literary snacks (vol 1): short stories, poems, and essays I loved this week
So every week, I'm going to bring you 5ish short stories and essays and poems that have stuck in my brain. Hopefully, most of them will be accessible to read online, but lit journals do run on shoestrings and often need paywalls to stay afloat. So I'll do my best to link as much as possible. Maybe if you find enough intriguing sounding stuff in one particular journal or another, you might try out a month of online subscription. I also really wanted to write this guide because I think the world of lit journals and short form can be so opaque. There's this idea that people don't want to read short stories or don't understand them when it comes to the wider book market. Or that lit journals are pretty exclusively just read by the people who want to be published in them (which is probably true, those are the people who will devote hours to seeking out new magazines). And they can be tough to approach for the first time—even to find at all. I feel like short stories have that veneer of being the purview of the old things in English textbooks from middle school, especially in the US. But the form is so alive and so fascinating. They're perfect for reading on the bus or while you're in line somewhere. When you can't commit to 300 pages, but you have 10 in you. When you're just looking for a literary snack.
Hopefully, these curated lists might be a way into discovering some writers and magazines you'll come to love.
lol I'm trying to tell you how it feels for me by Harriet Armstrong
Granta online, Fall 2025
I'm a big fan of Granta. One day, I would love to be published in Granta. So you'll probably see pieces from there coming up often. For a long established magazine, the voices of the pieces they publish always feel so fresh and vital.
This essay for their online series on punctuation, which also featured Madeline Cash writing about the ellipses, absolutely stole my heart. It articulated everything that I'd ever thought about the humble "lol," which, more than being a word or an emotion, really is a piece of punctuation. I am a chronic over-user of "lol" to take the edge off of a serious comment or say, this is me being sarcastic, or to back away from something sincere. It's a tone indicator in a words-only communication world. It's also a crutch for the anxious among us. It's a vehicle for those of us too sincere for our own good. Armstrong excels at taking a strange, unspoken social concept that we're all familiar with and both explaining what and why we're doing this thing while also encasing it in the kind of thoughtful, near poetic language that gives a sense of permission to care deeply about this particular internet thing.
a taste: "Maybe the best ‘lol’ texts do something like that: they speak to something which might be complex, or go unspoken for whatever reason, and they acknowledge that context without needing to explain it. They neither deflect nor fully disclose; they don’t need to, because both the sender and the recipient understand it all already. ‘Lol yes of course I know.’"
Valentine Poem for my Valentine by Victoria Kennefick 
Stinging Fly Issue 52, Summer 2025
I found this poem while flipping through a recent issue of The Stinging Fly. While I don't read a ton of poetry or honestly feel like I understand the discipline enough to talk about it with any authority, I do try to skim over them as I'm flipping between short stories, and this one happened to be positioned across from a short story by one of my favorite authors, Caoilinn Hughes. This poem made me stop and then linger over the page.
It is a love poem; it's also a poem about healing. But the imagery in it is grotesque and very of the body. It is both incredibly sweet and a little sad and also unafraid of touching the gory side of hearts and love. It feels very honest to how exposing experiencing love feels.
a taste: "I am ashamed of its sin and hunger / yet still try to offer you its bloody chambers./At times, I quickly shove it in your pocket, or satchel/when you're not looking. Others, I sneak it/into your tin cigarette box, or lob it into the boot/of your car as you drive away from me back to the city/(What am I to do?)."
Jim Morrison Is Dead and Living in Hollywood by Eve Babitz
Esquire, 1991
Jim Morrison came up in a conversation the other day, and it made me think about Eve Babitz and Joan Didion and how they both wrote about Morrison, but they cast him so differently. I wanted to write a little reference to this into a short story, so I thought I'd do some research to validate my vague memory, largely from reading Didion and Babitz (which I still have so many qualms with but recently reread. knowing that it's really just a book about Eve made it a much more enjoyable second listen). So I found the Esquire article and read it for the first time.
While very much a product of its time, it reminded me why I find Eve's writing fascinating, and I loved the bittersweet tone. Her obvious reverence for Jim and this love that was never fully realized, and then at the same time, she dresses him down. She is brutal in exposing the flaws she was able to see from being so close to this larger than life figure. She loves him, and she knows all his flaws and their motivations, and she lets the reader in on this. She sees him frankly. And then the section where she talks about him finding her years after their affair, confirming her suspicion of their telepathy. I won't spoil that whole anecdote that comes near the end—you should read it yourself. But I've been thinking about it for weeks. So here's a gem from the distant past.
a taste: "I couldn’t be mean to him. If the phone rang at night and there was a long pause after I said hello, I knew it was Jim. He and I had a lot of ESP in some kind of laser-twisted, wish-fulfillment kind of way. I always wished he were there, and every so often, he zoomed in."
Burning Mao by Fernanda Eberstadt
Granta Issue 171, Spring 2025
I thought this was a piece of historical fiction when I first started reading it. Only checking the table of contents did I realize it was actually a personal essay by a woman who had interned at the Factory close to its downfall. The essay is about Andy Warhol, cast in a different light than I'd ever seen rendered on the page. Not as the character he played or how he was remembered by history but as a very tender, very real, very vulnerable human. One that would stand there and sweep the office. The theme of the issue is Dead Friends. The stories are all elegies or eulogies of some kind. It's a riveting story and a very tender portrait.
a taste: "Rereading my teen diaries, I have the impression of someone driving a car repeatedly over a cliff, seeing how often they can walk away alive. There weren't many adults who were looking out for me, but Andy felt like one of them."
EVERYONE I HAVE EVER KISSED THINKS ABOUT ME ALL THE TIME AND IS IN LOVE WITH ME by Hilary Kaufman
Taco Bell Quarterly Issue 7, October 2024
I was always deeply intrigued by the Taco Bell Quarterly back in my teenage Twitter days, not that I even really understood what the Paris Review was or these institutional magazines they were poking fun at. I just thought they had a good online presence. But they fell off my radar when I got off Twitter and only recently noticed them again when they drifted onto my Substack feed. And then my coolest professor had us read their most recent issue in class. This was her favorite of them and also mine. It is but one long scream into the void, which I think we all need sometimes.
a taste: "...I AM NEVER DIZZY I AM NEVER DITZY I DON’T MISS ANYTHING EVER I AM NOT SCARED I AM THE THE YOUNGEST PERSON IN EVERY ROOM I AM SO NEW AND BENDABLE I AM THE VALUE MENU I INVENT EVERYONE I HAVE EVER KISSED THINKS ABOUT ME ALL OF THE TIME AND IS IN LOVE WITH ME I DON’T LAUGH AT ANYTHING EVER I HAVE NEVER BEEN PHASED I AM THE SHARPEST PERSON IN EVERY ROOM I AM THE KNIFE I PEEL APPLES IN ONE SINGLE SPIRAL LIKE A WELL TIMED INSULT I CUT EVERYONE I HAVE EVERY KISSED THINKS ABOUT ME ALL THE TIME AND IS IN LOVE WITH ME..."
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