6 Places Online to Read Short Stories for Free

Because they’re small but mighty

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I’ve been meaning to read more short stories.

It’s ridiculous, right?

I’m a short story author.

I write short fiction regularly, and I enter competitions and submit work to websites and journals.

I should be reading a lot of short fiction both to learn something and for enjoyment but I’ve struggled to make it a habit.

I blame high school.

I can still remember making pencil scratches in the margins of anthologies about similes and metaphors in short stories and poems that just didn’t resonate with me.

But then we were studying to pass exams rather than being prepared for a lifelong love of literature.

I’ve only just started to build a short fiction reading habit.

I now spend a small amount of time each week bookmarking short stories to read later. It saves a lot of time wasted in searching, and it also means I can collect the ones that are really good.

I started doing this because I was recently floored by a short story. In Amy Hempel’s ‘In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is buried’ an unknown narrator describes her guilt and then subsequent relief of avoiding having to deal with her…