best american short stories – Christopher Linforth

Short Story Award: Frank O’Connor Prize

Recently, I given the good news that my short-story collection–When You Find Us We Will Be Gone–was recently longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize. This is the first–and probably only time–I will share a list with Margaret Atwood. Top prize is 25,000 Euros! You can see the list here.
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Short-Story Collection Available to Purchase

My debut collection of short stories–When You Find Us We Will Be Gone–is now available to purchase on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It also available to pre-order in the UK through the UK Amazon site.
Read more: Short-Story Collection Available to Purchase
New Story Published

Today sees publication of one my recent stories, “Take It From Me, Kid, I’m a Clown.” Published by Lunch Ticket (Antioch’s MFA literary magazine), the story is available to read for free on the interwebs. Here’s the opening: “Listen kid, I know it’s your birthday and all, that you only turn ten once, and that…
Read more: New Story Published
Ten Rules For Writing

Last fall in my fiction class we looked over the rules of several famous and successful writers in this Guardian article and came up with our own list of rules. Mine is below: Write for one hour a day. Minimum. Try not to make the story predictable. Surprise yourself. Create an ending where people say…
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Short Stories and Literary Journals: The Resources

If you’re starting out and can’t tell your Chekhov from your Gogol, an excellent place to begin is to read a historical and taxonomical evaluation of the modern short story. Luckily for you, it’s dealt with in excellent detail in William Boyd’s article, “A Short History of the Short Story.” Over the years, the books…
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Best American Short Stories: Part 6

Pre-1978 The Best American Short Story series had a single editor. For decades, from 1915 to 1941, Edward O’Brien fulfilled this role. After his death, Martha Foley took over. Raymond Carver mentions Foley’s importance for American short fiction during his superb 1983 interview with The Paris Review: INTERVIEWER Is it true—a friend of yours told…
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Best American Short Stories: Part 5

The Best American Short Stories 1988 was a strange collection of work. From Raymond Carver’s “Errand” (a story of almost all summary and filled with a heavy dose of biographical material taken from Henry Troyat’s Chekhov) to Majorie Sandor’s enigmatic “Still Life,” there was a wide berth of subject matter, character, and thematic emphasis. Interestingly,…
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Best American Short Stories: Part Four

A quick post on the latest volume I digested and consumed. The Best American Short Stories 1999: Standout stories: Ha Jin’s “In the Kindergarten,” Tim Gautreaux’s “The Piano Tuner,” and Junot Diaz’s “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars.” Overall, there were some strong pieces within this edition. Although, all things considered, I felt the chosen…
Read more: Best American Short Stories: Part Four
Best American Short Stories: Part Three

The first two posts charting my odyssey through thirty volumes of the Best American series can be found here and here. While reading another one of the books, I came across a recent survey by VIDA, an organization that deals with women in the arts. VIDA completed a statistical analysis of the gender discrepancies in…
Read more: Best American Short Stories: Part Three
Best American Short Stories: Part Two

In my first post on the Best American Short Story series, I outlined my plan to read the last thirty editions. I’m reading the books for craft, the nuts-and-bolts of (short) storytelling, and to read some damn-good fiction. As I mentioned in my previous post, many of the magazines that submitted to the series are…
Read more: Best American Short Stories: Part Two

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