An Honest Review of Short Story, the Personal Styling Service for Short People, by a Short Woman

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If you’re below 5’4”, then you’re considered a shortie. As you probably already know, like most things, there are pros and cons to being of small stature . One of the cons being that clothes tend to fit weirdly on our short bods, whether they’re too long, too baggy, or overall ill-fitting. And if you’re plus size and short, shopping can be even more annoying. I’m on the higher-end of straight sizing and border on plus at a size 14. Every pair of jeans I’ve owned have always been comically too long, resulting in saggy ankles or me resorting to cuffing them so I look like a dude from The Outsiders  (IYKYK).

Over the past couple of years, I tried buying bellbottoms three times and they were all way too long for me. Heartbreaking for my ‘70s style goals! Dresses are much easier to wear, but there is a magic length holy grail that I have to search for when it comes to minis since a lot of skirts tend to rise higher in the back because of my booty. And if a dress is too long past the knee, I feel frumpy. I’ve learned to love maxi dresses, but I often have to get them hemmed or wear four-inch platform heels so I don’t look like a ghost floating around the halls.

All of these reasons are why I was so excited to learn about  Short Story , which is a subscription styling service that helps us shorties find cute clothes that actually fit. The founder and CEO, Isabella Sun, knows firsthand the struggle of being petite, as she’s 5’1” herself. “I’ve struggled my entire life to find clothing that fits, and intimately know the challenges of shopping as a petite person,” she tells Well+Good.

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“For women of shorter stature, shopping can really suck. Finding clothing that actually fits our frames can be exceptionally hard because most clothing is designed for women who are much taller, and often fitted on 5’9” fit models.” After learning that nearly 50 percent of women in the U.S. were considered petite and had the same frustrating experiences, Sun decided to leave her corporate job as a financial trader and start Short Story. “I wanted to create a better shopping experience that actually inspired confidence in petite women by helping them dress in perfectly fitting clothes,” she says.

While Short Story carries classic and up–and-coming brands, they also develop their own line of clothing, which is based on real feedback from a whopping 100,000+ respondents. “From this data we’re able to identify crucial ‘patterns’ in everything from silhouette and color preferences, to sizing dimensions that allows us to create clothing that directly addresses all of this,” says Sun.

Strangely enough, I’ve never really considered shopping in the petite section because I always thought of it as not just for short people, but for tiny, size 0 types, so I wanted to make sure that Short Story had my size, which they did. (They currently carry sizes 00 to 18P and have plans to expand their size range.) As far as what items they offer, it’s everything from tops, jackets, dresses, pants, jeans, and more.

How Short Story works

First, you take a quiz that asks you about the items that you usually shop for, things you wouldn’t wear, your opinion of a few of their clothing and styling examples, what your budget looks like, plus basic questions about weight, height, and age. They’ll also ask for your Instagram handle so they can get an even better sense of your style. After that, you order your Short Story Box , which can be sent monthly or every few months, and they’ll match you with a stylist who uses your responses to curate your box just for you. The styling fee is $25 per box, and that money goes towards any items you decide to keep. You can cancel your subscription at any time, and shipping and returns are always free.

short story

When you receive the box, you’ll get a small pamphlet with information about each of the five pieces of clothing they sent, as well as tips on how to style them, which I find super useful. Then you just try everything on and keep your favorites. Everything else can be easily returned via the prepaid label and shipping bag that is included. You just have to return your items within five days to avoid being charged.

short story

My honest thoughts on the Short Story box 

marie lodi

This dress couldn’t have been more me. I loved the neon pink color and it was the perfect length—not too short and not too long, so I didn't feel like I was drowning in it. I can see myself wearing this to everything—date night, parties, work events, vacation. It was a dream to wear.

Black short sleeve bodysuit

I appreciated that they included a black bodysuit, which is a great basic piece for building a year-round capsule wardrobe. Even better, it was comfortable to wear! Sometimes bodysuits can be too long in the torso, or too tight if you’re closer to plus size, causing the bust area to be pulled down and your bra to show. This didn’t do any of that, thankfully, and gave me the perfect amount of cleavage. Overall, it just felt really good to wear.

Pink printed skirt

skirt short story

The color and print of this skirt was also another “perfect Marie” pick. I can see myself packing this skirt (along with the bodysuit) on a trip. That sexy thigh slit just screams vacation, baby!

Velvet floral print robe

robe short story

Robes are one of my all-time favorite pieces of clothing. They instantly make me feel like a glamorous eccentric aunt (which I am, actually). They’re also super versatile because you can wear one over a slip dress, lounge around the house in one (with some cha-cha heels), and even pair them with jeans or trousers. I loved the velvet, and the rose pattern is always a win for me.

Black jeans (by 1822 Denim)

black jeans short story

I had to save the best for last—the jeans! Like I mentioned, jeans are a sore spot for me when it comes to shopping. They’re usually way too long, and instead of getting them hemmed, I just deal with it. I was absolutely shocked when these fit me perfectly just putting them on. The only thing is I wish these had pockets. Otherwise, they were perfect.

Final verdict

Overall, if you’re a short person who has had trouble finding clothes that fit, or just wants to experience a personalized shopping experience, Short Story is totally worth trying out. I loved all of my picks and found the return experience so much more simple than when I shop regularly.

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The Best Short Story Collections That Keep You Reading

Which of these captivating collections will you be picking up next?

female young behind book with face covered for a red book while smiling

Short story collections offer the perfect medium for fiction writers to craft compelling, affecting narratives that simply may not warrant a full-length novel to explore the ideas. The short story collection’s compact form delivers concise, impactful ideas and can free authors to explore a multitude of themes, characters, story arcs and styles within a single collection. Collections of short fiction have allowed writers like Edgar Allen Poe, Flannery O’Connor and James Baldwin to experiment with different tones, voices and plot devices while providing readers with gripping but approachable standalone stories.

These 8 short story collections are extremely readable, cover a variety of genres and authors and may give you a newfound appreciation of writers you already love.

Homesick For Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh

a ring with a person's face on it

From one of the most compelling, propulsive voices in contemporary fiction, Moshfegh’s 2017 short story collection is an eclectic compendium of some of her best fiction work—much of which was previously published in places like The Paris Review , The New Yorker and Vice . Exceedingly atmospheric and permeated with Moshfegh’s hallmark sordid wit, Homesick For Another World interrogates the ubiquitous afflictions of the human condition and our capacity for cruelty through the collection’s generally amoral, misanthropic protagonists. A highly anticipated follow-up to Moshfegh’s breakout debut novel Eileen , Homesick was later named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 and drew innumerable comparisons to the work of renowned authors like Mary Gaitskill and Flannery O’Connor.

Earth Angel by Madeline Cash

a lizard on a woman's head

An electric debut from author Madeline Cash, Earth Angel is a collection of short stories that rockets through the reader’s imagination like a fever dream. Teeming with chimeric vignettes synthesizing the mundanely sinister realities of a capitalist culture with cataclysmic doomsday tropes, Earth Angel manages to be both endlessly funny and deeply poignant without feeling didactic. Cash both parodies and embraces the myopic stylings dominating popular fiction in a way that never feels malicious, but rather like the playful ribbing of a writer that refuses to take herself too seriously. Irreverent, compelling and laugh-out-loud funny, Earth Angel marks the emergence of one of contemporary fiction’s most exciting new figures.

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma

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A surrealist collection from Severance author Ling Ma, Bliss Montage marks Ma’s first published short story collection after her phenomenal debut novel (which has no relation to the recent Apple TV+ series, by the way). Uncanny, otherworldly and above all evocative— Bliss Montage contains eight wildly different stories each touching on universal themes of the human experience against phantasmagoric, though eerily familiar backdrops. Ranging from a tale of two friends bonded by their shared use of a drug that turns you invisible to the story of a tourist caught up in a fatalistic healing ritual, Ma’s unforgettable collection manages to be both ingeniously unique and undoubtedly universal at once. Somehow both outlandish and quotidian, Bliss Montage keeps readers wrapped up in Ma’s captivating prose from start to end.

Daddy by Emma Cline

a person lying on a train

A thrilling examination of unspoken power structures (predominantly male power in a patriarchal society), Daddy by Emma Cline offers glimpses into the unexamined lives of each story's protagonist, often playfully alluding to, but never explicitly pointing to, a certain moral paradigm. Fraught familial dynamics, imbalanced romantic relationships and moral nuance permeate Cline’s collection, and each story offers a taste of her infectious prose and incisive style. The ten stories on offer often end achingly realistically, rejecting a tidy, personally gratifying ending—making each story appear as a certain tableau harkening to an idea rather than a traditional beginning, middle and end. Suspenseful, richly descriptive and engrossing—Cline’s collection begs to be devoured.

Skeleton Crew by Stephen King

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First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami

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First published in July 2020, First Person Singular is a collection of eight short stories each told from, you guessed it, the first-person singular perspective. Written by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, First Person Singular explores themes of nostalgia and lost love through stories from the perspective of mostly unnamed, middle-aged male protagonists believed to be based largely on the author himself, though some are more fantastical than others. Ranging from slice-of-life stories wherein the narrator reminisces on a past relationship, to the tale of a monkey doomed to fall in love with human women, the stories employ a myriad of hallmark Murakami techniques like magical realism, music, nostalgia and aging.

The Houseguest and Other Stories by Amparo Dávila

a green and pink bag

The first collection by beloved Mexican author Amparo Dávila to be translated into English, The Houseguest is a collection of 12 short stories touching on themes of obsession, paranoia and fear primarily featuring female protagonists and narrators. Often compared to horror writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Shirley Jackson, Dávila’s writing often deals with abstract feelings of dread and paranoia, imbuing them with magical realism to craft jarring, transfixing narratives that seem both eerily familiar and preternatural. Each tale menaced by an unseen, pernicious force, Dávila’s writing revels in its ambiguity with no straightforward answers. The Houseguest is an anxiety-inducing page-turner which will keep readers on the edge of their seats.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

text, letter

Though technically a short story cycle (a collection of self-contained short stories arranged to convey a concept or theme greater than the sum of its atomized parts), Olive Kitteridge consists of 13 stories each taking place in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine. The stories predominantly center on Olive Kitteridge, a brusque but caring retired school teacher and longtime resident of Crosby. Other stories show Olive only as a secondary character or in a cameo capacity and are from the point of view of other townsfolk. Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the collection was later adapted into a critically acclaimed miniseries starring Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, Zoe Kazan and Bill Murray. Profound, heartbreaking and human, Olive Kitteridge is an unforgettable first-read that will still impact you even if you watched the miniseries before.

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Where to Find Free Short Stories Online

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Sarah Ullery

Sarah suffers from chronic sarcasm, and an unhealthy aversion to noise. She loves to read, and would like to do nothing else, but stupid real life makes her go to work. She lives in the middle of a cornfield and shares a house with two spoiled dogs and a ton of books.

View All posts by Sarah Ullery

Short stories are a great way to discover new writers, or sample different genres. There are classic short stories that you can read in less than an hour, but leave you feeling like a better reader for having read them. In a previous article , I mentioned that they’re also a great way to break a reading slump, and they can be compiled onto reading apps like Pocket . They’re a great companion on lunch breaks, planes, waiting in line, or when you’re bored at work (they can be easily concealed on a web browser or on your phone).

I spend too much money on books, so sometimes it’s nice to read free stuff, and the internet is not lacking in places to find great stories that are free to read on your computer, tablet, or phone. I’ve compiled 20 different websites where I regularly find free short stories.

short story website review

Narrative Magazine

Narrative Magazine is a free space for readers to enjoy some of the best short stories, essays, and poetry written by both established and emerging writers. They also have a series called “Tell Me a Story” , a high school essay writing contest that encourages young writers to submit essays responding to a single prompt. They’re a nonprofit, and do appreciate donations , but it’s completely voluntary. Find new stories from writers like Min Jin Lee, or classics like “ Death in the Woods ” by Sherwood Anderson. Narrative is a treasure trove.

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is “free” until you receive the pop-up message on your screen that says “you’ve hit the wall,” which means no more mooching; time to subscribe. And it’s totally worth it, but expensive, so if you’re cheap like me, choose the stories you read at The New Yorker wisely. But seriously, is there anything better than The New Yorker ? It’s totally worth subscribing.

Electric Literature

A great resource to find information about new books, old books, and upcoming books; Electric Literature is also a great place to find short stories. Their “recommended reading” section has great short stories; or you can find “poetry, essays, and graphic narratives” in “The Commuter.” Electric Literature is a nonprofit, and much like Narrative they work hard to promote new and emerging writers.

Wattpad is a reader/writer interface that allows people to easily access over three million different stories through their website, or by downloading the app. It’s also a great place to submit short stories if you’re interested in writing. The site is open to anyone, at any level of writing experience. If you’re more interested in reading than writing, topics range from adventure to teen fiction to fan fiction to poetry and horror. There’s a little bit of something for everyone.

Like The New Yorker , Granta is a literary magazine that limits the number of articles you can read free digitally. So choose wisely. But like The New Yorker , Granta publishes the best writing. In their own words: “ Granta  does not have a political or literary manifesto, but it does have a belief in the power and urgency of the story and its supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real.” So basically, it’s worth the price if you’re willing to subscribe.

Tor.com is a fantasy/sci-fi website that  allows free access to short stories that are published on their website. One of my favorite Tor.com short stories is Rachel Swirsky’s “ A Memory of Wind “, which is about Iphigenia prior to Agamemnon’s sacrifice. You can also find stories from Seanan McGuire , Jonathan Carroll , Mary Robinette Kowal , and JY Yang (to name a few). This is consistently one of my favorite places to find new writers.

Lightspeed Magazine

Like Tor.com, Lightspeed is a digital magazine that publishes short stories by authors like Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, N.K. Jemisin, Ted Chiang, and Ken Liu. You can choose to subscribe for 12 months, which will get you access to over 100 short stories, plus you have access to author interviews, and other nonfiction content. But, if you’d rather dabble and choose not to subscribe, there’s still a ton of free content available.

American Short Fiction

A triannually published literary magazine that publishes short fiction by established and emerging writers; American Short Fiction has published Laura van den Berg and Roxane Gay. Many of their stories have appeared in the end-of-year collection The Best American Short Stories .

The Atlantic

The Atlantic is recognized for their journalism, but they also publish great short stories from well-established and emerging writers. You can access stories from the current issue of the magazine, or from their archives. I’d recommend Helen Phillips’s ( The Need and The Beautiful Bureaucrat ) short story “ The Wall .”

Project Gutenberg

The best source for public domain books, short stories, and poetry; Project Gutenberg boasts over 60,000 free ebooks. You don’t have to download any special apps to read their content; the books or short stories will download to whatever you use to read other digital books.

Guernica is a nonprofit digital magazine that publishes just about everything from poetry to fiction, comics, interviews, and essays. You will inevitably find something wonderful to read from Guernica.

Joyland Magazine

It you’re from a specific region of the United States that you think is underrepresented within the publishing industry, Joyland would be a perfect place to start hunting for stories from writers from all over the country. The magazine splits their stories into regions, so there’s stories from: New York, the Pacific Northwest (PNW), the South, the Midwest, the West, and Canada. Writers like Roxane Gay, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Lydia Millet, have all had stories published by Joyland .

Terraform (from Vice ) publishes science fiction short stories. They argue that, although science fiction is very popular in TV and movies “there’s a distinct dearth of science fiction in its purest, arguably its original, form—short fiction.” So if you’re nostalgic for the science fiction of yesteryear, try Terraform .

Paper Darts

Paper Darts is a “magazine of LIT + ART fueled by volunteers and imaginary money since 2009.” They also have great, original short stories, and you should read the stories that they offer free online, but if you can, you should also buy the print copy of the magazine.

Midnight Breakfast

Midnight Breakfast is a free online literary magazine that publishes short stories, essays, and nonfiction. They publish stories and ideas from diverse voices and are looking to “spark conversation” with “good friends over greasy food.” So if this at all intrigues you, check out their very eclectic catalogue of free stories.

Virginia Quarterly Review

Virginia Quarterly Review publishes criticism, poetry, photography, and fiction (short stories). The current most popular short story on their website is Stephen King’s “ Cookie Jar .” The fall issue of the print magazine is “Bedtime Stories” and is all about childhood stories, why they’re important, and how they shape our lives. They also have a profile of Oliver Jeffers, the author of numerous award winning picture books. So, basically, if you’re looking for something beyond fiction, they’ve gotcha covered.

Paris Review

The Paris Review ‘s Instagram account is one of my favorite things:

View this post on Instagram “The words have their own truth, and that comes from how they sound,” Herta Müller, born on this day in 1953, told ‘The Paris Review’ in her 2014 Art of Fiction interview. “But they aren’t the same as the things themselves, there’s never a perfect match.” Follow the link in bio to read more. A post shared by The Paris Review (@parisreview) on Aug 17, 2019 at 9:01am PDT

A constant source of wisdom and solace, the magazine boasts the writing of the creme de la creme of the literary world. You can read short stories online, listen to their podcast (which also features short stories read by the author), or if you want to shell out a few bucks, you can purchase the current issue for $20.

Kenyon Review

Kenyon Review is a “multi-platform organization” with fiction, reviews, poetry, and essays available in their print magazine (six issues released per year), at KROnline, or KR Reviews. If you’re looking for short stories you can read free online, you’ll want to stick with KROnline , which has both new and archived stories available for your perusal.

Classic Short Stories

If you’re just looking for the classics, and you want a really simple, user- friendly experience, try the website Classic Short Stories . They have stories from authors like George Saunders, Katherine Mansfield, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Unlike some of the other publications and websites I’ve listed, everything is available for free.

Levar Burton Reads

I grew up listening to Levar Burton read on Reading Rainbow . His voice is a balm to my soul. He could read the phone book to me and I would be enamored, but the stories he picks for his podcast are always the best stories from the best writers. This season he’s read Samantha Schweblin, Ted Chiang, and N.K. Jemisin. So if you’d rather listen to short stories during your commute or while you run or do chores around the house, try Levar Burton Reads .

Need more? Try 18 Great Short Stories You Can Read Free Online , 4 Must-Read Dark Fiction Magazines , and  Literary Magazines 101

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short story website review

The Best Reviewed Short Story Collections of 2020

Featuring nicole krauss, stephen king, emma cline, zora neale hurston, and more.

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Nicole Krauss’ How to Be a Man , Stephen King’s If It Bleeds , Emma Cline’s Daddy , and Zora Neale Hurston’s Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick all feature among the best reviewed short story collections of 2020.

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

To Be A Man ribbon

1. To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss (Harper)

18 Rave • 6 Positive • 2 Mixed

Read an interview with Nicole Krauss here

“… like talking all night with a brilliant friend … Krauss imbues her prose with authoritative intensity. In short, her work feels lived. Some of these stories appeared earlier, in the New Yorker and elsewhere. But re-encountering them in a collection lets us absorb them as siblings … Krauss’s explorations of interior struggle press on, unflinching; aperçus feel wrested from depths … With chilling casualness, Krauss conveys the murderous realities lurking behind the scrim of social surfaces, that young women routinely face … Settings range globally without fanfare, as do Krauss’s gelid portraits of modern arrangements … the hallucinatory ‘Seeing Ershadi,’ in which a dancer and her friend become obsessed with an Iranian actor, seems to distill the strange urgency of Krauss’s art … What Ershadi represents to the women slowly unfurls, and (like much of this fine collection) continues to haunt a reader’s mind and heart.”

–Joan Frank  ( The Washington Post )

2. The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans (Riverhead)

14 Rave • 4 Positive

“… a new collection that is so smart and self-assured it’s certain to thrust her into the top tier of American short story writers. Evans’ stories feel particularly urgent at this moment of national reckoning over race. While they aren’t specifically about being Black any more than Alice Munro’s are about being white, many of the characters are shaped by the social, economic and cultural conditions unique to African American life … she brings an anthropologist’s eye to the material conditions of her characters’ lives … The hands-down masterpiece of the collection is the title novella … Reading these stories is like [an] amusement park ride—afterward, you feel a sense of lightness and exhilaration.”

–Ann Levin  ( USA Today )

3. I Hold a Wolf By the Ears by Laura Van den Berg (FSG)

14 Rave • 2 Positive

Listen to a conversation between Laura Van den Berg and Catherine Lacey here

“The terrain of Van den Berg’s difficult, beautiful and urgent new book, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears , is an ecosystem of weird and stirring places you’ll want to revisit, reconsider, maybe even take shelter in. It’s easy to get going, because Van den Berg is such a master of setups … Possessing some of Karen Russell’s spookiness and Otessa Moshfegh’s penchant for unsettling observations about the way we live now—personally incisive but alive with a kind of ambient political intelligence—Van den Berg feels like the writer we not only want but maybe need right now … There is range here, particularly in characters and relationships: single people, mothers and daughters, loners, but also people engaged in the long dance of marriage … Van den Berg is so consistently smart and kind, bracingly honest, keen about mental illness and crushing about everything from aging to evil that you might not be deluded in hoping that the usual order of literary fame could be reversed: that an author with respectable acclaim for her novels might earn wider recognition for a sneakily brilliant collection of stories.”

–Nathan Deuel  ( The Los Angeles Times )

Verge Lidia Yuknavitch

4. Verge by Lidia Yuknavitch (Riverhead)

12 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

Read a story from Verge here

“With the powers of her prose on full, incandescent display, 6½ pages is all Yuknavitch needs to illuminate the connections between the body and the spirit, the fists and the heart, both beating in their losing battles … In these 20 efficient and affecting stories, Yuknavitch unveils the hidden worlds, layered under the one we know, that can be accessed only via trauma, displacement and pain. There is a vein of the wisdom of the grotesque throughout … the damaged beauty of these misfits keeps the reader leaning in.”

–Nicholas Mancusi  ( TIME )

5. Sorry For Your Trouble by Richard Ford (Ecco)

11 Rave • 4 Positive • 3 Mixed

“The finest and most substantial story here is ‘The Run of Yourself.’ One could say is has the richness and breadth of a novel, but that would be to slight the short-story form, of which Mr. Ford has repeatedly proved himself a master … However understated and oblique, Sorry for Your Trouble —which is what Irish people say to the bereaved at a funeral—is both a coherent work of art and a subtle and convincing portrait of contemporary American life among the moneyed middle class. None of the main characters has to worry about money, which highlights the emotional malaise that underlies their lives and their frequent and almost absent-minded couplings and uncouplings. In the background are wars, financial crises, natural vicissitudes. This is America, and Richard Ford is its chronicler. In these superbly wrought tales he catches, with exquisite precision…the irresistible melancholy that is the mark of American life.”

–John Banville  ( The Wall Street Journal )

Daddy Emma Cline

6. Daddy by Emma Cline (Random House)

9 Rave • 8 Positive

Read Emma Cline on Anaïs Nin’s erotic fiction and John Cheever’s journals here

“In an era whose ascendant short-story practitioners lean into high-concept experiments of genre and form, Emma Cline represents something of a throwback. The 10 stories that constitute her first collection, Daddy , are almost classical in structure—you won’t find a fragmentary collage, list or screenplay among them. Though she’s not one for a sudden, curious departure of voice or dissolution of the fourth wall, Cline has an unnerving narrative proprioception, and her stories have the clean, bright lines of modernist architecture … As for her style, she seems to eschew the telegraphic mode made popular by writers like Sally Rooney or Rachel Cusk for something at once direct and musical. Cline’s idiom is earnestness punctuated by millennial cool—but nothing too fussy, everything in just the right place … The aesthetic pleasure of Cline’s writing is anesthetizing. So much so that one could conceivably read these stories with the same drugged passivity with which one shuffles through a lifestyle catalog. But that would be a mistake … Cline is an astonishingly gifted stylist, but it is her piercing understanding of modern humiliation that makes these stories vibrate with life … the characters shift uncomfortably through the beautifully appointed shoe box dioramas of their lives, aware at once of their own insignificance and also of their desire for prominence. They ask if anything matters as though nothing does, and yet hope to be contradicted. But perhaps we all do. Perhaps, in these brilliant stories, that is the most daring and human thing of all.”

–Brandon Taylor  ( The New York Times Book Review )

7. You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South (FSG Originals)

9 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed

Listen to an interview with Mary South here

“South writes as though she has always been where we find ourselves now: looking back on a world where we believed we might gain personal agency over technology’s dominion, entering one where such agency is a luxury we might never again hope to afford … stories of exceptional loss, spilling out at the point of conflict between the cool detachment of the technological world and the tender vulnerability of the users living within it … This collection’s power, though, comes from South’s dark sensibility, her comfort with brutality, and her narrative insistence that, while the nightmare of tech capitalism won’t wholly eradicate the personal and the private, it will compress beyond recognition the spaces where personal, private moments can unfold … South writes with the assurance of someone who knows she has no answers to give. But instead of resulting in a shrugging ambivalence, You Will Never Be Forgotten  mounts an ever more effective critique of technology-amplified structural inequality … [the] stories are united by South’s keen examination of the thrill and risk of human connection—between lovers, siblings, parent and child, care-giver and care-receiver, and digitally connected strangers—under increasingly cruel conditions … Still, You Will Never Be Forgotten  shows us there is still tenderness to be found, and protected, in the brave new world to come.”

–Jennifer Schaffer  ( The Nation )

8. If It Bleeds by Stephen King (Scribner)

6 Rave • 10 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Nobody does novellas like Stephen King … a quartet of stories that are a little too long to be labelled short, all of which are packed with that uniquely King combination of fear and empathy … One of the joys of King’s novella collections is the reminder that he, perhaps more than any of his bestselling peers, has a tremendous gift for giving stories exactly the amount of space they need to be properly told. Sometimes, that results in 700-plus page epics. Other times, just 70. Whatever it takes to get the story from his head to the page—that’s what King gives you. It’s remarkable really, that an author can create stories that cause a reader to shiver, to smile and to shed a tear in the space of a few pages—but really, should anything Stephen King does surprise us anymore? … practically pulses with the humanistic empathy that marks the best of King’s work. It’s an outstanding quartet, featuring four tales that are wildly different from one another, yet undeniably bound together by the voice of our finest storyteller. There is much to fear in the worlds created by Stephen King, but even in the depth of his darkest shadows, a light of hope steadily glows. More exceptional work from the maestro … Keep ‘em coming, Mr. King.”

–Allen Adams  ( The Maine Edge )

9. Show Them a Good Time by Nicole Flattery (Bloomsbury)

7 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Nicole Flattery’s publisher paid big money for these debut stories (plus a novel-in-progress), and it’s not hard to see why: they’re often extremely funny—peculiar as well as ha-ha—and highly addictive … Flattery’s themes are work, womanhood and early-to-midlife indirection, all tackled slantwise … It’s easy to read but trickier to get a handle on: Flattery’s off-kilter voice blends chatty candour and hard-to-interpret allegory (think Diane Williams or 90s Lorrie Moore), with the deadpan drollery and casually disturbing revelations heightened by her fondness for cutting any obvious connective tissue between sentences … Trauma lurks in the background, with allusions to attempted suicide, abuse and a 13-year-old’s miscarriage … Yet Flattery’s stories don’t depend on bringing such things to light; they’re just there—part of a woman’s life—which ultimately proves more disconcerting … Flattery…doesn’t seem too bothered about sewn-up narratives running from A to B; it’s a mark of her art in these strange, darkly funny stories that we aren’t either.”

–Anthony Cummins  ( The Guardian )

10. Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston (Amistad)

7 Rave • 4 Positive

Read a story from Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick here

“..a revelation not just in its celebration of Hurston’s lesser-known efforts as a writer of short stories but also in the subjects and settings that it takes on … Hurston’s stories do not merely document black experience in the early 20th century; they testify to larger truths about black life … tender and wry … Fans and scholars of Hurston’s work and the uninitiated alike will find many delights in these complex, thoughtful and wickedly funny portraits of black lives and communities … this book is a significant testament to the enduring resonance of black women’s writing.”

–Naomi Jackson  ( The Washington Post )

The Book Marks System: RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Free writing critiques.

Quick links on this page:

free writing critique list - professional critiques - rana's biography

Constructive criticism can help you become a better writer. Your family and friends might read your stories and help out, but they're not writers. Their feedback is going to be limited as they're unlikely to be experienced in fiction writing.

So, if you're a beginner, how do you gain helpful writing feedback and good advice without shelling out loads of money for a professional critique service you're not yet ready for?

Simples (please accept my apologies - I can't quite believe I'm quoting a meerkat in a blog post... I must be overtired) . You can seek help from a respected writing community offering encouraging free writing feedback.

Happy Sad Smileys

I was recently contacted by one of my readers, Rana Tarakji. She suggested that a list of free fiction critiquing opportunities would be a good resource to build. I agreed.

When Rana was researching critiquing services, she came across a number of websites that offer free writing feedback, so she very kindly put a list together for me. You can see the list below - it details some of the best online services available.

After the free writing feedback list, you will find details of professional critique services. These are useful when you have developed your writing and are in need of help from someone with detailed knowledge and direct industry experience.

After that, you will find Rana's biography, as this was her brain child.

If you know of / use / run a website that offers writing feedback or critiquing services, please contact me and I will add the details to the lists below.

Free Writing Feedback

Here are some of the best websites and online writing communities that allow writers to gain writing advice, tips and feedback on their stories free of charge. Websites are listed alphabetically.

Free

1. ABCtales

At the time of writing, ABCtales hosts over 100,000 short stories written by nearly 20,000 authors. Their forums allow writers to share their work with an active community of writers who give feedback and constructive criticism.

In 2016, it looked like ABCTales might close . The writing community were hoping Tony Cook (who runs it) could find someone to either help out with costs, or take it over. While the 'ABC will Tales close' message still exists, the blog is up to date and there are regular new postings (this written in 2018 (and checked again in 2019)) so it looks like the site is still running. I'll leave this listing live until I hear otherwise.

It's worth noting that stories published on ABCTales are made public, so by using the site you might be giving away first publication rights to any stories you post.

Bookrix is a self-publishing platform that allows you to engage with community members and promote your work. They help you with publishing and distribution via Amazon and other major online retailers.

3. British Science Fiction Association

There are currently 7 groups, called Orbits, looking at short story or novel length stories. They are all online, usually by simple email, and focus on SF, fantasy or horror. Members of the BSFA enjoy free entry to one or both groups which are small and have been successful for many years now. The original Orbits were actually postal.

The normal ‘round’ is bimonthly, with a maximum submission of 15,000 words.

The aim is to improve writing skills so while all members are polite, and invariably very friendly, the feedback aims at professional standards. Members range from complete beginners to multi-published, and live in quite a surprising number of countries, so being a Brit is not a requirement.

Please note, you do have to be a BSFA member to take part, but their membership costs are very reasonable.

4. Critique Circle

Based in Iceland, Critique Circle is an award winning website that has been running since 2003. At the time of writing they have posted almost 120,000 stories which have received over 550,000 critiques. They offer active forums and a great community.

Here is a comment from one of my website users, Alex Guerriero, about his experiences with this website:

I have tried Critique Circle and I found it very helpful. Reading somebody else's work makes you more aware of your own mistakes.

5. DeviantArt

A website that is primarily aimed at artists, but is also aimed at any form of art, including fiction writing. DeviantArt has been running since August 2000 and has over 38 million members.

6. Indie Novella

Indie Novella are a non-profit cooperative. Their team comprises authors, writers and illustrators who hold MAs in literature and publishing. They have worked and studied with publishing houses such as Curtis Brown and Faber.

You can submit the opening 10,000 words of your novel / novella to them and they will provide feedback. If they like your story, they may request your full manuscript to read.

Inkitt offer publishing advice, free writing competitions and encourage kind and constructive feedback from community members. Their content is curated, but they boast a 24 hour turnaround time for any submission.

They employ a strategy to get authors to the top of Amazon best seller lists. You can learn more about that on their website .

There are 2 case studies about Inkitt on my blog. The first is by HR Kemp and the second is by Simone Elise .

Mibba is a creative writing website with a growing audience. It was developed for writers to share their stories, poems, blogs and books and then gain feedback from community members.

9. Pen Factor

A platform that is passionate about giving emerging writers more encouragement and feedback. To participate, you have to give feedback to other writers before receiving feedback on your own stories.

This was recommended by Chris Nelson, one of my website users. He said:

Reddit's r/Writing subreddit has a weekly 'critique' thread with the week's current submittals out for review and comment.

It looks quite active, so it well worth checking out.

11. Scribophile

Aimed at writers of all skill levels, Scribophile encourages members to share their experiences and give respectful feedback in their friendly community forums. At the time of writing they have served almost 650,000 critiques for almost 110,000 submitted works, so it's a highly active community.

American author, Rebecca Henderson, has written about her experiences of using Scribophile for my website. In her post, she shows how she used the critiques she received from Scribophile users to improve her short story 'The Keymaster'. She then submitted her story to BLYNKT - they accepted the story and published it.

You can read Rebecca's story and case study here .

A note from Poornanand Goswami, one of my website users, about Scribophile:

I personally checked out each site listed on this page and I found Scribophile to be the best. Let me tell you how this works. You've got to critique at least 4 works to earn karma points. Your critique should be at least 125 words. If you spend 5 karma points, your work is placed in the 'spotlight'. 1 story will gainat least 8 critiques, some short, some long. The longer the critique, greater the credit.

Scrib is good and free, but only let's you post 2 works at a time. I'll have to wait for at least 30 days for everyone to critique my work. Then I'll delete them and post another story.

12. Story Write and All Poetry

Story Write and All Poetry were suggested for inclusion on this page by writer Seay Donovan, who has been using the platforms for 20 years. Shay said:

The community is wonderfully kind and attentive, and made up of everyone from amateurs to published authors from all over the world. They offer free courses, contests, and author pages for posting to gain feedback. They provide paid memberships as well for writers who want to add art to their words or wish to post more and comment less. Author’s maintain full rights to their work on these sites.

Peer review system aimed specifically at short stories, giving objective feedback via an online community.

This website was recommended for the lists by Dianne Bown-Wilson, one of my website users. Dianne has used the site and found it very helpful and learnt lots from it. For more information, see Dianne's notes in the comments at the bottom of the page.

A note from Poornanand Goswami, one of my website users, about Taylz:

I'd say Taylz is a good option, but the style of critique is not as good as Scribophile. The options are limited. It asks various questions regarding the story. It doesn't let you choose what work you'd like to review.

A response from Taylz founder, Jonathan. He contacted me after one of his users saw Poornanand's comments and felt that Taylz was being done a bit of a disservice, as Poornanand seemed to have missed the point of the website.

Taylz was designed for writers, not readers. It is indeed not in the style of other sites and, yes, the options are limited, but this is by design. The stories are allocated randomly and reviewed anonymously, so that there is no way to ‘game’ the system (back-scratching is very common on sites that allow users to choose the stories they review), and I maintain that it thus provides the most honest, frank reviews on the web. We are working hard to add more functions to Taylz, on a limited budget, but for the time being are focussing on delivering useful reviews, rather than the bells and whistles that other sites provide.

We want Taylz to be the place that serious writers choose.

Jonathan also shared the email exchange he had with Poornanand with me. His responses were polite, professional and explained everything very clearly.

Another note, from user Jack Effron:

A good British site! They are the only free site that has some good discipline (you must critique what they give you, no mucking about and you can complain about unfair critiques).

The administrator of Taylz is good, with a great vision, but his site has problems which I run to him with daily. He does sort them, though, patiently and supportively.

14. The Phare

The Phare is magazine that also offers a community forum where members can support other writers by offering feedback, advice and guidance. Members also have access to extras such as online workshops and events.

15. WritersCafe.org

A community offering proofreading, constructive criticism and general advice and feedback on both fiction and non-fiction writing.

16. YouWriteOn

Another site suggested by Dianne Bown-Wilson, who has used the site and found it really useful. Again, her notes can be seen in the comments section at the bottom of the page.

YouWriteOn is associated with FeedARead. Every 4 months, the authors who sell the most books on FeedARead receive feedback from publishers of authors like Dan Brown, Terry Pratchett and Ian Rankin.

A note from Jack Effron, one of my website users, about YouWriteOn:

YouWriteOn is still good but seems to have a small base of participants and some trouble getting stories critiqued. They also get bulk spammed in the forums which can be annoying.

A note from Pete Pitman, in July 2020:

Hi Chris, I've been trying to get into YouWriteOn's website for weeks, but can't get in. So, finding your helpful website has given me the opportunity to try a couple of alternative sites.

I had a look and YouWriteOn's website is inaccessible. After a bit of digging, I found some information on Paul Samael's website. He said, "... in December 2019, YouWriteOn announced that it is to close, although it is hoping to re-emerge following a kickstarter campaign to fund a new website." You can see more information on Paul's website .

I'm assuming the kickstarter campaign was unsuccessful, although those types of crowdfunding efforts can take a long time. So, for now I have disabled the link but left the listing here. I shall update it if YouWriteOn re-emerges at a later date.

Another Useful Resource From Reedsy

Reedsy have a useful resource titled 50 Places to Find a Critique Circle to Improve Your Writing . This also gives details of other places you can get writing critiques / assessments and feedback.

back to top

Professional Writing Critiques

Free writing critiques are great - they can be helpful and give you great advice when you're starting out. However, as you become more accomplished, you will need an expert to work with.

These professional services cost money, but you are usually receiving feedback from a successful editor, publisher or writer who can draw on extensive real-life experience to help you develop your stories so they have a much better chance of being published.

Here are details of some professional services that might be of interest to you. My writing services are included in this list, but I also link to other well reputed services so writers can research the market and see which appeals to them most.

1. Christopher Fielden's Critique Services

I relaunched my professional short story and poetry critique service in 2018 after putting together a team of highly experienced proofreaders and editors.

All are award winning writers and editors, some with backgrounds in education. Each member of the team has lots of real life experience to draw on, including extensive experience with writing critiques and helping authors develop their skills.

You can learn more about all my writing services here .

2. Flash Fiction Masters

Flash Fiction Magazine run a Flash Fiction Masters program that offers 1 flash fiction critique a month (for stories of 300 to 1,000 words). There's an annual fee, or you can pay monthly. They also run an active Facebook group, where writers comment on each other's work.

3. Henshaw Press

Henshaw Press run regular short story competitions and offer reasonably priced critiques to entrants. They also run a separate critique service, and a proofreading service, both of which are very reasonably priced.

I used Jacqui Bennett Writers Bureau to critique and edit my first novel, Wicked Game . I worked closely with Doug Watts and found his feedback invaluable. JBWB offer an excellent service at an affordable price.

5. Lynn Love

Lynn is a widely published writer. She is a reader for the Bristol Short Story Prize and is represented by Susan Armstrong at C&W. And she is also a critical reader. You can find out about her services on her website.

6. The Next Big Writer

Launched in 2005, The Next Big Writer give members access to constructive criticism from 1,000's of writers living all over the world. They also run writing contests.

They offer a 7 day free trial, although the trial does not allow you to post anything, so you need to part with cash to make proper use of the platform.

7. Writer's Digest

I haven't used these services myself, but have heard good things about them from my website users a few times. Writer's Digest offer reasonably priced services for all aspects of writing, including short stories, picture books, synopsis and query letters.

However, I have also received some negative comments about WD's services. Here is a comment from one of my website users, Alex Guerriero, about his experiences with Writer's Digest services:

Writer's Digest was a big disappointment because their critique was very superficial and although I was told a follow up was part of the process I had to send several messages before I got a reply. It was very frustrating, I had to wait a month. I don't recommend it.

While Alex's experience wasn't great, I have left the details here so you can research the company and make up your own mind. They do have a good a reputation.

Rana Tarakji's Biography

Rana Tarakji

Rana Tarakji is an American/Lebanese female entrepreneur, writer and digital marketer.

After having worked in one of the fastest growing companies alive - Groupon - Rana has launched and funded an internet start-up called Cary , a pre-owned marketplace based in the United Arab Emirates.

Since then, Rana has remained a co-founder at Cary but ceased being involved in the operations in order to start he own small online business Stylerail , an online beauty shop and blog.

Rana has been focusing mainly on her online business as well as on freelance writing, and has had articles published on dozens of respected websites and blogs.

You can connect with Rana on:

Big Thanks To Rana

I'd like to say a massive thank you to Rana for coming up with the idea for this resource and helping me develop it.

If you have any ideas about other useful writing resources that could be developed on this site, please get in touch with me using the comments form below or visit my contact page .

How to Write a Short Story, book by Christopher Fielden

This page may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure policy .

Leave your comments

Please use the form below to leave your comments. All comments will be reviewed so won't appear on the page instantly. I will not share your details with anyone else. Most recent comments appear at the bottom of the page, oldest at the top.

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Please prove you're a human by entering the security code in the box below: 3175, your comments:.

Dianne BW Hi Chris, thanks for your excellent post on this – and the basis of a very useful list. Two additions you might want to consider are:

Both of these sites run a peer review system of writers reviewing other writers’ work. While this means that some reviews may not be of the highest quality, in general, most are fair and helpful and also, as a writer, one learns a great deal by reading/reviewing other writers’ work. That’s my experience anyway and I use/have used both these sites. NB they can also help writers understand that regardless of its quality, ultimately not everyone will like your work, for whatever reason.

By the way, ABC Tales is currently due to close on Dec 31st – you might want to check this later to ensure your list is up to date.

Thanks again for all your helpful input to the writing community. Much appreciated! :-)

Chris Fielden Thanks very much, Dianne. I’ve added those sites to the lists and credited you as suggesting them.

That’s a shame about ABCTales. I'll keep an eye out and update the site.

Brendan OM Hi Chris, when I see anything on the Internet with the word 'Free' in the caption, I always take it with a pinch of salt. The 'Critque Circle' is just that. Convoluted, punctuated with you don't have 'enough credits' yet to submit your story for critique, the 'notorious' join 'premium membership' and access this and that for a monthly direct debit... NO says I. The other sites are likely no different. Nothing is free on the internet!

Chris Fielden Hi Brendan. I see where you’re coming from with this comment, but websites like these are a full time job to run, so they have to offer paid services or they wouldn’t exist. At some point I’ll have to figure out a way of making a living from my site as my savings are depleting rapidly and a man has to eat. I’ve been trying to make income by displaying adverts, but am well short of making enough to live on. I don’t want the ads to become too intrusive. It’s difficult to strike the balance between offering a supportive platform that people can use and earning a living.

Also, writing communities require input to get output. I don’t think anyone should expect others to critique their work for no monetary payment without reciprocating. Many writers are very strong advocates of sites like these and I’ve heard some great success stories from people who get involved. Critiquing other people’s work is a great way of improving your own writing. However, I appreciate they aren’t for everyone and do understand your point. Maybe ‘free’ is the wrong word – any suggestions for a better one would be gratefully received :-)

Brendan OM Thank you for your reply, Chris.

Maybe it was just me sounding off my frustration at so many site using the word 'free'. In far too many sites, generally speaking, 'free' usually means free to join using your name and email. After that the fine prints hits you. Of course I understand your point about costs involved and I know you've been trying your best to promote important services and provide advice and guidance. I have already bought both your books - How to Self Publish and How to Write a Short Story. I also refer to your table of short story competitions regularly.

Chris Fielden Hi Brendan. Yes, I do know what you mean. I share your dislike of fine-print and wish more sites were a little more open about that kind of thing from the off.

Thanks for buying my books – I hope you enjoyed them/found them useful :-)

Sylvie S You are actually quoting a fictional meercat in the intro (paragraph three)!

Having spoken to a few meercats in our local zoo, I can report that they are highly scornful of the carricature and have shown this by refusing to repeat the word 'simples' to me during any of our, rather one sided conversations!

First time on your site and am enjoying the information, thank you.

Chris Fielden So you're telling me that talking meercats aren't real?

You'll be telling me Santa doesn't exist next... :-)

Glad to hear you're enjoying the site.

Sylvie S When discussing Santa with zoo reindeers recently, it appears their believe in the generous saint remains undaunted! The real controversy surrounds Rudolf who they believe was actually a bit of a Port guzzler, hence the red, shiny nose and the ridicule he suffered from the others. Perhaps this led to the tradition of leaving out a mince pie and a glass of sherry. Mince pie for Santa whilst a  frenzied search for more alcohol by Rudolph aids the speeding sleigh.

Chris Fielden Thanks, Sylvie, that makes complete sense and puts my mind at rest :-)

Alex Christopher, many thanks for these recommendations. I have tried Critique Circle and I found it very helpful. Reading somebody else's work makes you more aware of your own mistakes.

Also I tried Writer's Digest. It was a big disappointment because their critique was very superficial and although I was told a follow up was part of the process I had to send several messages before I got a reply. It was very frustrating, I had to wait a month. I don't recommend it.

Chris Fielden Thanks for your feedback, Alex - much appreciated.

I've placed your comments in the relevant listings :-)

Emily T Hi there. My co-worker gave me a little bit of what she started writing and I thought it was pretty good. She is Indian and has had quite a life. She started to write a little and gave it to me. I was curious as to what you would say to her about her writing. If you can give any feedback, that would be wonderful!

Chris Fielden Hi Emily. I'm afraid I receive many requests like this and have to turn them all down - I simply don't have time to read other writer's stories for free.

You can learn about my paid proofreading service here .

You can find out about other websites that offer free feedback on the page above - there are many listed. However, these are community sites, so your colleague would have to sign up and engage with the community to receive feedback.

I hope that's helpful and wish your friend the best of luck with their writing :-)

Poornanand G Hey there. I'd like to tell you that you haven't mentioned how any of these site works. I personally checked out each site and I would say I didn't find any of them as good as Scribophile. For those who wanna know, lemme tell you how this works. [See main page for Poornanand's comments on the different websites - CF]

Which site will you liked the most? Comment and let me know.

Chris Fielden Thanks for your comments, Poornanand. I've added the ones about Scribophile and Taylz to the main page. I didn't add the ABC Tales comment as it didn't explain why you thought the critique wasn't constructive. If you supply a bit more detail about 'why' I will add your comments to the page. Thanks for the information you've provided - very helpful and much appreciated.

Chris N This is a good list.  I'll start to work through it - from the 'review and comment' side, since I don't care much to do my own writing any more, but I do like to encourage and assist new writers and see new material.

But I'm surprised that you didn't mention Reddit.

[NOTE - the rest of Chris's comment has been added to the resource above]

Chris Fielden Hi Chris. Glad to hear you found this resource useful.

Thanks for letting me know about Reddit. I've added details, along with your comments, to the page above.

Jack E A great idea but you ought to try to sign up with one each month and see what happens.

Several of these are not critique sites or have bad reputations on the internet.

The best one I have seen is YouWriteOn but I am trying them now. If they do prove better than the others - or don't - I will come back here to say so.

Chris Fielden Thanks, Jack.

I'm so busy I don't have time to sign up and use all these sites myself, so any feedback from users is much appreciated.

Some of the sites are writing communities, rather than specific critique sites, but you can ask other users for feedback and critiques by using them.

I hope you find the sites you sign up to beneficial. Any feedback would be very much appreciated.

Jack E Dear Chris. The list of recommended sites need periodic review. Some sites do not work, have negative reports on the internet or are publishers rather than writing sites. The only really good and really free one I have found is You Write On, so far excellent after a few days of service. Sponsored by the British Council and apparently has links with major publishers who may lurk there reading. Their members have got published by traditional publishers. Yes, you have to write reviews (like a commune, if you eat you have to grow food) but 1 point and 1 critique per critique you write: clear and fair. I did not try Trailz, Next Big Writer or Writer's Cafe so I cannot comment.

Hope that this feedback is helpful.

Chris Fielden Hi Jack. Thanks for this, very useful.

This post was written by a guest author, Rana Tarakji, who did have experience with all of the sites. I run lists of thousands of writing resources (competitions, magazines, writing platforms and much more). There is no way any one person could test all of them, unfortunately.

I have added details of a few extra resources to this list over time, as users have suggested them. This website is run like a community, with input from lots of users who share their experiences, so that’s how the sites are ‘tested’ if you like. The more people, like yourself, who share their experiences and opinions, the better. It helps give a balanced view. The aim is to help writers discover potential avenues that might be of interest to them. They then have to do the research and see which ones they’d like to consider using. Everyone is different, so it’s down to the individual.

Re publisher sites, agreed, but they offer a platform with many users who can give authors feedback on their work, so they are relevant to this resource.

I have seen many negative reports about a lot of the businesses and platforms I detail on this site. I have also seen many positive ones. As an example, I work directly with Inkitt and know their team. They are good people who genuinely try and help authors. They also have some excellent results and case studies to prove it. Their negative reviews largely refer to marketing tactics that were used when the company was in its infancy. These are not used anymore and Inkitt have evolved in a positive way. You will always find positive and negative reviews about platforms like this – it’s down to the individual to research each one and form their own opinion.

Thanks for your comments about the other platforms. I have added what you said about YouWriteOn to the main page.

Jack E A big 'Shukraan' to Rana Tarakji. This is a brilliant idea which has helped me and, I'm sure, many other writers.

Chris Fielden Awesome, thanks Jack. Will let Rana know :-)

Rana T Thanks a lot, Jack, I hope you've found this useful! :)

John L With each passing day, I find that the only thing I am looking for is feedback. There can be no growth without it. I have looked at some sites, and understand some of the frustrations contained within the comments. I have been a member of Critique Circle for six months now and it has been beneficial.

It's true that nothing is for free, but if you cannot invest a few moments to help others why should they do so for you? It's a fair trade, and you can pick and choose those sites that you wish to go 'premium' with, or not.

I have been unsuccessful in finding a critique partner that I could work with closely. If you have any information to that end it would be highly appreciated. Maybe you could put an article together on the subject.

I enjoyed the post. Thanks. I will be looking into most of them.

Chris Fielden Hi John. Thank you for your message.

I couldn't agree with your assessment more. Another thing worth noting is that a writer can learn just as much from critiquing other writer's stories, as they can from receiving critiques on their own work. It all helps you develop as a writer.

I've found the best way to gain insightful critiques is to join a local writing group. I'm in a small group with 7 members and we all regularly meet up and critique each other's work. Having a variety of reading tastes in the group really helps - if more than one person picks up on the same issue, you know you have a problem. And different people pick up different problems too. Still, I'd recommend a small group as too many opinions can be overwhelming. I've found that since joining the group, my publication success rate has more than doubled. You might find that better than just working with a single partner, but you may also find someone in a group who you could partner up in. So it's worth exploring.

Putting a post together on the subject matter is on my 'to do' list already, but as my list of tasks is a tad epic, it is unlikely to happen any time soon.

Anyway, I hope my comments are useful :-)

Lynn C Hi Chris. Having read your comments on JBWB, I decided to have a look at their critique services and sent off my 300-word free critique. I received a wonderful email reply and immediately decided to have my first novel critiqued by Doug. I know it's in safe hands and he will help me get to the best my novel can be.

I only found your website yesterday by chance, but I have listed it amongst my favourites on my PC.  I will be a frequent visitor. Thank you.

Chris Fielden Hi Lynn. That's great news. Doug is a total legend and I'm sure you will find his help invaluable. I wish you the best of luck with your novel and thank you for bookmarking the site.

I run an email newsletter, which you can sign up to here . I send out an email every week or two or three about all sorts of writing related stuff. Just thought I'd mention it, in case it's of interest :-)

Pete P Hi Chris, I've been trying to get into YouWriteOn's website for weeks, but can't get in. So, finding your helpful website has given me the opportunity to try a couple of alternative sites.

Taylz are in the process of updating their site, so I've left my email address for them to notify me when it's ready.

Chris Fielden Hi Pete, thanks for letting me know about YouWriteOn - much appreciated.

I found some information on Paul Samael's website. He said, "... in December 2019, Youwriteon announced that it is to close, although it is hoping to re-emerge following a kickstarter campaign to fund a new website." As it's now July, I guess that didn't happen. You can find more info on Paul's website .

I have made an update to the listing on my website and will update it if it reappears.

Good luck with Taylz - I've heard good things about them and Jonathan, who runs it, is great.

Thanks again for your help :-)

Edward S Hi Chris, you are doing quite a service to the community. But what about us memoir writers. Where's our list of free? Fiction ain't everything. If you ain't got no list but know of one or two,  please send them to me.

Sorry, I can't prove I'm a human.

Chris Fielden Hi Ed. Thank you for your message.

Many of these platforms are set up for fiction and non-fiction. I simply mention fiction more often as that is what my website is focussed on. So I'd recommend looking at the platforms listed to see what they do. You may find many accept memoirs and other forms of non-fiction.

I have a list of memoir competitions on my website. But there are very few that I'm aware of... If you know of any to add, then please do let me know.

I hope that helps :-)

Marge P How do I join your club? I am 87 years young, and have written over 150 books on personal development, senior issues, and some poetry. I need help and guidance on query letters and book proposals. Any advice?

Chris Fielden Hi Marge, thanks for you for your message. I usually advise writers to keep their query letters concise and to the point, listing relevant information and experience, but it depends on the agent / publisher that you intend to approach and what they request in their submission guidelines.

I'd recommend starting by researching who you wish to approach, find out what they ask for and then tailor your proposal for them. The most recent Writers' & Artists' Yearbook and Mslexia's Indie Publishing Guide are a good places to start this type of research.

I hope that helps and I wish you the best of luck with your submissions :-)

Marge P Thank you so much for the info!

Chris Fielden No problem, Marge - all the best :)

Mark Hey Christopher, thanks for this summary and making the extra effort to include your members comments. I found them very useful.

This is just my 2 cents rather than anything actionable. I'm not expecting it to be added as a comment. Just wondering what your experienced view has to say re my experiences.

With the aim of getting two short stories critiqued, I read the observations and chose Scribophile and Critique Circle. I then signed up and made an attempt on Scrib. to leave a critique.

As an aside, I was surprised that the first three stories that I read had a significant number of grammatical and word choice issues. One so much so that it was almost unreadable.

Nevertheless, I ploughed on with the  third story as it had a wonderful narrative and plot.

I tried the inline and prose reviews but found the site's tools extremely cumbersome. Most people remark on how adept I am at using technology and thus I was surprised at how I struggled to produce a quality review in a reasonable amount of time.

Sorry for the diatribe - my question is really this: do these sites really expect reviewers to spent 1-2 hours (the time I would expect to do a descent job on 3,000 words) for one review and then repeat this X number of times to get some feedback?

I'm quite happy to put in the time and love to help others. It's just that I don't want to feel like I'm fighting the site as I'll eventually lose my cool with the result that the review will be a shortened version and perhaps not as constructive as I would have wished.

I wonder if you have any recommendations for a more manageable platform?

Chris Fielden Hi Mark, thanks for your message.

Personally, I favour face to face writing groups. My experience with those is that you find like-minded writers you can work with in a constructive and positive way. I haven't used sites like Scribophile etc. because I've never need to. I'm fortunate to have a local writing group that works really well - we critique each other's work and run spoken word events. I have heard from other writers that free writing critique sites can be really useful, but can also be a bit hit and miss with quality. You have to spend some time finding what works best for you. Many writers use them to find other writers on their wavelength and then develop relationships outside the platforms, undertaking critiques for one another etc.

My advice would be to try the platforms for a while and see what works best for you as a writer. Also, research local groups or online groups you can join that might offer what you're looking for. You can start by looking at this writing groups resource on my site.

I hope that helps and wish you the very best with your writing in the future :)

The copyright of the stories and content published on this website remain with the author.

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Top left clockwise: Kevin Barry, Kit De Waal, Chris Power, Donal Ryan and Mary Gaitskill

Take risks and tell the truth: how to write a great short story

Drawing on writers from Anton Chekhov to Kit de Waal, Donal Ryan explores the art of writing short fiction. Plus Chris Power on the best books for budding short story writers

T he first story I wrote outside of school was about Irish boxer Barry McGuigan. I was 10 and I loved Barry. He’d just lost his world featherweight title to the American Steve Cruz under the hellish Nevada sun and the only thing that could mend my broken heart was a restoration of my hero’s belt. Months passed and there was no talk of a rematch, so I wrote a story about it.

My imagined fight was in Ireland, and I was ringside. In my story I’d arranged the whole thing. I’d even given Barry some tips on countering Steve’s vicious hook. It went the distance but Barry won easily on points. He hugged Steve. His dad sang “Danny Boy”. I felt as I finished my story an intense relief. The world in that moment was restful and calm. I’d created a new reality for myself, and I was able to occupy it for a while, to feel a joy I’d created by moving a biro across paper. I think of that story now every single time I sit down to write. I strive for the feeling of rightness it gave me, that feeling of peace.

It took me a while to regain that feeling. When I left school, where I was lucky enough to be roundly encouraged and told with conviction that I was a writer, I inexplicably embarked on a career of self-sabotage, only allowing my literary ambitions to surface very sporadically, and then burning the results in fits of disgust. Nothing I wrote rang true; nothing felt worthy of being read.

Shortly after I got married my mother-in-law happened upon a file on the hard drive of a PC I’d loaned her (there’s a great and terrifying writing prompt!). It contained a ridiculous story about a young solicitor being corrupted by a gangster client. I’d forgotten about the story, and about one of its peripheral characters, a simple and pure-hearted man named Johnsey Cunliffe. My wife suggested giving Johnsey new life, and I started a rewrite with him as the hero; the story kept growing until I found myself with a draft of my first finished novel, The Thing About December . I didn’t feel embarrassed, nor did I feel an urge to burn it. I felt peace. I knew it wouldn’t last, and so I quickly wrote a handful of new stories, and the peace didn’t dissipate. Not for a while, anyway.

So a forgotten short story, written somewhere in the fog of my early 20s, turned out to be the making of my writing career. Maybe it would have happened anyway, or maybe not, but I think the impulse would always have been present, the urge to put a grammar on the ideas in my head. Mary Costello, author of The China Factory , one of the finest short story collections I’ve ever read, says: “Write only what’s essential, what must be written … an image or a story that keeps gnawing, that won’t leave you alone. And the only way to get peace is to write it.”

I know that in this straitened, rule-bound, virus-ridden present, many people find themselves with that gnawing feeling, that urge to fashion from language a new reality, or to get the idea that’s been clamouring inside them out of their imagination and into the world. So I’ve put together some ideas with the help of some of my favourite writers on how best to go about finding that peace.

Don’t worry

Stephen King Full Dark, No Stars

In a short story, the sentences have to do so much! Some of Chekhov’s stories are less than three printed pages; a few comprise a single brief paragraph. In his most famous story, “The Lady with the Dog”, we are given a detailed account of the nature, history and motivations of Gurov within the first page, but there is no feeling of stress or overload. Stephen King’s 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars is a masterclass in compression and suspense. My colleague in creative writing at the University of Limerick, Sarah Moore Fitzgerald, is, like me, a novelist who turns occasionally to the short form. Sarah considers short stories to be “storytelling’s finest gifts. In the best ones, nothing is superfluous, their focus is sharp and vivid but they can be gloriously elliptical too, full of echoes.” The novel form, as I’ve heard Mike McCormack say, offers “a wonderful accommodation to the writer”, but the short story is a barren territory. There’s nowhere to hide, no space for excess or digression.

My wife asked me once why this worried me so much. I’d just published my first two novels and had embarked on a whole collection of short stories, A Slanting of the Sun . She’d come home from work to find me curled up in a ball of despair. “Every sentence worries me,” I whined. “None of them is doing enough .” “Don’t worry about how much they’re doing until all the work is done,” she said. “Get the story written, and then you can go back and fix all those worrisome sentences. And the chances are, once the story exists, you won’t be as worried about those sentences at all. They’ll just be. ”

Ah. I can still feel the beautiful relief I felt at her wise words. Life is filled with things to worry about. The quality of our sentences should be a challenge and a constant fruitful quest, a gradual aggregation of attainment. But creativity should always bring us at least some whisper of joy. It should be a way out of worry.

One of the concepts my colleague Sarah illuminates is that of a “draft zero” – a draft that comes before a first draft, where your story is splashed on to your screen or page, containing all or most of its desired elements. Draft zero offers complete freedom from any consideration of craft or finesse.

Kit de Waal, Supporting Cast

Kit de Waal, who recently published a wonderful collection, Supporting Cast , featuring characters from her novels, offers this wisdom on getting your story from your head on to your page or screen: “Don’t overthink but do overwrite. Sometimes you see a pair of gloves or a flower on the street or lipstick on a coffee cup and it moves you in a particular way. That’s your prompt right there. Write that feeling or set something around that idea, you don’t know what at this stage, you’re going off sheer muse, writerly energy, so just follow it. And follow it right to the end – it might be a day, a week, a year. Overwrite the thing and then sit back and ask yourself, ‘Where is the magic? What am I saying? Who is speaking?’ When you’ve worked that out, you have your story and you can start crafting and editing.”

Your draft zero is Michelangelo’s lump of rough-hacked marble, but with David’s basic shape. It is the reassuring existence of something tangible in the world outside of your mind , something raw and real, containing within its messy self the potential for greatness. And the best way to make it great is to make it truthful.

Be truthful

I don’t mean by this that you need to speak your own truth at all times or to draw only on your own lived experience, but it’s important to be true to our own impulses and ambitions as writers; to write the story we want to write, not the story we think we should write. That’s like saying things that you think people want to hear: you’ll end up tangling yourself in a knot of half-truths and constructed, co-opted beliefs. You’ll be more politician than writer, and, as good and decent as some of them are, the world definitely has enough politicians.

Melatu Uche Okorie, This Hostel Life

Your own experiences, of course, your own truth, can be parlayed into wonderful fictions, and can by virtue of their foundation in reality contain an almost automatic immediacy and intensity. Melatu Uche Okorie’s debut collection, This Hostel Life , is drawn from her experiences in the Irish direct provision system as an asylum seeker. The title story in particular has about it a feeling of absolute truthfulness, written in the demotic of the author’s Nigerian countrywomen; while another story, “Under the Awning”, feels as though it might be an oblique description of events witnessed or experienced first-hand by the author.

You might as well do exactly what you want to do, even (or especially) if it’s never been done before. You have nothing to lose by taking risks, with form, content, style, structure or any other element of your piece of fiction. Rob Doyle , a consummate literary risk-taker, exhorts writers to “try writing a story that doesn’t look how short stories are meant to look – try one in the form of an encyclopaedia entry, or a list, or an essay, or a review of an imaginary restaurant, sex toy, amusement park or film. Have people wondering if it’s even fiction. Mix it all up. Short stories can explore ideas as well as emotions – huge ideas can fit into short stories. For proof, read the work of Jorge Luis Borges . In fact, I second Roberto Bolaño’s advice to anyone writing short stories: read Borges.”

Frank O’Connor in 1958.

Bend the iron bar

“When the curtain falls,” said Frank O’Connor of the short story, “everything must be changed. An iron bar must have been bent and been seen to be bent.” One of the first short stories to break my heart was O’Connor’s “ Guests of the Nation ”. It has been described as one of the greatest anti-war stories ever written, and one of the finest stories from a master of the form. Its devastating denouement closes with this plaintive statement from the shattered narrator: “And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.” This line contains within it an entreaty to short story writers to reach for that profound moment, that event or epiphany or reversal or triumph; to arrive within the confines of their story at a moment that will have a resonance far beyond its narrow scope.

Another great literary O’Connor, this time the novelist Joseph, who teaches creative writing at the University of Limerick, says that “to me every excellent short story centres around an instant where intense change becomes possible or, at least, imaginable for the character. Cut into the story late, leave it early, and find a moment.” Joseph quotes the closing words of one of his favourite short stories, Raymond Carver’s “Fat”: “It is August. My life is going to change. I feel it.”

The moment of course needn’t be in the ending, and the end of a story doesn’t necessarily have to be incendiary or revelatory, or to contain an unexpected twist. Mary Gaitskill ’s story “Heaven” describes a family going through change and trauma and loss, and iron bars are bent in almost every paragraph, but its ending is memorable for the moment of relief it offers, in a gently muted description of the perfect grace of a summer evening and a family gathered for a meal. “They all sat in lawn chairs and ate from the warm plates in their laps. The steak was good and rare; its juices ran into the salad and pasta when Virginia moved her knees. A light wind blew loose hairs around their faces and tickled them. The trees rustled dimly. There were nice insect noises. Jarold paused, a forkful of steak rising across his chest. ‘Like heaven,’ he said. ‘It’s like heaven.’ They were quiet for several minutes.”

Listen to your story

Kevin Barry Dark Lies the Island

“Beer Trip to Llandudno”, Kevin Barry’s masterpiece of the short form, from his 2012 collection Dark Lies the Island , is another story that has remained pristine in my consciousness since I first read it. Part of the magic of that story, and of all Barry’s work, is its dialogue: the earthy, pithy, perfectly authentic exchanges between his characters. When I asked Kevin about this, he said: “If you feel like you’re coming towards the final draft of a story, print it out and read it aloud, slowly, with red pen in hand. Your ear will catch all the evasions and the false notes in the story much quicker than your eye will catch them on the screen or page. Listen to what’s not being said in the dialogue. Very often the story, and the drama, is to be found just underneath the surface of the talk.”

Such scrupulous attention to the burden carried by each unit of language and to the work done by the notes played and unplayed can make a story truly shine. Alice Kinsella is an accomplished poet who recently turned her hand to the short form in great style with her sublime account of early motherhood, “Window”. “Poetry or prose,” Alice says, “the aim is the same, to make every word earn its place on the page.”

Ignore everything

And as self-defeating as this sounds, here’s a final piece of advice: once you sit down to write your story, forget about this article. Forget all the advice you’ve ever been given. Free your hand, free your mind, cut yourself loose into the infinity of possibility, and create from those 26 little symbols what you will. We came from the hearts of stars. We are the universe, telling itself its own story.

Donal Ryan is a judge for the BBC national short story award with Cambridge University. The shortlist will be announced on 10 September and the winner on 19 October. For more information see www.bbc.co.uk/nssa .

Books for budding short story writers By Chris Power

If short story collections occupy a minority position on publishers’ lists, books about the short story are an even scarcer commodity. In the 1970s the academic Charles E May published Short Story Theories , which he followed up in 1994 with The New Short Story Theories . These volumes, out of print but easy enough to find second-hand, collect some of the key texts about short fiction, from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales , to Elizabeth Bowen’s tracing of Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov’s influence, and Julio Cortázar’s brilliant lecture Some Aspects of the Short Story (“the novel always wins on points, while the story must win by a knockout”).

Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice (1963) studies 11 great story writers, from Ivan Turgenev to Katherine Mansfield, and argues that the quintessential short story subjects are outsiders: “There is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel – an intense awareness of human loneliness.” O’Connor’s assertiveness makes disagreeing with him part of the fun. As his countryman Sean O’Faolain wrote: “He was like a man who takes a machine gun to a shooting gallery. Everybody falls flat on his face, the proprietor at once takes to the hills, and when it is all over, and you cautiously peep up, you find that he has wrecked the place but got three perfect bull’s-eyes.”

I have a similar relationship with George Saunders’s remarkable study of seven classic Russian short stories, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain , published earlier this year. I don’t buy the overarching argument about fiction generating empathy, but this is a book stuffed with arresting observations and practical tips from a master craftsman. His 50-page close reading of Chekhov’s 12-page “In the Cart” is jaw-droppingly good.

Steering the Craft by Ursula K Le Guin isn’t specifically about short stories, but she could certainly write them, and her clear, practical advice is invaluable to anyone wanting to learn about two of the form’s prerequisites: rhythm and concision.

My last recommendation isn’t a book at all, but the New Yorker: Fiction podcast . Appearing monthly since 2007, each episode features a writer reading a story from the magazine’s archives and discussing it with fiction editor Deborah Treisman. These conversations are a wonderful education in how stories work. I strongly recommend Ben Marcus on Kazuo Ishiguro (September 2011), Tessa Hadley on Nadine Gordimer (September 2012), and ZZ Packer on Lesley Nneka Arimah (October 2020), a discussion which moves between craft, fairytale and motherhood.

  • Short stories
  • Raymond Carver
  • Stephen King
  • Anton Chekhov
  • Jorge Luis Borges
  • Mary Gaitskill
  • Kevin Barry

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10 Ways to Review a Novel or Short Story

10 Ways to Review a Novel or Short Story

You’ve come to the end of another novel or short story. Now what? If you’re looking to spice up your review activities with something fresh, unique, or just plain different than your average paper, read on! Here are ten ways to review a novel or short story.

Here are 10 Ways to Review a Novel or Short Story

1. socratic seminars.

Why write when you can discuss? If you’re unfamiliar with a Socratic Seminar , it is a method to understand information by creating a dialogue in class. Students should find deeper understanding and discuss complex ideas. Works that are “heavy” or require your students to really think about issues are perfect for Socratic Seminars.

2. Create a Game

You can either have students create their own game with various templates they find online, or you can create a game that students will play in order to review. Either way, it’s a fun excuse to host a game day in your classroom and breaks up the monotony of review, papers, and tests. I really like having students create their own games, or put a creative spin on old classics.

3. Task Cards

Instead of a long project, try several smaller tasks that review the works. It’s also great if you want to have students work in small groups. Check out my Task Card Resource that can be used with any novel. It includes a pre-reading set of task cards, as well as a second set for review. There are four sets of student directions for differentiation.

10 Ways to Review a Novel or Short Story

4. Escape Room

I love escape rooms, and you can usually find one for just about any novel or short story. Or, if you’re particularly creative with puzzles, you can create your own. They don’t have to be super complicated or involve anything more than paper (though there are plenty of digital escape rooms that are very engaging). Try one for your next read and see how students respond.

5. Fan Fiction

This activity is especially engaging when students have read cliff-hanger or open-ended stories. I’ll have students continue the story, or re-write it from a different perspective. When I use this with short stories, students see it as more manageable than trying to write something for a longer novel. Alternatively, you may try having students write poetry based on the overall themes or major plot points.

6. Collaborative Review Poster

I love this for the beginning of the year with my freshmen and sophomores. It works as a review for my short story unit and, since they present their posters to the class, it helps all the students review for their unit test. Because I use this within my short story unit, each group will review a different story, though sometimes I will have duplicate groups. You can read more about this project specifically here or find my poster project here .

10 Ways to Review a Novel or Short Story

7. Be Artsy

There are many alternatives to writing projects, and you may have students who much prefer to express their thoughts artistically. Students might work on a collection of shape poems. You could also have them copy a few pages from the novel or short story and create blackout poems . I’ve had students create bookmarks using quotes, or students who drew scenes from period pieces. I have even seen collaborative projects where students created graphic novel-inspired projects.  

8. Take it to the Theater or Silver Screen

If you’ve read a novel or short story that has no film adaptation, this is a particularly excellent activity. Have students imagine who would play in the film, or who would act on stage. Students can create soundtracks for key plot points, design the stage, research film locations, create a film poster or playbill, and even write scenes as a script. This is another collaborative opportunity for students.

9. Write for Children

Have students think about the novel or short story from a different angle. There are a lot of ways to create a children’s story from longer works. Students can condense the story into a picture book, focusing on visual aspects and simple language structure. You can also bring in alphabet books to see how it is structured around a theme, and then have students create a version of the novel in alphabet form. I suggest having a plethora of examples from the library for students to lean on, and have students work in pairs or small groups. This is really a fun activity and having to simplify a story proves to make a great review.

10 Ways to Review a Novel or Short Story

10. Write a Little Bit

Instead of a full paper, think of something creative that involves a little bit of writing. Give students a short stack of post-its and require the answers to fit on the square. You can also collect mint tins and require the same thing. Their “review” notes must fit inside the mint tin. If you have class sets of whiteboards, students can write a summary and then work on condensing the story into the shortest sentence. You may have students write a tweet for a summary or write the “live tweet” of the short story. Any of these can be collected and copied for a class set of notes to study for a later test.

These are all great activities to use as a review for a novel or short story, but they also work as stand-alone projects as well. Put a creative spin on your review activities with any of these, and let me know in the comments what your favorite options are.

Take a look at this resource, Activities for ANY Novel .

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The Best Short Story Writing Contests of 2024

Writing competitions curated by Reedsy

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The reedsy prompts contest.

Every Friday, Reedsy sends out five writing prompts. Enter your response within a week for a chance at $250. Winners may also be included in a future issue of Reedsy’s literary magazine, Prompted.

Additional prizes

$25 credit toward Reedsy editorial services

Entry requirements

Deadline: December 31, 2023 (Expired)

Fiction, Short Story

Anthology Flash Fiction Award

Anthology Magazine

The Anthology Flash Fiction Competition is open to original and previously unpublished flash fiction on any theme in the English language by writers of any nationality. We are looking for writing that is clever and unique, inspires us, and crafts a compelling story. Max 250 words.

Deadline: September 30, 2024

Fiction, Short Story, Flash Fiction

Ironclad Creative Short Story Competition

Ironclad Creative CIC

We are looking for short stories that respond in any way to: 7:12am. You can use that in the text, as a theme, or any way you want. We accept any prose genre and any length of story up to 6k words. We’re looking for writers who have exciting voices and can move us - that can happen in any genre of prose. We’re not accepting plays or poetry for this competition.

2nd: £50 | 3rd & 4th: £25 | 10 short-listed entries: publication

Deadline: April 30, 2024

Fiction, Short Story, Crime, Fantasy, Flash Fiction, Horror, Humor, Mystery, Novella, Romance, Science Fiction, Thriller

Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize

The 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, the fifteenth edition of the prestigious prize, is open from 1 February to 1 July 2024. Exceptionally international in scope, the prize supports writers who have not yet published a book-length work, with no limits on age, gender, nationality, or background. The winners of each category will receive a £1,000 cash prize and publication in Wasafiri magazine.

Publication

Deadline: June 30, 2024

Fiction, Poetry, Short Story

Jim Martin Memorial Story Contest

Arizona Mystery Writers

Every year the Arizona Mystery Writers hosts the Jim Martin Memorial Story Contest. Naturally, since we’re the Arizona Mystery Writers, we want a mystery story, but we’re flexible about the boundaries of that category, and we also accept thrillers and suspense stories. It doesn’t matter if your story’s characters are in outer space, riding horses, or living underground. Costumes and settings don’t matter as long as the story is a mystery, thriller, or suspense tale as described.

2nd: $100 | 3rd: $75

Deadline: August 01, 2024

Fiction, Mystery, Short Story

Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers

University of Tulsa

The Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers honor the work of writers at the beginning of their careers. $500 prizes will be awarded in both the fiction and poetry categories, and the winning manuscripts will appear in the spring issue of Nimrod. Winners will have the chance to work with the Nimrod board of editors to refine and edit their manuscripts before publication.

Deadline: July 15, 2024

HG Wells Short Story Competition

HG Wells Competition

There are two different competitions in 2024: one for those 21 and under, and one for those over 21. The competition for those 21 and under is free to enter and has a prize of £1,000 for the winning entry. All shortlisted entries will also be published in a quality, professionally published paperback anthology.

Under 21: £1,000 | Over 21: £500

Deadline: July 08, 2024

Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction, Short Story

Fabula Press Short Story Contest

Fabula Press

Fabula Press’ annual short story competition has two segments – a free section, and a paid section. At least 3 submissions from the free section will be selected for publication in the Fabula Press Anthology and on the Fabula Press website; for paid submissions, at least twelve entries will be included in the anthology on the website. There is no theme for our contests; also, barring a few exceptions, we are flexible about genre

2nd: $250 | 3rd: $100 | Stories selected for publication: $75

Deadline: June 07, 2024

Elegant Literature's Award For New Writers

Elegant Literature

One of the largest awards open to unpublished writers, and the only one closed to professionals. We are the first magazine to pay pro rates and only accept submissions from new writers, putting over $100k into the hands of emerging talent around the globe. One new writer receives the grand prize. We also choose the best stories, pay the authors professional rates, and publish them in our magazine.

Paid publication, 25 x $20 USD | Free entry to Novelist Accelerator

Deadline: February 29, 2024

Crime, Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Humor, Mystery, Romance, Science Fiction, Short Story, Thriller, Young Adult, Flash Fiction, Science Writing

The Pinch Literary Awards & Page Prize

The Pinch Literary Journal

The 2023 Pinch Literary Awards accepts poetry and fiction. The 2023 Page Prize accepts non-fiction.

$2000 for poetry & fiction winners

$1000 for Page Prize winner

Fiction, Poetry, Short Story, Non-fiction

Creative Writing Award for Short Fiction

Aesthetica Magazine

The Aesthetica Creative Writing Award celebrates outstanding writers. The Award was launched after the publication of Aesthetica Magazine, as a way to support the next generation of literary talent. The Creative Writing Award is open to Poetry and Short Fiction submissions on any theme, however, we are particularly interested in works that reflect upon our ever changing world.

Publication in the Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual | A five-day course from Arvon | Consultation with Redhammer Management | Six-week writing short stories course from Curtis Brown Creative

Deadline: August 31, 2024

Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Competition

Dzanc Books

The Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize celebrates imaginative and inventive writing in book-length collections (generally over 40,000 words, but there is no hard minimum). Past winners include Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh (Zan), Nino Cipri (Homesick), Anne Valente (By Light We Knew Our Names), Chaya Bhuvaneswar (White Dancing Elephants), Jen Grow (My Life as a Mermaid), Julie Stewart (Water and Blood), and Ethel Rohan (In the Event of Contact). The winning submission will be awarded a $2,500 advance and publication by Dzanc Books.

ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

Australian Book Review

ABR welcomes entries in the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. The Jolley Prize is worth a total of $12,500 and is for an original work of short fiction of between 2,000 and 5,000 words, written in English. This is the fifteenth time the Jolley Prize has run and it is one of the world’s leading prizes for short fiction.

2nd: $4000 AUD | 3rd: $2500 AUD

Deadline: April 22, 2024

Minds Shine Bright Writing Competition

Minds Shine Bright

Minds Shine Bright is an arts business based in Melbourne Australia committed to supporting the arts and writers. We run two fiction writing competitions; Minds Shine Bright Confidence, a longitudinal look at the theme confidence in fiction and poetry, and Seasons a competition with a changing external theme. Light and Shadow is currently open.

2nd: $400 AUD | 3rd: $300 AUD | 4th: $200 AUD | Commended entries: $100 AUD

Deadline: March 31, 2024

Fiction, Flash Fiction, Poetry, Script Writing, Short Story

F(r)iction Short Story Contest

We seek work that actively pushes boundaries, that forces us to question traditions and tastes. If your work takes risks, we want to read it. We like strong narratives that make us feel something and stories we haven’t seen before. We accept work, written in English, from anywhere in the world—regardless of genre, style, or origin—and welcome speculative writing and experimental literature. Strange is good. Strange with a strong character arc is even better. Keep it weird, folks.

7 Day Story Writing Challenge

Register now for our next 7-day story writing challenge. A secret theme, a randomly assigned genre, and just 7 days to write a story of no more than 2,000 words. Our 7-day story writing challenges take place throughout the year. The challenges are free and you can even get feedback on your story. Take part in one challenge or take part in all of them!

Publication on website

Deadline: March 11, 2024

Fiction, Flash Fiction, Short Story, Crime, Fantasy, Horror, Humor, Mystery, Romance, Science Fiction, Thriller, Young Adult

Brink Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing

The Brink Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing will be administered to the winner of a literary contest designed to champion innovative hybrid and cross-genre work.

Deadline: February 16, 2024 (Expired)

Essay, Fantasy, Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Non-fiction, Poetry, Science Writing, Short Story

Writing MAGIC

Sadie Tells Stories

Are you an author who loves magic? Do you have an idea for a super short story that needs to be shared with the world? If you answered yes to both of those questions this contest is for you! The story can be about anything magical. Maybe it’s something that you’ve experienced in real life or it’s something you’ve created. Maybe it’s the start of a great idea. Maybe it’ll be the thing that inspires you to finally publish your book.

Deadline: April 01, 2024

Fantasy, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Memoir, Mystery, Non-fiction, Romance, Science Fiction, Short Story, Young Adult

Rigel 2024: $500 for Prose, Poetry, Art, or Graphic Novel

Sunspot Literary Journal

Literary or genre works accepted. Winner receives $500 plus publication, while runners-up and finalists are offered publication. No restrictions on theme or category. Closes: February 29. Entry fee: $12.50. Enter as many times as you like through Submittable or Duotrope

$500 + publication

Runners-up and finalists are offered publication

Essay, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Memoir, Non-fiction, Novel, Novella, Poetry, Script Writing, Short Story

Military Anthology: Partnerships, the Untold Story

Armed Services Arts Partnership

Partners are an integral aspect of military life, at home and afar, during deployment and after homecoming. Partnerships drive military action and extend beyond being a battle buddy, wingman, or crew member. Some are planned while others arise entirely unexpectedly. Spouses, family, old or new friends, community, faith leaders, and medical specialists all support the military community. Despite their importance, the stories of these partnerships often go untold. This anthology aims to correct that: We will highlight the nuances, surprises, joy, sorrow, heroism, tears, healing power, and ache of partnerships. We invite you to submit the story about partnerships from your journey, so we can help tell it.

$500 Editors' Choice award

$250 for each genre category (prose, poetry, visual art)

💰 Fee: FREE

Deadline: March 01, 2024

Essay, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Non-fiction, Poetry, Short Story

Spring Microfiction Battle

Writing Battle

Two days to write a 500 word short story. The peer-powered quarterly writing contest where every story receives oodles of feedback. Write one. Read ten. Win thousands.

Genre Winner (x4): $1,500

Genre Runner-up (x4): $375 | Feedback by industry professionals

Deadline: May 03, 2024

Crime, Fantasy, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Horror, Humor, Mystery, Romance, Science Fiction, Short Story, Thriller, Young Adult

Summer Nanofiction Battle

Two days to write a 250 word short story. The peer-powered quarterly writing contest where every story receives oodles of feedback. Write one. Read ten. Win thousands.

Deadline: August 02, 2024

Crime, Fantasy, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Horror, Humor, Mystery, Romance, Science Fiction, Science Writing, Short Story, Thriller, Young Adult

Passionate Plume

Passionate Ink

The 2024 Passionate Plume celebrates the best in erotic fiction, both long and short, and features a special category for emerging authors.

Engraved award

Publication in the Passionate Ink Charity Anthology

Deadline: March 21, 2024

Fiction, Novel, Novella, Romance, Short Story

Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize

Desperate Literature

The aim of the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize is both to celebrate the best of new, boundary-pushing short fiction and to give winners the most visibility possible for their writing. That’s why we’ve teamed up with fourteen different literary and artistic institutions to not only offer cash prizes and writing retreats but also to ensure that all our shortlisters have the opportunity to be published in multiple print and online journals, have their work put in front of literary agents, and present their stories in multiple countries.

€2,000 + week's stay at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation artists' residency

2nd + 3rd: €1000 | All shortlisters: publication in our print collection Eleven Stories | All longlisters: One-year subscription to The Literary Consultancy's "Being a Writer" platform | One shortlister: two-week residency at Studio Faire, France

Deadline: December 04, 2024

Fiction, Flash Fiction, Short Story

Primal Fears Horror Short Story Challenge

For this short story challenge, all participants will be randomly assigned a horror sub-genre and will receive a list of 20 primal fears. All participants will receive the same 20 primal fears. As soon as you receive your randomly assigned sub-genre and the list of primal fears, you'll have until the closing time to write and submit a short story of any length up to 5,000 words. Your story should fit the sub-genre you were assigned and should be underpinned by one of the primal fears from the list. You get to choose the primal fear that will underpin your story. The available horror sub-genres are: body horror, folk horror, eco horror, psychological horror, and fantasy horror. Early entry tickets are £2.50, general entry tickets are £5, and late entry tickets are £9.

Deadline: February 19, 2024 (Expired)

Fantasy, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Horror, Short Story

NOWW 26th International Writing Contest

Northwestern Ontario Writers Workshop (NOWW)

Open to all writers in four categories: poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, and critical writing.

2nd: $100 | 3rd: $50

Essay, Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry, Short Story

Season Themes

HAVOK Publishing

HAVOK is a constant flash fiction contest, with rolling deadlines. Each season is split into monthly competitions with thematically connected prompts in a range of genres.

Publication in an anthology. Potential for larger gift card wins.

Deadline: December 29, 2023 (Expired)

Fantasy, Flash Fiction, Mystery, Science Fiction, Short Story, Thriller

Vocal Challenges

Enter themed storytelling contests to put your creativity to the test and be in with a chance of winning cash prizes and more. To submit, you'll need to sign up for a monthly fee of $9.99, or $4.99/month for 3 months.

$1,000 — $5,000

Deadline: March 07, 2024

Essay, Fiction, Memoir, Non-fiction, Short Story

The Hudson Prize

Black Lawrence Press

Each year Black Lawrence Press will award The Hudson Prize for an unpublished collection of poems or prose. The prize is open to new, emerging, and established writers.

BBC National Short Story Award

2024 marks the 10th anniversary of the BBC YWA, an award created to inspire and encourage the next generation of short story writers, open to 14 – 18-year-olds. BBC Radio 1 Presenter Katie Thistleton returns as Chair of Judges for the YWA for the seventh time.

4x shortlisted stories: £600

Deadline: March 18, 2024

To Hull and Back Humorous Short Story Contest

Christopher Fielden

July 2022 saw the launch of the 8th To Hull And Back Short Story Competition, a biennial short story contest with a humorous twist that celebrates the most imaginative and amazing short stories from writers all over the world.

2nd Prize: £600 | 3rd Prize: £300 | 3 x Highly Commended: £150 | 14 x Shortlisted: £75

Deadline: June 30, 2025

Fiction, Humor, Non-fiction, Short Story

Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award

Killer Nashville

The Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award is committed to discovering new writers, as well as superlative books by established authors and, upon discovery, sharing those writers and their works with new readers. There are a large number of both fiction and non-fiction categories you can enter.

Deadline: June 15, 2024

Crime, Essay, Fantasy, Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Mystery, Non-fiction, Novel, Poetry, Science Fiction, Script Writing, Short Story, Thriller

Stories Through The Ages - Baby Boomer Plus

Stories Through The Ages

Stories Through The Ages - Baby Boomers Plus 2023 is open to people born 1966 or earlier. The deadline for entries is June 15, 2023. There is no prompt for the contest. Authors may write about any topic. The entry fee is $20 ($15 if submitting more than one story). The word count for this contest is 900 - 5000 words. Cash prizes of $500, $200 and $100 will be awarded. There will be a minimum of 15 finalists whose story will appear in the book.

2nd: $200 | 3rd: $100

Short Story, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Non-fiction

Bridport Short Story Prize

Bridport Arts Centre

Gail Honeyman was shortlisted in our competition and went on to write Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, winning the Costa debut novel award. All the winning and highly commended pieces are entered into the Sunday Times Audible competition, top prize £30,000. UK based writers are entered into the BBC short story competition. That's not all, literary agent A.M. Heath reads all the shortlist and considers representation. Long story short? You are 5,000 words away from success.

£1000 for 2nd, £500 for 3rd

Deadline: May 31, 2024

Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition

Writer's Digest

Enter our 91st Annual Writing Competition for the chance to have your work be seen by editors and agents! Almost 500 winners will be chosen. The top winning entries of this writing contest will also be on display in the Annual Writer’s Digest Competition Collection. [$20 for a poetry entry, $30 for a manuscript entry]

2nd: $500 | 3rd: $100

Deadline: May 06, 2024

Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry, Short Story

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Book Reviews

Kelly link's debut novel 'the book of love' is magical, confusing, heartfelt, strange.

Gabino Iglesias

Cover of The Book of Love

For years, fans of Kelly Link, one of the finest purveyors of contemporary short fiction, have wondered what the author would be able to do with a full novel — and have eagerly waited for her to deliver one.

That wait ends now with the release of The Book of Love , Link's debut novel. And the author has embraced the freedom granted by a longer format, delivering a 600-page behemoth of a novel that shatters reality while pulling readers into the lives of several characters and obliterating any perceived dividing line between speculative fiction and literary fiction.

As an avid reader and book reviewer, I'm looking forward to seeing how other reviewers tackle a synopsis of this novel. The narrative starts late one night when Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves in a classroom with their music teacher and a strange entity. The youngsters are dead, but they're not. They disappeared a year ago from their hometown of Lovesend, Massachusetts. They were presumed dead, and they are, but now that they're back, their teacher, who possesses magical powers, alters reality. Instead of dead, they're all coming back from a long trip to study in Ireland. Their teacher knows what happened...maybe.

With their story in their heads and their new reality in place. the teenagers are sent back to their previous lives, where they must cope with everything that happened during their absence while simultaneously trying to figure out what will happen next. Also, there was a cryptic message for them on the blackboard of the room where they appeared: "2 RETURN/2 REMAIN." What does it mean? How does that math affect the outcome of their return? Their life as the undead is already complicated enough, but their bizarre revivification has brought something other than the teenagers from the other side; supernatural entities that have their own agendas. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo navigate their new situation and adapt to their new realities, they must also crack the mystery of their return, and more than their own resurrection hangs in the balance.

That's a lengthy synopsis, but it barely scratches the surface of The Book of Love , which also delves into the complications of love and friendship, family drama, grief, resilience, and the unlimited power of adaptability while delivering a tale of supernatural menace that also explores what it truly means to be alive. After years of award-winning short stories in some great venues and a few outstanding short story collections like Get in Trouble , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and White Cat, Black Dog , this novel is proof that Link can be as strange, entertaining, and witty in novel form as she is when writing short stories.

The Book of Love is a narrative about love — and death and resurrection and kissing people and growing up and sibling rivalry and horror. This is a story about stories that even touches on writing. Mo's grandmother, Maryanne, who passed away while Mo was away, was a prolific writer who wrote 73 books in 42 years. Writing allowed her to build a good life and to take care of Mo after his mother passed away. She was also a Black woman. Little details like that open the door to new things, so while Link is telling us about Mo, she also gives us Maryanne's biography while also discussing publishing and the intricacies of a Black woman writing a very popular series about a white woman. Stories within stories, narratives that delve into memories, and expansive passages what go deep into the psychological and emotional inner worlds of the characters are common. In fact, this book will be too much for some readers. This is an entertaining novel, but it's also a barrage of ideas and minutiae, a veritable onslaught of language and narratives that deviate from the core of the story.

This is a long book that's simultaneously dazzling and dizzying. Some lines cut with their clarity and sincerity while some plot elements are puzzling. Link is a wizard writing spells that obey a dream logic only she fully understands. At once a book for adults that's full of elements that make it feel like a fantasy YA novel, a story about survival and danger that starts with a group of dead kids and only gets weirder from there, and a narrative that shows a mighty writer with a unique voice at the height of her powers, The Book of Love is, simply put, a magical, confusing, heartfelt, strange, wonderfully written novel that delivers everything fans of Link's short fiction expected while also packing a few surprises.

Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @Gabino_Iglesias .

EXCLUSIVE: Nikki Haley sides with Alabama Supreme Court on IVF ruling: 'Embryos, to me, are babies'

OpenAI teases ‘Sora,’ its new text-to-video AI model

Want to see a turtle riding a bike across the ocean ? Now, generative AI can animate that scene in seconds.

OpenAI on Thursday unveiled its new text-to-video model Sora, which can generate videos up to a minute long based on whatever prompt a user types into a text box. Though it’s not yet available to the public, the AI company’s announcement roused a frenzy of reactions online.

AI enthusiasts were quick to brainstorm ideas around the potential of this latest technology, even as others raised immediate concern over how its accessibility might erode human jobs and further the spread of digital disinformation.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman solicited prompt ideas on X and generated a series of videos including the aforementioned aquatic cyclists, as well as a cooking video and a couple of dogs podcasting on a mountain.

“We are not making this model broadly available in our products soon,” a spokesperson for OpenAI wrote in an email, adding that the company is sharing its research progress now to gain early feedback from others in the AI community.

The company, with its popular chatbot ChatGPT and text-to-image generator DALL-E, is one of several tech startups leading the generative AI revolution that began in 2022. It wrote in a blog post that Sora can generate with accuracy multiple characters and different types of motion.

“We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction,” OpenAI wrote in the post.

But Sora may struggle to capture the physics or spatial details of a more complex scene, which can lead it to generate something illogical (like a person running in the wrong direction on a treadmill), morph a subject in unnatural ways, or even cause it to disappear out of thin air, the company said in its blog post .

Still, many of the demonstrations shared by OpenAI showcased hyper-realistic visual details that could make it difficult for casual internet users to distinguish AI-generated video from real-life footage. Examples included a drone shot of waves crashing into a craggy Big Sur coastline under the glow of a setting sun and a clip of a woman strolling down a bustling Tokyo street still damp with rain.

As deepfaked media of celebrities, politicians and private figures becomes increasingly prevalent online, the ethical and safety implications of a world in which anyone can create high-quality video of anything they can imagine — especially during a presidential election year, and amid tense global conflicts fraught with opportunities for disinformation — are daunting.

The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday proposed rules aimed at making it illegal to create AI impressions of real people by extending protections it is putting in place around government and business impersonation.

“The agency is taking this action in light of  surging complaints  around impersonation fraud, as well as public outcry about the harms caused to consumers and to impersonated individuals,” the FTC wrote in a news release. “Emerging technology — including AI-generated deepfakes — threatens to turbocharge this scourge, and the FTC is committed to using all of its tools to detect, deter, and halt impersonation fraud.”

Prompt: Several giant woolly mammoths approach treading through a snowy meadow, their long woolly fur lightly blows in the wind as they walk, snow-covered trees and dramatic snowcapped mountains in the distance, midafternoon light with wispy clouds and a sun high in the distance creates a warm glow, the low camera view is stunning, capturing the large furry mammal with beautiful photography, depth of field.

OpenAI said it is working to build tools that can detect when a video is generated by Sora, and plans to embed metadata, which would mark the origin of a video, into such content if the model is made available for public use in the future.

The company also said it is collaborating with experts to test Sora for its ability to cause harm via misinformation, hateful content and bias.

A spokesperson for OpenAI told NBC News it will then publish a system card describing its safety evaluations, as well as the model’s risks and limitations.

“Despite extensive research and testing, we cannot predict all of the beneficial ways people will use our technology, nor all the ways people will abuse it,” OpenAI said in its blog post. “That’s why we believe that learning from real-world use is a critical component of creating and releasing increasingly safe AI systems over time.”

short story website review

Angela Yang is a culture and trends reporter for NBC News.

Letter Review

The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Unpublished Books

short story website review

The Letter Review Prize (Jan – Feb)

Is now open.

The Prize is awarded every two months in the categories of Short Fiction , Nonfiction, Poetry , and Unpublished Books .We offer a yearly Prize pool of $30,000 USD, and publication for our winners.

Letter Review emerges as a hallowed space where words bleed, mend, and soar. Within its pages, we find not just tales, but the delicate pulse of memories, interwoven with the age-old craft of storytelling and vulnerability. To have my voice cradled in such a sacred place is a serenade to the moonlit hours where prose meets poetry. A profound honor. The Letter Review stands as a monument of writing wisdom and talent. Being part of this mosaic of narrative and verse is a true honor. Frederick Joseph : two-time New York Times bestselling author, activist, philanthropist, and poet (First Place in Letter Review Prize for Poetry)

Letter Review Prize for Short Stories

The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction

Letter Review is offering $1000 USD Prize pool in a competition for short fiction up to 5000 words. No genre or theme restrictions: all stories welcome. Open to writers who live anywhere in the world. Three Winners are announced who are published and share in the Prize money. Up to twenty writers are shortlisted. All entries are considered for publication, submission to the Pushcart Prize, and for further anthologies. The Prize is judged blind to ensure fairness. See our  Previous Winners Page here , and our  Comments / Testimonials Page here . Judges’ feedback is available on all entries. Enter via Submittable using the button below.

The Letter Review Prize for Poetry

Letter Review is offering $1000 USD total Prize pool in a competition for poems of not more than 70 lines. No subject or style restrictions: all poems welcome. Open to writers who live anywhere in the world. Three Winners are announced who are published and share in the Prize money. Up to twenty writers are shortlisted. All entries are considered for publication, submission to the Pushcart Prize, and for further anthologies. The Prize is judged blind to ensure fairness. See our  Previous Winners Page here, and our  Comments / Testimonials Page here . Judges’ feedback is available on all entries. Enter via Submittable using the button below.

The Letter Review Prize for Poetry

The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction

Letter Review is offering $1000 USD total Prize pool in a competition for nonfiction up to 5000 words in length. The Prize is open to writers who live anywhere in the world. Three Winners are announced who are published and share in the Prize money. Up to twenty writers are shortlisted. All entries are considered for publication, submission to the Pushcart Prize, and for further anthologies. The Prize is judged blind to ensure fairness. See our  Previous Winners Page here , and our  Comments / Testimonials Page here . Judges’ feedback is available on all entries. Enter via Submittable using the button below.

The Letter Review Prize for Unpublished Books

Letter Review is offering $1000 USD total Prize pool in a competition for unpublished books including Novels, Novellas, Short Story Collections, Poetry Collections, and Nonfiction Books. Open to writers who live anywhere in the world. Three Winners are announced who share in the Prize money. Winners can choose whether to publish an extract, or not. Up to twenty writers are shortlisted. The Prize is judged blind to ensure fairness. See our  Previous Winners Page here , and our  Comments / Testimonials Page here . Judges’ feedback is available on all entries. Enter via Submittable using the button below.

short story website review

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‘The 2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films’ Review: Small Running Times, Large Themes

Many of this year’s films take a darker turn, but there is some levity among the bunch.

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A man stands on a terrace in a city looking out and holding his neck. The sun shines down on him.

By Jeannette Catsoulis ,  Maya Phillips and Ben Kenigsberg

When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

The Oscar-nominated short films are being presented in three programs : live action, animation and documentary. Each program is reviewed below by a separate critic.

Live Action

Whatever your takeaways from the live action section of this year’s Oscar-nominated short films, a good laugh is unlikely to be among them. Suicide, abortion, bereavement, discoloring corpses — they’re all here, in a deluge of downers that only the Danes (and, depending on your tolerance for extreme preciousness, Wes Anderson) can be trusted to alleviate.

Those Danes, though! In Lasse Lyskjer Noer’s magnificently morbid comedy, “Knight of Fortune,” two grieving widowers bond over toilet paper and the trauma of viewing a loved one whose flesh — as warned by a pair of ghoulish mortuary attendants — might be the color of a banana. Although, bathed in the sickly spill of the morgue’s fluorescents, no one’s complexion here is exactly glowing.

If “Knight of Fortune” is a gentle nudge to the ribs, Misan Harriman’s “The After” is a two-by-four to the gut — and not in a good way. Trafficking in the kind of forced sentiment that can break you out in hives, this handsomely shot movie, featuring a garment-rending David Oyelowo, follows a London ride-share driver in the wake of a shocking personal tragedy. A trite, bullying soundtrack herds us toward the histrionic climax of a film that doesn’t trust us to get there on our own.

6 Films Our Critics Are Talking About

book cover for Land of Bad

Land of Bad

R | Action, thriller

Fighters on the ground are assisted by drone pilots, including one played by Russell Crowe, half a world away.

Read our full review.

book cover for Upgraded

R | Comedy, romance

Camila Mendes plays a broke assistant posing as an art world bigwig in this slyly charming romantic comedy.

book cover for Monolith

R | Mystery, thriller

Lily Sullivan plays a podcaster investigating a supernatural mystery in this thriller.

book cover for The Space Race

The Space Race

Not rated | Documentary

The days of shooting for the stars are interpreted through the stories of people of color whose aspirations were thwarted.

book cover for God & Country

God & Country

PG-13 | Documentary

This film follows the rise of Christian nationalist voters and argues that they threaten pluralism and democracy.

book cover for Onlookers

This experimental nonfiction feature aims to reflect on travel and tourism in Laos.

More restrained, and infinitely more resonant, “Invincible” observes the final 48 hours in the life of a 14-year-old boy (Léokim Beaumier-Lépine) as he struggles to corral his emotions and earn release from a center for troubled youth. The acting is impressive and the direction (by Vincent René-Lortie, drawing from a painful real-life memory) is bold and intuitive. Subtly intimate photography by Alexandre Nour Desjardins does much to enhance a movie that understands when it comes to emotions, less is often more.

For Wes Anderson, less is rarely an option. As “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” flits through a forest of intricate sets, a flurry of famous faces (Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley) and multiple story lines, its 37 minutes of virtually nonstop narration can feel like as many hours. Changing character onscreen and speaking directly to the camera, the actors navigate an ever-shifting story ( adapted from Roald Dahl’s original ) and constantly shuffling surroundings. A gorgeous, ingenious and finally exhausting exercise in puzzle box moviemaking.

Even allowing for Anderson’s flash and fame, Nazrin Choudhury’s “Red, White And Blue” — the only one of this year’s entries that’s overtly political — is the program’s clear standout. Wrapping the cold steel of its message in velvet-soft packaging, this beautifully acted, warmly photographed observation of financial precarity follows a desperate single mother (Brittany Snow) who must cross state lines to terminate a pregnancy. Painstakingly constructed from small, telling details, the movie ends with the kind of sting that lingers longer than any news report. JEANNETTE CATSOULIS

This year’s Oscar-nominated animated shorts — sobering tales of war, assault, trauma, identity and regret — ask the question, what tools can filmmakers use to tell a poignant, but not exploitative or gratuitous, story about trauma?

The novel technique the directors Jared Hess and Jerusha Hess use in “Ninety-Five Senses” is the story structure: An inmate (voiced by Tim Blake Nelson) eating his last meal anecdotally reflects on each of his senses, telling tidbits of the life he had (and the life that could have been). Each sense is illustrated by different artists, in a different style, creating a kind of 13-minute anthology of a life — but that makes this understated film also feel a bit incoherent, with the vignettes lacking the build to bring the film to a satisfying emotional conclusion.

“Our Uniform,” a 7-minute selection from the Iranian director Yegane Moghaddam, packs a lot into a succinct reflection on her school uniform and the ways her culture’s restrictive fashion rules shaped her understanding of her gender and autonomy. Like “Ninety-Five Senses,” the narrative of “Our Uniform” is plain and direct, but the latter shows the most creative animation concept of the group; illustrations move against a backdrop of various fabrics, with characters running around buttons and along seams.

In the quiet but harrowing French short “Pachyderme,” from the director Stéphanie Clément, a young girl tells of her summers with her grandparents in the country. The robust art style — each shot is as beautifully shaded as a painting — and sedated narration create the sense of a Grimm fairy tale, showing how seemingly innocuous details can hide something menacing beneath.

The unspoken monster in “Pachyderme” mirrors the ever-morphing monster in the breathtaking “Letter to a Pig,” directed by Tal Kantor. In the film, a Holocaust survivor tells a classroom of young students about the pig who saved his life. Though the movie never details the atrocities of the war, it paints just as chilling a picture through incisive visual metaphors. The animation, which morphs from bare-bones line drawings in black and white to fleshy watercolor pinks to 3-D realism, creates a sophisticated, heart-wrenching account of a tragedy.

Juxtaposed with such a remarkable war story, Dave Mullins’s “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko” feels pat. In an alternate World War I, soldiers on both sides find a way to connect. A telegraphed death and the idealistic crooning of John Lennon and Yoko Ono make this the least impressive of an otherwise strong category of films about the darker parts of humanity. MAYA PHILLIPS

Documentary

Only one documentary short nominee this year has the full balance of human interest, social relevance and aesthetic appeal that tends to make a winner.

It’s “The Last Repair Shop,” directed by Ben Proudfoot, who won two years ago, for “The Queen of Basketball,” a New York Times Opinion production, and the composer Kris Bowers, who was nominated with Proudfoot for “A Concerto Is a Conversation,” another Times Opinion documentary. This time, both have made their documentary with The Los Angeles Times. But it’s a better movie, and it happens to have a Los Angeles subject.

The repair shop of the title fixes instruments for the city’s school district; according to the opening text, that service has been offered to students for decades. The movie presents the recollections of four specialists (in strings, brass, woodwinds and piano), who share their experiences of immigration, of coming to terms with being gay and even of opening for Elvis in a bluegrass band, a long-term payoff of buying a $20 fiddle at a swap meet. Schoolchildren further testify to how music affects their lives. The generational contrast gives “The Last Repair Shop” a pleasing shape and helps it make an uninflected case for the importance of financing music education.

Sentimentality in “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó” is a given. Directed by Sean Wang, who received his Oscar nomination just as his debut feature, “Dìdi,” was becoming a Sundance darling , the short profiles Wang’s two grandmothers , who are so close they even sleep in the same bed. Wang depicts them as cut-ups (he films them arm-wrestling, watching “Superbad” and generally being goofballs), which is sweet, but the subject is a bit too easy. The doc never transcends being a professional-grade home movie.

It is also no trick to wring pathos from a centenarian World War II widow speaking out against a censorious Florida school board — something that happens in “The ABCs of Book Banning,” directed by the longtime HBO documentary chief, Sheila Nevins, now at MTV. The heart of the film is children talking about books that authorities have removed or considered removing from schools. While using kids might seem cheap, they are unfailingly thoughtful. “It’s like you’re trying to slow down children’s reading,” says a fourth-grader named Ruth Anne of those who would remove books from shelves.

John Hoffman and Christine Turner’s “The Barber of Little Rock” centers on Arlo Washington, who started a barbers’ college and then a nonprofit fund with the specific goal of helping underserved Black residents of Little Rock, Ark. The short splits the difference between observing Washington and his fund at work and presenting polished interviews with him and others. The first approach is more effective than the second.

Finally, “Island in Between,” a Times Opinion documentary by the Taiwan-born director S. Leo Chiang, explores questions of national identity through the lens of Kinmen, islands that are governed by Taiwan but geographically closer to mainland China. It’s the least pushy, least resolved title in the lineup, which means it barely stands a chance. BEN KENIGSBERG

The 2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Live Action Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 31 minutes. In theaters.

The 2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Animated Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters.

The 2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Documentary Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 33 minutes. In theaters.

Maya Phillips is an arts and culture critic for The Times.  More about Maya Phillips

The Run-Up to the 2024 Oscars

The 96th academy awards will be presented on march 10 in los angeles..

What are the best performers of the year doing when they’re not on film? Here’s how Emma Stone, Bradley Cooper, and other great actors spend their free time .

Christopher Nolan and Robert Downey Jr. have worked on some of the most beloved superhero films of our time, so how is it that the two had never worked together  on a movie before “Oppenheimer”?

The “Holdovers” star Da’Vine Joy Randolph has had a charmed run  through awards season so far. But does that mean it has been easy to navigate?

At the Oscar nominees luncheon in Beverly Hills, the Border collie from “Anatomy of a Fall”  had the stars lining up to meet him.

The veteran actor Jeffrey Wright has played everything from an artist to a general to a professor, but his role as a novelist in “American Fiction” is what finally landed him an Oscar nomination .

In the documentary short “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó,” the filmmaker Sean Wang chronicles the inner lives of his grandmothers. Now, the film is nominated for an Academy Award .

  • Newsletters

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

  • Will Douglas Heaven archive page

OpenAI has built a striking new generative video model called Sora that can take a short text description and turn it into a detailed, high-definition film clip up to a minute long.

Based on four sample videos that OpenAI shared with MIT Technology Review ahead of today’s announcement, the San Francisco–based firm has pushed the envelope of what’s possible with text-to-video generation (a hot new research direction that we flagged as a trend to watch in 2024 ).

“We think building models that can understand video, and understand all these very complex interactions of our world, is an important step for all future AI systems,” says Tim Brooks, a scientist at OpenAI.

But there’s a disclaimer. OpenAI gave us a preview of Sora (which means sky in Japanese) under conditions of strict secrecy. In an unusual move, the firm would only share information about Sora if we agreed to wait until after news of the model was made public to seek the opinions of outside experts. [Editor’s note: We’ve updated this story with outside comment below.] OpenAI has not yet released a technical report or demonstrated the model actually working. And it says it won’t be releasing Sora anytime soon. [ Update: OpenAI has now shared more technical details on its website.]

The first generative models that could produce video from snippets of text appeared in late 2022. But early examples from Meta , Google, and a startup called Runway were glitchy and grainy. Since then, the tech has been getting better fast. Runway’s gen-2 model, released last year, can produce short clips that come close to matching big-studio animation in their quality. But most of these examples are still only a few seconds long.  

The sample videos from OpenAI’s Sora are high-definition and full of detail. OpenAI also says it can generate videos up to a minute long. One video of a Tokyo street scene shows that Sora has learned how objects fit together in 3D: the camera swoops into the scene to follow a couple as they walk past a row of shops.

OpenAI also claims that Sora handles occlusion well. One problem with existing models is that they can fail to keep track of objects when they drop out of view. For example, if a truck passes in front of a street sign, the sign might not reappear afterward.  

In a video of a papercraft underwater scene, Sora has added what look like cuts between different pieces of footage, and the model has maintained a consistent style between them.

It’s not perfect. In the Tokyo video, cars to the left look smaller than the people walking beside them. They also pop in and out between the tree branches. “There’s definitely some work to be done in terms of long-term coherence,” says Brooks. “For example, if someone goes out of view for a long time, they won’t come back. The model kind of forgets that they were supposed to be there.”

Impressive as they are, the sample videos shown here were no doubt cherry-picked to show Sora at its best. Without more information, it is hard to know how representative they are of the model’s typical output.   

It may be some time before we find out. OpenAI’s announcement of Sora today is a tech tease, and the company says it has no current plans to release it to the public. Instead, OpenAI will today begin sharing the model with third-party safety testers for the first time.

In particular, the firm is worried about the potential misuses of fake but photorealistic video . “We’re being careful about deployment here and making sure we have all our bases covered before we put this in the hands of the general public,” says Aditya Ramesh, a scientist at OpenAI, who created the firm’s text-to-image model DALL-E .

But OpenAI is eyeing a product launch sometime in the future. As well as safety testers, the company is also sharing the model with a select group of video makers and artists to get feedback on how to make Sora as useful as possible to creative professionals. “The other goal is to show everyone what is on the horizon, to give a preview of what these models will be capable of,” says Ramesh.

To build Sora, the team adapted the tech behind DALL-E 3, the latest version of OpenAI’s flagship text-to-image model. Like most text-to-image models, DALL-E 3 uses what’s known as a diffusion model. These are trained to turn a fuzz of random pixels into a picture.

Sora takes this approach and applies it to videos rather than still images. But the researchers also added another technique to the mix. Unlike DALL-E or most other generative video models, Sora combines its diffusion model with a type of neural network called a transformer.

Transformers are great at processing long sequences of data, like words. That has made them the special sauce inside large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google DeepMind’s Gemini . But videos are not made of words. Instead, the researchers had to find a way to cut videos into chunks that could be treated as if they were. The approach they came up with was to dice videos up across both space and time. “It’s like if you were to have a stack of all the video frames and you cut little cubes from it,” says Brooks.

The transformer inside Sora can then process these chunks of video data in much the same way that the transformer inside a large language model processes words in a block of text. The researchers say that this let them train Sora on many more types of video than other text-to-video models, varied in terms of resolution, duration, aspect ratio, and orientation. “It really helps the model,” says Brooks. “That is something that we’re not aware of any existing work on.”

“From a technical perspective it seems like a very significant leap forward,” says Sam Gregory, executive director at Witness, a human rights organization that specializes in the use and misuse of video technology. “But there are two sides to the coin,” he says. “The expressive capabilities offer the potential for many more people to be storytellers using video. And there are also real potential avenues for misuse.” 

OpenAI is well aware of the risks that come with a generative video model. We are already seeing the large-scale misuse of deepfake images . Photorealistic video takes this to another level.

Gregory notes that you could use technology like this to misinform people about conflict zones or protests. The range of styles is also interesting, he says. If you could generate shaky footage that looked like something shot with a phone, it would come across as more authentic.

The tech is not there yet, but generative video has gone from zero to Sora in just 18 months. “We’re going to be entering a universe where there will be fully synthetic content, human-generated content and a mix of the two,” says Gregory.

The OpenAI team plans to draw on the safety testing it did last year for DALL-E 3. Sora already includes a filter that runs on all prompts sent to the model that will block requests for violent, sexual, or hateful images, as well as images of known people. Another filter will look at frames of generated videos and block material that violates OpenAI’s safety policies.

OpenAI says it is also adapting a fake-image detector developed for DALL-E 3 to use with Sora. And the company will embed industry-standard C2PA tags , metadata that states how an image was generated, into all of Sora’s output. But these steps are far from foolproof. Fake-image detectors are hit-or-miss. Metadata is easy to remove, and most social media sites strip it from uploaded images by default.  

“We’ll definitely need to get more feedback and learn more about the types of risks that need to be addressed with video before it would make sense for us to release this,” says Ramesh.

Brooks agrees. “Part of the reason that we’re talking about this research now is so that we can start getting the input that we need to do the work necessary to figure out how it could be safely deployed,” he says.

Update 2/15: Comments from Sam Gregory were added .

Artificial intelligence

Ai for everything: 10 breakthrough technologies 2024.

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT reached mass adoption in record time, and reset the course of an entire industry.

What’s next for AI in 2024

Our writers look at the four hot trends to watch out for this year

  • Melissa Heikkilä archive page

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

Deploying high-performance, energy-efficient AI

Investments into downsized infrastructure can help enterprises reap the benefits of AI while mitigating energy consumption, says corporate VP and GM of data center platform engineering and architecture at Intel, Zane Ball.

  • MIT Technology Review Insights archive page

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