picked up Lionel Shriver's collection Property. This is the first story in that collection, but it was also previously published as a stand-alone novella. To explain the title, Shriver includes an epigraph - a quote from E.M. Forster, writing about a wood (in the sense of an area of vegetation) that he once bought. Forster asks, "What is the effect of property on character?" - speaking of his joy in owning the wood, his annoyance that it borders a public walkway, and his concession that "other people should participate in my shame..." These are themes that Shriver is clearly exploring in The Standing Chandelier, in which two lifelong friends, Jillian and Weston, fall apart after Weston's new girlfriend Paige objects to their friendship. Jillian and Weston have been friends, once lovers, but are for the most part, each other's longest-lasting relationship. Shriver is at great pains to describe how Jillian possesses a quality of being peculiarly unlikeable - and this is where the brutality comes in, because she has the ability to hone in and outline the tiniest insecurity, the littlest doubt, and build it into something looming, surgically painful. It is very well-written and easy to read, but it is also a little bit like being slapped in the face.

Eleven Numbers by Lee Child
Published 2025 as an Amazon Original Story

Nathan Tyler is a mathematician and college professor known in math circles for his PhD thesis on Kindansky numbers. When the US government gains access to a secret Russian military database, they need Tyler's assistance determining the passcode. Little does Tyler know what he is getting into.

Unlike Child's Reacher stories, this one is more cerebral than violent. I enjoyed it and didn't foresee the twists. It did feel a bit dated, as though it were set during the Cold War, and is completely implausible, but fun if you like that sort of thing.

The Slows by Gail Hareven
Published 2009 in The New Yorker

Thanks to Kate/kjuliff for recommending this one.

A researcher of The Preserves is surprised to find one of the Slows sitting in his office. The female is there with her larva to confront him about the rumor that The Preserves are about to be eradicated. On the face of it, The Slows are being persecuted for failing to turn over their young for rapid maturation, but it's also a story about Other, and motherhood, and nature. It's a story that begs discussion to dissect all its layers.

"Presence" by Gina Chung
Published 2024 in her short story collection, Green Frog

Amy Hwang was a medical researcher, married to the CEO of a biomedical company, and in charge of testing the company's flagship product. At the height of their success, however, Amy finds herself divorced, vilified in the press, and haunted by a Presence no one else sees. When she takes a vacation to a remote spa, several things become clear to her.

I wish they had come as clear to me! I liked this story quite a bit, although I'm mystified as to what exactly happens. I am looking forward to acquiring Green Frog, the collection of short stories of which this title is one.

>10 rasdhar: Oh good, I'll have to give Green Frog a read. I loved that crazy cover.

The three finalists for The Story Prize have been announced:

Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane
There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr.
Ghost Pains by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

I haven't read any of them yet, but I've got the McFarlane and Stevens, so I may see if I can get to them before the March award event. I used to go and cover it in person every year, but it's been livestreamed since the beginning of the pandemic, and it's so much harder to motivate myself to sit in front of my computer for one more thing. I should try and catch it, though, because the reading and author interviews are always fun.

I ended up DNFing Lionel Shriver's Property because I found it a bit odd that every character in every story started whining about immigration. Then I googled the author and found that this is her whole schtick. Even without the politics, there's an element of spite and meanness running through all her stories that I didn't like. The story I mentioned above felt violent - all the others were just nasty. Not recommended.

>16 rasdhar: Oof. Hard pass.

One Dog Year by Kevin Moffett
Published 2008 in Tin House, 13 p.

Moffett grew up in Ormond Beach, Florida, a few miles from the Casements, John D. Rockefeller's winter home. When Moffett learned that that's where JDR had his first airplane ride, he was inspired to write this story.

John D. Rockefeller sits in his wheelchair watching the festive crowds on the beach who are waiting for the arrival of a stunt biplane. He ponders the effort he is taking to prolong his life and wondering if it is worth it. He doles out dimes to the children, and sips the drinks his aide provides. His mind wanders, but he gamely agrees to take a ride when the pilot offers. A rather odd, quiet story about an aging man at the mercy of those around him, when in the past he was always in control.

"The School" by Donald Barthelme
Originally published 1976, published 2014 in Electric Lit
Online version

I loved this humorous short story and the not-so-funny implications of the ending. It's about a school teacher who has terrible luck with his class: their projects keep dying. It begins:

Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that… that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems… and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.

It wouldn’t have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes — well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that… you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days...

And on it goes. I could relate since the girls' experiment growing lavender failed to produce a single sprout and their Earth Day tamarack trees lost all their needles within weeks.

Modulation by Richard Powers
Published 2008 in Conjunctions, 18 p.

This one went over my head. Perhaps I don't know enough about music to understand the subtleties. It's told from the perspectives of multiple people all somehow involved with music: a former hacker who now works trying to prevent illegal music file sharing, a journalist investigating the use of loud soul-crushing sound as a weapon in Iraq, a recently retired music professor who worries there is nothing left that he hasn't heard, and a musician on his way to a Chiptune Blowout. Then something happens that changes music for everyone.

A few stories from Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2020 edition

Sinew and Steel and What They Told by Carrie Vaughn
A nice feel good story, well told.

Little Free Library by Naomi Kritzer
Liked the story, based on a fun idea. Didn’t take much to the writing, which felt a bit flat though not bad.

An Explorer’s Cartography of Already Settled Lands by Fran Wilde
Interestingly postmodern (or something), but I’m not sure it completely worked for me.

The Night Sun by Zin E. Rocklyn
A woman and her abusive husband spend a weekend in an isolated cabin in a last chance attempt to salvage their marriage. Obviously, things start getting a little strange even before they arrive. Not bad.

And one from Granta magazine 169, free to read throughout February.
The Piranhas by Jianan Qian
A woman starts noticing strange wildlife during her daily commute. Intriguing.

Just dropping in to say thank you to all for posting all these links.

Here are the short stories I read in January:

The Haunted Policeman by Dorothy L. Sayers
On the night Lord Peter's first child is born and after he sees off the doctor, Wimsey is wakeful, standing on his front doorstep. The local policeman walks by on his rounds, but appears agitated and in shock. Lord Peter invites him in and serves him champagne as celebration of his son's birth and also to listen to the policeman's tale. It eventually comes out that the policeman had seen a shocking scene of a grisly murder through the letter box flap of a house a couple of streets away, but when he summons help, evidence of a murder has completely disappeared, and the policeman's superior accuses him of drinking on duty. Wimsey solves the mystery in his usual efficient way.

German Harry by W. Somerset Maugham
German Harry is a very short story about a Danish "able seaman" on a vessel that had shipwrecked on an island in the Torres Straits thirty years before. Apparently, sixteen survivors originally arrived on the island, but at the end of three years, when they were finally rescued, only five survived. Four men were rescued, but German Harry refused to go with them. "He said that during those three years he had seen such terrible things that he had a horror of his fellowmen and wished never to live with them again. He would say no more. He was absolutely fixed in his determination to stay, entirely by himself, in that lonely place." In the ensuing years, boats would stop and drop off supplies, but German Harry never took up offers to leave and he never revealed what had happened during those three mysterious years that turned him against humanity.

wow that last sounds really interesting

>22 cindydavid4: It's very short -- only four pages in the W. Somerset Maugham short story collection I read it in. Here is a link to the two page spread in Cosmopolitan Magazine from 1924: German Harry

thanks I tried to tead the cosmo but couldnt zoom it enough to see. Ill see If I have said short story collection.

>24 cindydavid4: I found it here

excellent!

>25 labfs39: Oh good, I'm glad!

Into Duty, Into Longing, Into Sparrows

By Nne Ukwu & Somto Ihezue
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #425, February 6, 2025

I don’t remember how this story ended up on my Pocket feed. It was a difficult read about a young woman’s struggle with the tradition that suffocates her. I liked it.

https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/into-duty-into-longing-into-spar...

The Flaming Embusen - Uncanny Magazine
By Tade Thompson

The story was OK but the writing was extremely bland and clunky. I only finished it because it was very short.

>28 FlorenceArt: I also just read this story and really enjoyed it.

Some short stories that I recently read:

1. PG Wodehouse, ‘Death at the Excelsior’ (1914)
Wodehouse sends up the detective trope in a homage to Conan Doyle's 'The Speckled Band'.
Read at Project Gutenberg | Listen (Classic Tales Podcast)

2. V. L. Ramamoorthy, 'Irulappa Sami and the 21 Goats' (translated from the Tamil by Vijaysree Venkataraman, Exchanges Fall 2024)
The British in colonial India designated entire tribes as 'criminal', even if their crimes were committed by a few, and generated by poverty, creating a lasting legacy of social stigma. This story examines the story of one such tribe, and signals a possible shift in their fates. I didn't think much of the story itself, but I enjoyed the setting and learning about the context.
Read here

3. Yordan Slaveykov, 'The Little Brother' (translated from the Bulgarian by Yana Ellis, Words without Borders, April 2025)
The young protagonist discovers a friend, himself, loneliness, and grief, in that order. This was very moving.
Read here

4. Jonathan Coe - Summer of Light (The New Statesman, 2023)
A painter does something cruel to his young model, Livia. Years later, in 1920s Venice, Livia and her friend come across him again. This was well written. I felt the cruelty.
Read here (paywalled, can read with free registration) |Listen (New Statesman Podcast)

5. Nne Ukwu & Somto Ihezue, "Into Duty, Into Longing, Into Sparrows" (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, April 2025)
Read here (there's an audio link on the page as well)

>8 FlorenceArt: Do you know that the Vaughn story is part of a series? It's one I really like. There are 5 stories in total if I'm not mistaken and the last one came out not that long ago so new ones may be written yet!

>32 chlorine: No, I didn’t ! I will look for them on the Reactor website.

>33 FlorenceArt: I hope you enjoy them! :)

Apparently May is "National Short Story Month" in the US (who knew?) so the website LitHub is recommending one free online short story to read, per day. You can find them here: https://lithub.com/tag/one-great-short-story/

>35 rasdhar: Thanks for sharing!
I read the one from yesterday, Viola in Midwinter, and it was interesting but it didn't really click for me.
Moreover I read it to take a break from reading speculative fiction and it turned out it was a speculative fiction story! :)

>35 rasdhar: Thank you!

>32 chlorine: Turns out I had already read the second story, An Easy Job, which was included in Some of the Best of tor.com 2021. I had forgotten all about it, though it vaguely came back while rereading it. I think it feels different, knowing it’s part of a series.

>37 FlorenceArt: It's so hard to keep track, especially with short fiction!

Below are all (I think) the short stories in the Graff series by Carrie Vaughn. They are nice, but I feel I like them better as part of the series. Each depicts a different moment in Graff's life, not in chronological order. Links are to the freely available stories on the Reactor Mag website.

- Sinew and Steel and What They Told
- Time: Marked and Mended
- Not the Most Romantic Thing
- Bravado

I hope there will be more.

>39 FlorenceArt: I also hope there will be more stories in this series!

We will teach you how to read by Caroline M. Yoachim was quite interesting. I thought I read it because it was recommented in this thread but apparently not:
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/we-will-teach-you-how-to-read-we-will...

>41 chlorine: You probably saw it in the 2024 thread. I mentioned it and I think someone else did too. I have to admit I didn’t take to it that much. 🫤

>42 FlorenceArt: Aha if I saw it in the 2024 thread this means that I had a tab open on it since 2024. :D Which is not unlikely given my tendancy to have a gazillion tabs open just in case. :p

I read Aishwarya Rai by Sanjana Takur which was recommended by rv1988 last year and really liked it. It was the winner of the Commonwealth short story prize in 2024. This year's five regional winners are available here: https://commonwealthfoundation.com/short-story-prize/
I will try to read them.

John Joseph Adams is an editor of speculative fiction. He has published anthologies and is the main editor of Lightspeed magazine and participates in Nightmare magazine. He has been on my radar because he seems to publish interesting anthologies in particular.
Joining the Lightspeed/Nightmare mailing list gives you access to a digital copy of Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! which is an anthology of stories coming from various anthologies he has published.

The first story is Change of ownership by Christie Yant and I really liked it. It's quite short but I think it packs a puch. It's about free will and ownership/slavery of AI.

I'm also making very slow progress on Anton Chekhov's collection of stories Le moine noir (the black monk). In general they do not make a strong impression on me but I really liked De mal en pis (from bad to worse) which was a fun portrayal of a strange and stubborn character.

>45 chlorine: I have a few issues of Lightspeed Magazine on my reader, them being included in my Kobo subscription, but I havent read any yet. And I’ve been meaning to read Chekhov but haven’t gotten round to it either 😊

>46 FlorenceArt: I feel you! I actually subscribe to Clarkesworld magazine but I almost never find the time to read the whole issues (and some issues are still unopened). Still I can afford the subscription so I'm happy to support them. I see that as a payback for all their stories that I put on my ereader. ;)

Ken Liu's story Good Stories is an interesting reflection about the place of authors in an age of generative AI. It's available here. I thought it was quite interesting. Ken Liu always amazes me with his reflections and orighinal ideas.

>47 chlorine: Clarkesworld also has an audio version so you can listen to them instead, but the narration can be a bit iffy

>49 rasdhar: Good to know! Although listening to English requires _a lot_ of focus for me so not sure this is a viable solution to diminish the backlog. It might be good on occasions though.

>48 chlorine: Thanks for sharing the link. Interesting story. Interesting too that he incorporated machine-generated text instead of "cosplaying" a machine.

>48 chlorine: Thanks for the link. Ken Liu is on my loooong list of authors to check out some day…….

>48 chlorine: The whole magazine issue, The Digital Aesthete, is available on Kobo Plus, so I downloaded it and read Ken Liu’s story. Interesting indeed! I look forward to reading the rest of the issue (some day…).

The Stop After the Last Station - Uncanny Magazine
A. T. Greenblatt

I came across this story again and just reread it, and I must say I liked it much better this time, maybe because I read it in one stretch, or maybe because I knew in advance that it was going to be confusing. But since when did confusing stop me from enjoying a read? This time I stopped expecting it to make sense to me and concentrated on the confusion and pain of the character(s). I think I like it even better now that I wrote to say I like it better 😊

>51 labfs39:, 53 : glad you found the story interesting. Yes I also thought it was interesting that he machine generated the parts of the story that were supposed to be AI-written (and that he didn't count them in the word count for his salary ;)
Florence, I will be interested in your thoughts in the rest of the issue when you get to it.

>54 FlorenceArt: Sounds interesting. According to my records I have only read one of Greenblat's stories A Record of Our Meeting with the Grand Faerie Lord of Vast Space and Its Great Mysteries, Revised which I found was well written and interesting.

>55 chlorine: I highly recommend Greenblatt’s Questions Asked In The Belly of the World

>56 FlorenceArt: ooh I have read that one (from a Tor.com's best of if I remember correctly) and thought it was really good indeed!

I read Catherynne M. Valente's The difference beween love and time in the anthology Someone in Time and thought it was excellent. It's difficult to describe because it's about a woman who's in love with and has a relationship with the space-time continuum. The story is at the same time all-over the place because it jumps from moment to moment in the woman's life and very beautiful.
I don't know if this quote is interesting without having read the story (the "it" in it refers to the space-time continuum, and it's about them living together and splitting chores)
It has taken a moral stance against both mowing the lawn and dusting. It says doing so would only appropriate the culture of sequential cause and effect, which it has no right to wear like a costume.

It seems to be available here:
https://readsalot.com/the-difference-between-love-and-time/

(apparently I read it in early 2023 and only the first few lines were familiar to me, go figure...)

>55 chlorine: I read A Record of Our Meeting with the Grand Faerie Lord of Vast Space and Its Great Mysteries, Revised by A.T. Greenblatt, thanks for the reference. I think this one could be worth a second read too.

And so is The Night Soil Salvagers by Gregory Norman Bossert, in Some of the Best of tor.com: 2020 Edition. I disliked it at the beginning, and then it grew on me, possibly because it reminded me of The Age of Wire and String, which is a very special book for me. But maybe also on its own merits. I ended up not hating it.

>59 FlorenceArt: The 2020 some of the best of Tor.com is on my ebook reader so I may get to it someday and read that story. It's not high on my list of priorities though as my feeling about this series is that they include too many stories and wind up including ones that are not so good.

Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200 by R. S. A. Garcia is a fun take at autonomous robots. I read it for my challente to read all works who won the Hugo or Nebula award. It has been published by Uncanny and is available online.

Today I was very happy to discover that the Pocket service on my Kobo (now defunct) has been replaced with Instapaper. Kobo even gave instructions on how to migrate my saved articles from Pocket to Instapaper, which was very easy to do. Instapaper seems much better than Pocket at converting articles to a clean, reader compatible format. So I read one of the short stories I had saved but never read, and liked it very much.

Half-drowned by S. L. Harris, in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #423

I don't remember on whose recommendation I saved this one. The story is nice but not groundbreaking, but it's very well told and the characters and world building are done with just the right amount of detail for me, which is, very light but evocative.

>61 chlorine: And now that I have Instapaper on my Kobo, I can save this one to read!

>63 FlorenceArt: That's nice! I use dotepub which is a browser extension and transforms a web page into an epub file which I can then upload to my ebook reader.

I just finished The Sagan Diary, which is described as a 'novelette', it is really more of a long short story. It started a bit slow, but it is a different kind of diary format (not by date or event) and I thought it really picked up as it went along.

>65 Karlstar: This seems interesting! I liked old man's war and it's always interesting to have alternate viewpoints on the same story.

>66 chlorine: It definitely ties in with the story, but it isn't about the story, more Jane's thoughts on things. Philosophical.

Just finished the Short History of Sound and absolutely loved it I wanted it to keep going but but it was meant to be that way for a reason I really hope there is some more books by him he's certainly somebody that I would like to read more of

>58 chlorine: I have to thank you for this recommendation. I was reluctant at first because it sounded to me like a silly gimmick, but she made it work beautifully and I ended up loving it.

I’m posting the Reactor link here. I don’t know why this site makes it so damn hard to find things, but I did manage it so here it is:

The Difference Between Love and Time

>69 FlorenceArt: So glad you enjoyed it! This is one that will stay with me for a while. :)

I just discovered Diane Williams's short stories in Granta. They are strangely poetic, I liked the three I read.

Some of them are under a paywall, but they are very short so the first one may be readable anyway.

I want to subscribe to Granta, but the last time I did this, I never read it after the first month.

Diane Williams | Granta

I read Ha Seong-Nan's collection of short stories Bluebeard's First Wife and really enjoyed them. The titular story was also published in Asymptote and can be read online here: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/special-feature/ha-seong-nan-bluebeards-first-w...

It deals with themes of intimate violence, much like the original Bluebeard story by Charles Perrault.

>71 FlorenceArt:,72 These sound interesting, thanks! I've downloaded the available stories to my ereader for a rainy day, which we should be getting a lot of in France in the near future. :)

Colwill Brown has won the BBC Short Story Award for her story, You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle. Oddly, the story seems to have been removed from the website : the link comes up as dead. I hope they restore access because it sounds interesting.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002jhnd

Since there has been some interest about Ken Liu's short story about writers, readers and AI, I'm sharing the link to his latest newsletters which involves different AI anectdotes: https://kenliu.substack.com/p/please-dont-be-lazy
He also gives a link to his latest short story, available online (I've immediately downloaded it but not yet read it).

>75 chlorine: His interactions with AI over transcription were priceless. Thanks for sharing

can i offer you a nice egg in this trying time
By Iori Kusano
In Uncanny Magazine

I came across this by following a link on Reactor Mag, I think. I found it beautiful but sad.

I have been listening to Amazon Original short stories. So far I've listened to

Worst Wingman Ever by Abby Jimenez
Rand0m1ze by Andy Weir
Slow Time Between the Stars by John Scalzi
Halfway to Free by Emma Donoghue
Persephone by Lev Grossman
The Shortest Day by Colm Tóibín
A Righteous Man by Tochi Onyebuchi
Shine, Pamela! Shine! by Kate Atkinson

None of them blew me away, but it's a nice way to incorporate more short stories into my routine.

I'm really upset in the most litteral sense because I just finished a story that I cannot interpret otherwise than an admiration for the fact that Bertrand Cantat, leader and singer of the French band Noir Désir, killed his partner/girlfriend.
The story clearly references songs from the band both from an excerpt at the beginning, the name of a character and some words used in the story. AND the main character kills two women. The justification given is that he fights against the system and that they are FBI spies, that have slept with him only to betray him, and their only characteristics other than being traitors are how good they are in bed.

I recently finished six stories by Victoria Goddard, the first five being collected in In the Realms of Gold.
Sheherezade
Rook
Not Far From the Tree
Blue Moon Over Pincher Creek
Inkebarrow
The Tower At the Edge of the World

I liked them, but to be honest, the only two I actually remember were the two most recently read ones. I especially liked the last one, probably because it's about my second favorite character of hers, and I could draw on previous knowledge of him to flesh out the story.

Eyes of Amber and Other Stories
Joan D. Vinge

I actually went to the trouble of ordering the physical book to read this one. It all started years ago, when I was reading a magazine called Univers that published French translations (and some original French) of SFF stories. There were a few that stayed with me, and one in particular that kept coming to my mind when I read about @KeithChaffee’s endeavors to read SF awarded stories. Of course I didn’t remember the title or the author’s name, but that’s what the Name that Book group is for. And so I now had an author name, and managed without too much trouble to locate this book, first on archive.org, and then the first story was so intriguing I decided to buy it.

Eyes of Amber was very intriguing. It felt very original to me, although I’m not that familiar with vintage SFF. I was rather confused by the ending, but I felt it was very modern in its take on media and power.

To Bell the Cat was another very modern, original and thoughtful story of first encounter.

View from a Height was again original and thoughtful (am I repeating myself here?).

Media Man was the weakest of the lot. It felt very naive and simplistic, which the others were definitely not.

The Crystal Ship was a bit less believable maybe, but moving. Probably not the best of the lot but the almost romance got to me. I resent the epilogue a little, I think an open ending might have worked better.

Tin Soldier, ah, finally, the reason I bought the book in the first place! This one is more old fashioned romance, which is probably why it has stayed with me all these years. I still love it, but it feels less mature than the rest. Maybe I only say that because it was the first story she wrote.

Addendum to the Martian Social Studies Textbook, 5th Ed.
By Maya Wristen
In Strange Horizon

This is presented as poetry, but I rather see it as flash fiction. The two often intersect, and both descriptions seem to fit. Anyway, il liked it.

Happy New Year everyone! The short fiction thread for 2026 is up. I hope to see you there!

I read a lovely story in the new yorker by Valeria liusella predictions and presentiments a mother raising her child alone, wanting to reinvente themselves. it about stories and how to begin ourselves, she has an upcoming debut novel called beginning,middle, end I am eager to read this.

>84 cindydavid4: I loved her Lost Children Archive! I'm happy to hear she has another novel coming out.

Magical Girl: Corporate Failure, Haven Spec Magazine

I wasn’t impressed by the first two stories I read from the Reactor recommendation list. But this one I liked, very much.

BTW this is the SHORT FICTION 2025 thread, not the 2026 one.

oh, is there, a way to transfer posts to 2026?

Oops, thank you!

>88 cindydavid4: Not automatically, but if you edit your post, you can copy the content and then paste it to the 2026 thread.