A long excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person” (pdf), which first appeared in the January 1998 issue of Harper‘s: The feelings of shame and inadequacy the depressed person experienced about calling members of her Support System long-distance late at night and burdening them with her clumsy attempts to describe at least the contextual … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
This weekend’s tale is Jack London’s 1908 classic, “To Build a Fire“: The man flung a look back along the way he had come. The Yukon lay a mile wide and hidden under three feet of ice. On top of this ice were as many feet of snow. It was all pure white, rolling in … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
This week’s selection is the late Breece D’J Pancake’s “Trilobites,” published in The Atlantic in 1977, when he was just 25 years old. It begins: I open the truck’s door, step onto the brick side street. I look at Company Hill again, all sort of worn down and round. A long time ago it was … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
A passage from “Find the Bad Guy” by Jeffrey Eugenides: I remember going into people’s houses as a kid and thinking, Can’t they smell how they smell? Some houses were worse than others. The Pruitts next door had a greasy, chuck-wagon odor, tolerable enough. The Willots, who ran that fencing academy in their rec room, … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
A reader writes: In addition to long-form journalism, I have to admit that I fantasize that one day the Dish will also support long-form fiction – not novels, which still get published in print books, and not short stories, which can get published in lit mags, but long short stories and novellas, which have a really hard … Continue reading A Short Story For Saturday
Stuart Dybek, who recently published two new short story collections, discusses the hard-to-define genre: It makes sense the short form … lacks a sturdy name: It’s varied, shifting, and hard to define, and its parameters are continually up for debate. Flash fictions have a narrative quality that makes them different from classical prose poems; at … Continue reading Flash Fiction, Ctd
The Dish 