What’s weird about Atlanta is that sometimes you forget you’re in the South. Most whom I know aren’t from here, and it’s not all that often I run across a thick Southern accent, and some Bible-thumping. But there are reminders everywhere, like the hoards of church busses I find parked at the Botanical Garden when…

Here’s a story by Creative Loafing Atlanta editor and columnist, Wyatt Williams. I’ve known Wyatt for a while, but am mostly familiar with his nonfiction. So this was refreshing and impressive: this cool story about a book critic writ large, or small, depending on how you look at things. + The book critic had some…

Here’s a story about a life-long love tinged with madness. There’s an epistolary female Hannibal Lecter lurking inside this. + 1875 You must know by now that I am wholly unwell. Mother told you of my state. You know it is more than the leg I lost. God bless you. God bless her. God bless…

Chris Bundy and I were in our grad program at GSU together, so I’ve known him for about ten years. Our friendship in school passed over into our working-as-writers lives, as Chris and I, along our third, Man Martin (who will also be featured here this month) formed our writing group. We read drafts of…

Here’s a Southern Yarn from Collin Kelley who, I learned by talking with him over email, worked on this story with Georgia novelist Ferol Sams whose granddaughter was once one of my students. Georgia’s small like that. + Standing in the checkout line at the A&P, I noticed Fanny Ballard was a couple of customers…

Here’s a short from Lydia Ship, managing editor of The Chattahoochee Review. Lydia and I also went to school together, so I’ve been reading her stories for a long time. She just keeps getting to be a better and better writer. I’m actually astonished that she hasn’t published a book yet, but one must be…

I don’t make it a point to celebrate my birthday, usually, because birthdays just make me feel older and closer to death, and I love life. But this year, because I’m doing this writer-in-residence, I’m celebrating. I’m posting a story of my own, on this, the day of my birth. And that story is a…

It will perhaps be evident upon reading this that Matt DeBenedictis was once a preacher. I guess God’s call for Matt, though, was writing stories. + He said it was important, that it had to be now. He had to leave before the kids rustled from their slumber, before they began the morning processions to…

Reading like a series of short notes penned by a deranged fan to a message board on Ke$ha’s Family, taken individually, these pieces might read more like prose poems than flash fictions. But taken together, a character emerges, one far more interesting, even, than Ke$ha. Not only are these paragraphs funny, inventive, and full of…

This story by Matt Sailor is at once painful and hilarious, as it alternates from realtime realism detailing the beating, healing, and attempting to move on of a hate crime victim, and pseudo-academic analysis of The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire. You can never really get that image of Rob Lowe “playing” the saxophone…

I first accepted a story by Anna Schachner close to ten years ago, when I was fiction editor of a now-defunct print literary magazine out of Atlanta. I was impressed by Anna’s ability to distill a character within a situation by a simple gesture. Obviously, her powers haven’t just maintained but grown, as is obvious…

Everyone knows that there’s long been a tradition of great fiction coming out of the South. William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, etcetera. When most think of Southern fiction, I imagine they picture the white oak hollows of Yoknapatawpha County, and not the clogged freeways or crumbling surface streets of Atlanta. But here…