For many years, I assumed that the appeal of a short story was that it was, well, short. Instead of slowly reading a novel over weeks, the reader of these bite-size plots can experience character ...

American short fiction has always thrived on intensity. Within a few pages, it can capture a lifetime, a heartbreak, or a national mood. The following pieces (tragic, witty, haunting, and strange) ...

There is a quieter, more succinct wing of literature that thrives on pithy conciseness: the short story. The authors of this art form have perfected the concept of this type of storytelling by ...

Kelly Link is a writer whose work is easy to revere and difficult to explain. She began her career by publishing stories in sci-fi and fantasy magazines in the mid-nineteen-nineties, just when the ...

Are you trying to get back into reading? Looking for something easy to dip into during your lunch breaks, or in between dips in the pool while on vacation? What could be better than a book where each ...

Good morning and welcome back to the L.A. Times Book Club newsletter. I’m Jim Ruland, a fiction writer, punk historian and a longtime contributor to the Los Angeles Times, and this summer I’ll be ...

Stephen King writes big books. Tomes, you could say. The Stand and It both top out at well over a thousand pages each, and he has dozens of other titles that aren’t far behind. One of his own villains ...