Short Stories/Happy Hour

A Brattleboro Literary Festival Special Event

Short story readings, hosted by Tim Weed.

In a short story, each paragraph, sentence, and word is more important than they would be inside a large novel. Short stories are precise with their delivery, they must capture the attention of the reader quickly, and tell a full tale from beginning to end in a short time. Join us again for an evening of short-story readings with six of the festival’s most entertaining readers and writers.

Our 2018 Short Story Readings authors are Joan Silber, Sigrid Nunez, Dariel Suarez, Noy Holland and Ben Marcus.

Cash bar, Beer, wine, sparkling water 

Noy Holland’s latest work is I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like: New and Selected Stories, out now from Counterpoint Press. Other collections of short fiction and novellas include Swim for the Little One First (FC2), What Begins with Bird (FC2), and The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf).  She has taught for many years in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts and serves on the board of directors at Fiction Collective Two.

Ben Marcus is the author of six books of fiction including The Flame Alphabet, Leaving the Sea, and his new book, Notes from the Fog. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, The Paris Review, The Believer, and elsewhere.

Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, and, most recently, The Friend. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four volumes of Asian American literature. She lives in New York City.

Joan Silber is the author of eight books of fiction. The most recent, Improvement, is the winner of the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and her short fiction has been chosen for the O. Henry Prize, Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Dariel Suarez was born and raised in Havana, Cuba. He immigrated to the United States with his family in 1997, during the island’s economic crisis known as The Special Period. Dariel’s story collection, A Kind of Solitude, was selected as the winner of the 2017 Spokane Short Fiction Prize and is forthcoming from Willow Springs Books in fall of 2018.

Tim Weed’s short fiction collection, A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing (2017), was shortlisted for the International Book Awards, the New Rivers Press Many Voices Project, the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, and the Lewis-Clark Press Discovery Award. Tim teaches writing at Grub Street in Boston and in the MFA Writing program at Western Connecticut State University, and he is the co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program.