New issues of Long Story, Short Journal .

Stories that take their time, free to read online.

‘Blame it on the Rain’ is a psychologically complex portrait of a woman whose mind is swinging between grasping need and gravid interiority. Michelle Auerbach, American author of The Third Kind of Horse, brings us the stylistically unique tale of a woman on the edge of losing her sanity. Photo by Pierre Melloul.

“It is always raining when I do these things. Any port in a storm, gimme shelter from the storm, stormy weather, raindrops keep falling on my head. My eyes will be turning red soon. Oh. Pathetic fallacy…”

At the crossroads of the short story and the Irish storytelling tradition, ‘The Cowboy’  by Northern Irish author Jamie Guiney is a humorous piece following the exploits of a man whose reputation for pilfering the local farmer’s fields may be catching up with him. Humorous, with a dark edge, the reader finds themselves in the rural gothic, where innocent fun isn’t quite so innocent after all. Photo by Gareth Wray.

“It was rumoured that the farmer who lived in the house with the twelve chimneys, had a set of medieval stocks in one of his rundown sheds, and that trespassers caught on his land doing anything at all, including just breathing, were bundled into his tractor and taken to be put in those stocks and dear knows what else.”