The Short Review + #storysunday

Each monthly issue of The Short Review brings original online reviews of new, not-quite-so-new and classic collections and anthologies, written by reviewers many of whom are also short story writers themselves and who love short fiction.

The Short Review was initiated in November 2007 by Tania Hershman to fill a void she saw in terms of short story collection reviews.

Hershman says: "Readers don't know what's there and so they don't buy the books. We have over 40 reviewers around the world, I get people contacting me all the time to review books, we're always happy to have new, reliable reviewers, different perspectives. I also receive many requests from publishers and authors who want us to consider their short story collection. We can't review them all since we only review 10 per issue, older books as well as new, but the market is certainly very healthy!

We never consciously choose themes for The Short Review, I prefer to let it happen organically, with categories ranging from classics and children's to fantasy and historical as well as literary or steampunk. The current issue has, as ever, a mix of recently-published single-author collections, such as Corporate by Guy Cranswick and Lori Ostlund's The Bigness of the World, and older books, this month's being Sean O'Faolain's Selected Stories, as well as reviews of multi-author books like Qissat, an anthology of short stories by Palestinian women, and Ten Journeys from Legend Press. The October issue will be out around October 7th and will take us from zombies and dracula to rattlesnakes with single author collections by Darlin Neal, Peter Gordon, Steven Redwood, Brendan Connell, Jonny Townsend, Andrew Hurley and Lydia Davis, as well as several anthologies."

#storysunday
#storysunday is a twitter-based story exchange. The base idea: every Sunday, short story recommendations are shared on twitter - anyone can join and add a link, as long as the short story can the read online, and as long as it's not written by the poster himself/herself. Hershman explains that she came up with the idea of #storysunday on Twitter for 2 reasons: "because I wanted to get away from the "me-me-me" culture and inspire people to link to other people's short stories.... and because I wanted more recommendations of new stories to read! It's taking off well, and now if I'm stuck with a free 15 minutes, I search for #storysunday on Twitter and find myself something to read - and hope that's what other people do too!"