QwikLit

From short fiction and poetry to essays and creative nonfiction, these 50 selections bring together Editor’s Choice picks and new discoveries from literary publications, sourced using the discovery engine on our iOS app, Qwiklit Short Story Reader.

Short Stories

01. Headland

SHORT STORY

By Harry Goddard · Overland

Two boys go in search of a beached whale after a shared mistake leaves one of them beaten. A haunting story of boyhood, guilt and the things we cannot undo.

02. In the Know

SHORT STORY

By Bergita Bugarija · The Common

A newly arrived Croatian woman learns the rhythms of a Chicago pharmacy while its owner explains the register and little else.

03. The Ghost Station

SHORT STORY

By Adam Fell · Strange Horizons

An oral history of a Midwestern punk scene lets its witnesses disagree about a mysterious girl and the music she brought with her.

04. Our Lady of Slaughter

SHORT STORY

By Scarlett Diaz Power · Bellevue Literary Review

Our Lady of Slaughter immerses us in a magical Cuban world mired in the realities of misery and poverty, as well as the joys of sisterhood. Both brutal and hopeful in the same breath.

05. Hyena Boys

SHORT STORY

By Samuel Kọ́láwọlé · The Common

Bonaventure, who has albinism, joins a travelling troupe after years of being mocked. The story presents a young boy with many moral dilemmas about community, violence, and finding identity in a chaotic world.

06. All the Shapes We Have Ever Been

SHORT STORY

By Kehkashan Khalid · Lightspeed Magazine

An orphaned girl and a dragon form an unlikely bond in a tower, both bound by a king’s cruelty. A beautiful fairy tale about finding freedom together.

07. Field Marks

SHORT STORY

By Nerissa Nelson · Fractured Lit

Bird illustrations are disappearing from old library books, cut out with extraordinary care. A quiet, moving story about what we take and what we imagine about the people who take it.

08. Uncanny Jack

SHORT STORY

By Susan Palwick · Lightspeed Magazine

A woman imagines her husband’s dementia as a changeling exchange and sets out to bring him home.

09. The Talking Dog

SHORT STORY

By Jamie Mullins · CRAFT

A family watches a talking-dog video while news of an air strike and an interrupted conversation compete for their attention.

10. The Cleaner

SHORT STORY

By Emma Vescovo · The Stinging Fly

A trauma cleaner meets the mother of a young woman whose blood he has just cleaned away.

11. The Last Bayog

SHORT STORY

By Alfred Luarca · Booth

In colonial Luzon, Domingo faces punishment for a healing practice and an identity his community both relies on and fears.

12. The Bump Shop

SHORT STORY

By James Kelly · The Iowa Review

Two brothers run a garage across from the narrator’s apartment, where repairs and conversations reveal the life of a small New Hampshire town.

13. Child of the Soil

SHORT STORY

By Michael Emehinola · Brittle Paper

A child named Kwame confronts the loss of his name after a missionary arrives in his village.

14. Twenty-Two Steps to Become Us

SHORT STORY

By Hannah Yang · Clarkesworld Magazine

A narrator navigates a home filled with copies of their mother, each learning to be her.

15. The Meat Market

SHORT STORY

By Isabel J. Kim · Clarkesworld Magazine

A trader watches losses mount on a market platform and tries to recover his footing in a speculative world.

16. You are Cursed

SHORT STORY

By Sarah Cummins · Joyland

A young person’s messages and thoughts move between desire, shame, religion and the difficulty of naming what they feel.

17. The Three

SHORT STORY

By Na Zhong · Joyland

A daughter pieces together early memories of her parents and the home in which she grew up.

18. Newcomer

SHORT STORY

By ‘Pemi Aguda · Isele Magazine

A small Pentecostal congregation celebrates its blessings and encounters a newcomer among its members.

19. His Only Current Wife

SHORT STORY

By R. Makama · Isele Magazine

A woman looks back on her marriage after her husband announces that he intends to take another wife.

20. Check-out girl

SHORT STORY

By Coralie Loon · Mud Season Review

A grocery-store cashier takes stock of the people and routines around her while wondering about the life she expected.

21. Little Minnie

SHORT STORY

By Sarah Clapp · Mud Season Review

A former child star remembers the spectacular career and ordinary life that followed her years on screen.

22. Objects of An Unusual Nature

SHORT STORY

By Gina Bisceglia · F(r)iction

A shopkeeper sells singular objects at an unusual price when a young customer chooses a toy truck.

23. Axel’s Used Goods

SHORT STORY

By Alex Rhymes · F(r)iction

A driver whose car has broken down enters a mysterious shop and is offered a pocket watch.

24. Episode

SHORT STORY

By Gabriela Garcia · Ninth Letter

A narrator in a halfway house watches her sister and grapples with fractured memories and imagined scenes.

Poetry

25. Sunrise

POEM

By Matthew Shenoda · The Offing

A poem of grief, memory and the search for a way home. “We, who come upon grief / like the hooves of a beast / cresting a hill”

26. Post-Traumatic Syntax of a Massacre

POEM

By Ismail Yusuf Olumoh · Strange Horizons

A powerful poem that turns punctuation into an act of remembrance for the people of Woro. “I stand here collecting the broken punctuation / of my people. Do not let it be a dot. Never a dot.”

27. Usury

POEM

By Doug Fritock · Bellevue Literary Review

A classroom lesson returns with a devastating new meaning as a father lives with cancer. “I guess that’s where tumors reside as well, / once they’ve collected what’s theirs.”

28. The Deluge, 1920

POEM

By Jocasta Suzanne · Overland

A vivid response to Winifred Knights’s painting, where a flood turns people and landscape into shapes. “It’s all / dramatic: the world becoming shapes.”

29. Study a Cause

POEM

By Kimberly Quiogue Andrews · The Offing

A restless poem about melancholy, work and the demand that art prove its worth. “The great question of melancholy has at its center the question of service.”

30. Forgetting

POEM

By Owen Habel Lwanda · Brittle Paper

Memory slips away in painful fragments, from the person once loved to the tastes and sounds of home. “I am forgetting Kenya in pieces.”

31. The Rebellion of Trees

POEM

By Vyacheslav Kupriyanov, translated by Dmitri Manin · Another Chicago Magazine

Trees imagine leaving a damaged Earth, only to find that rebellion requires more than a shared longing. “The forest won’t stand up for any single tree, / Each tree is ultimately on its own.”

32. Two poems by Jasper Haze

POEM

By Jasper Haze · Another Chicago Magazine

Two poems move between desire, shame and the strange intimacy of everyday life. “The toast pops & I flinch like a suspect— / everything lately has been too warm,”

33. At the celebration of life

POEM

By Jennifer Elmore · Harvard Review

A family gathers after a death, and the next generation begins to fill the rooms. “holding…someone new / as the dead…held me”

34. Thin Air

POEM

By Peter Balakian · Harvard Review

From an airplane, a speaker thinks of his mother and the distance between them. “The day is short as the night is opaque / and everyone hungers for spring”

35. 6 Sapardi Djoko Damono translations by Norman Erikson Pasaribu

POEM

By Sapardi Djoko Damono, translated by Norman Erikson Pasaribu · Cordite Poetry Review

Six poems by Sapardi Djoko Damono, translated from Indonesian by Norman Erikson Pasaribu. “Suppose you go to your mirror this morning and you find / not your face but a bird”

Essays & Creative Nonfiction

36. Have You Ever Really Looked at a Pigeon?

CREATIVE NONFICTION

By Jeffrey-Michael Kane · River Teeth · Beautiful Things

A pigeon’s iridescent neck becomes a miniature lesson in light and attention. “The eye it turns on you is orange, rimmed like an eclipse, older in its lineage than any city it decorates.”

37. I Need to Know How I Forgot I Wanted to Die

CREATIVE NONFICTION

By Erica Dawson · Electric Literature

A harrowing but profound reflection on what you lose when trying to save yourself.

38. Fixing Up Our Home Means Making Memories My Husband Might Lose

CREATIVE NONFICTION

By Josepha Natzke · Electric Literature

Josepha Natzke renovates a home with her husband as his memory changes. Photographs, damaged walls and familiar objects hold parts of their life together.

39. Framing Catastrophe in the First Two Paragraphs

ESSAY

By Darryl J. Benjamin · CRAFT

A close reading of three short-story openings, each moving from a broad view into a particular scene.

40. The Grammar of Confession: How Pronouns Create Vulnerable Prose

ESSAY

By Huck Smith · Brevity

A craft essay about changing “you” to “I” when writing about personal mistakes, and what that change asks of the writer.

41. The H Word–The Final Girl Fifty Years Later

ESSAY

By Tanya Pell · Nightmare Magazine

A look at how horror’s Final Girl has changed over fifty years, from surviving an attack to living with its aftermath.

42. Into the Ocean

REPORTAGE

By Jihan and Maddy Bolt · The Margins

Jihan describes learning to swim in Lombok, alongside Maddy Bolt’s reporting on the barriers Indonesian women face in the water.

43. Eudorawelty34

ESSAY

By Jacquelyn Ardam · The Iowa Review

A woman comes to know her partner’s mother through the books, poems and memories they share.

44. The Real Reason We Hate MFAs

ESSAY

By Thea Lim · The Walrus

A writer and teacher examines the long-running arguments about creative writing programs and who gets to study writing.

45. Why Do We Sing?

ESSAY

By Lauren Elkin · Literary Hub

An exploration of singing as a source of pleasure, vulnerability and connection, from private moments to collective occasions.

46. The Technique

ESSAY

By Amy Fusselman · The Adroit Journal

A writer takes a screenwriting class and reflects on adaptation, acting and the difficult work of transformation.

47. Why Centering a “Universal” Real Isn’t a Safe Practice

ESSAY

By Asa Drake · The Adroit Journal

Drake considers memory, cultural inheritance and the boundaries drawn between reality and the unreal.

48. Printed in Place

ESSAY

By Caleb Dean · Orion

A writer reflects on a family landscape in Oregon and the local life of an independent newspaper.

49. A Spider’s Portion of Joy

ESSAY

By Eric Aldrich · Orion

A writer brings a black widow indoors and looks more closely at the life of a much-feared neighbour.

50. Jumpers

ESSAY

By Leah Mensch · Ninth Letter

In “Jumpers,” Mensch reflects on Pittsburgh’s bridges, an enduring childhood memory and depression.