ONE STORY publishes one great short story at a time. We bring people together through reading, writing, and learning about short fiction.
In Lindsey Godfrey Eccles’s “Decomposer in Chief,” Tanaka, a hapless mycologist, has been summoned by the Secret Service to deal with a mysterious development: the President, apparently, has been replaced by a fungal entity that looks exactly like him.
In Nate Brown’s speculative short story “The Sea of Cortés,” a scientist who, with her partner, studies the migratory patterns of endangered humpback whales finds herself reassessing her life after a new pair of scientists arrives at their remote laboratory outpost.
Alice McDermott hosts our final lecture of our 2024 Lecture series. In Is This as Good as You Can Make It? she’ll explore the topic of revision, and the endless pursuit of better sentences, scenes, characters, and stories.
Online Lecture
December 7
One Story makes a great gift for all of the readers in your life. They’ll get a great short story every month. You’ll get year-round gratitude.
Readers Love One Story
“At a time when literary writing seems like a dying art, when little magazines are folding left and right, when publishers bemoan the sinking bottom line, here lies a spot of hope…It is called One Story.” – The New York Times
Your support keeps words on the page and stories in the mail.
In this asynchronous class led by Editor in Chief Patrick Ryan, you’ll focus on how to develop your characters, how to deepen them, and how to use them to drive the story.
Asynchronous
December 5 – 10
Learn tips and tricks for revision at your own pace in this self-guided class. Get five in-depth revision techniques to understand, deepen, and polish your work.
Self-Guided
For our One Teen Story contest, we ask writers ages 13-19 to enter their original, unpublished fiction. We are interested in great short stories of any genre about the teen experience—literary, fantasy, sci-fi, love stories, horror, etc.
Contest Open through December 2
One Story arrives in the mail each month like a letter from a friend. Whether you read all of the time, or want to read more, One Story fits into your pocket and into your life.
Six Months for $10.00
Start your New Year by getting new work on the page! Join One Story Executive Director Maribeth Batcha and One Story authors and editors for this online generative fiction writing class designed for writers of all skill levels. Each day, a One Story author or editor who will lead you through a fiction writing exercise designed to help you create a new scene, character, or sketch.
What do you do when a dear friend is suffering, and you can’t help them? Elane Kim plumbs the depths of that question in “Photoelectric,” one of the winning stories of our Teen Writing Contest.
You can now send a tax-advantaged stock gift in minutes. Reduce taxes on capital gains while deducting the fair market value of gifted stock held more than one year.
This class answers frequently asked questions about how to present your work to those on the other side of the submit button.
Self-Guided
Take a moment and scroll through our archives. You might be surprised by who you find there.
We have reached our fall cap. We will reopen in Spring of 2025.
One Story provides a free, open-source submission management system to other publishers at no cost.
One Story’s program income makes up half of our budget. While that’s a lot for a nonprofit like ours, we depend on individual donors and grants to make up the rest. Your support at year-end allows us to keep publishing and keep working with writers on craft.
