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ByA girl named Pen and her brother, Thomas, spend the summer in Pennsylvania with their father and his new girlfriend and discover that power and control—perhaps more so than love—are central to the adult world that awaits them.
ONE STORY publishes one great short story at a time. We bring people together through reading, writing, and learning about short fiction.
A girl named Pen and her brother, Thomas, spend the summer in Pennsylvania with their father and his new girlfriend and discover that power and control—perhaps more so than love—are central to the adult world that awaits them.
In Emma Cairns Watson’s off-kilter tale “The Dissection Question,” 13-year-old Nadine tries to impress her friend Selby by signing up for an adult dating service—and gets both much more and much less than she ever expected.
Each year at our annual fundraiser, the Literary Debutante Ball, we honor our authors who have published their debut books in the past year. Our 2024 debutantes are ’Pemi Aguda, Puloma Ghosh, Uche Okonkwo, and, Shannon Sanders.
Get a subscription to One Story and you’ll get one great short story in the mail each and every month.
Join our story-of-the-month club
The Literary Debutante Ball returns to Brooklyn. We hope you’ll support us at our largest fundraiser.
In this four week-course students will consider how to write complex characters—even if their experiences differ from those of the writer.
Meets Weekly
April 29 – May 20
One Story Co-Founder and Executive Editor Hannah Tinti will share techniques and exercises that she’s developed over the past two decades as an editor and teacher to help bring your work to the next level.
Self-Guided
Michael Kardos leads the next installment of our Lecture Series with a talk on endings. Register for access to this talk, plus lectures from Fatima Kola, Anya Johanna DeNiro, Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Gina Chung, and Alice McDermott.
Live on April 20
Designed for fiction writers ready to get their work out into the world, this class will answer questions about how to present your work and yourself to the editors, agents, and selection committees on the other side of the submit button.
Self-Guided
Through reading short stories by classic science fiction writers alongside newer texts, readers will join in a discussion and analysis of the ways that speculative fiction has allowed writers to explore and challenge our gendered realities and unrealities.
Meets Weekly
May 15 – June 5
A second-generation Chinese American teen attempts to reconcile her new, emerging self with the deep roots of her culture and ancestry in Luna Hou’s Teen Writing Contest-winning story, “Railroads.”
We will reopen in spring 2024.
One Story provides a submission management system to other publishers at no cost.