short shorts

unmatched jigsaw puzzle pieces, in orange, blue, and green

Lydia Davis’s “Ethics” and the Instability of Logic

ByJaney Tracey

The short stories of Lydia Davis, in spite of their infamous brevity, often work on at least three levels. In the case of “Ethics,” a paragraph-long fiction that humorously interrogates the Golden Rule, the story works as a character study, a reductio ad absurdum argument, and a larger philosophical questioning.

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The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Off Days” by Shane Jones

ByRoss McMeekin

In the flash fiction piece “Off Days” (The Adroit Journal), Shane Jones captures the comedy in the small moments characteriing his day-by-day struggles with memory loss before a full shift in his reality becomes manifest. We meet Ted and his wife Gina at the supermarket. Ted mistakes a younger woman in the soup aisle as…