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I’m trying to learn how to write short fiction, and so I’ve decided to read at least 5 short stories per week, to understand what I like and what I don’t, what I want to write and what I really don’t want to do.

Here’s a little rundown of what I read, whether I enjoyed them, if I recommend them or not, and the craft lessons I learned from it. None of this is intended to reflect badly on the authors and their craft, it’s really just me extracting why I didn’t enjoy some aspects of stories, in order for me not to repeat them in my own work. It’s a lot easier to see those things in other people’s stories than in your own – but I promise I’m not trying to be mean!

If you want to read the stories, I included a link, and I’d advise you read the story before my review. I’m making sure not to spoil in the “pitch” section, but I will spoil in the next section if a certain element caught my attention.

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Today we have a mix of speculative fiction from Clarkesworld 232 (January 2026), two from the New Yorker: a story with speculative elements (did I tell you I like speculative fiction?), and one “normal” literary story.

The Stars You Can’t See By Looking Directly by Samantha Murray, Clarkesworld 232 (Jan 2026)

Pitch: it’s the end of the world, the babies are coming out weird. The protagonist struggled with infertility, but finally managed to get pregnant – but she did so after the “snowfall” that contaminated it all, so her baby will be “strange”. On the other end of the table, her sister in law who also struggled with infertility, got pregnant before and so her baby will be “normal”.

I loved this story! The vibes were excellent from start to end, in that dream-like, somewhat detached and eerie state that I love. I wish I’d written it.

Some elements that stood out to me:

1. The very simple temporal structure of Before / After / Before. We don’t go back and forth a thousand times because our name isn’t Chistopher Nolan, we only move twice through time, which is already a lot for a short story. I have, let’s say, tendencies, to want MORE and to flash back and forward between a thousand scenes, forgetting I’m in a short story and not a novel. And even in a novel, if you’re not careful, you get a Tenet instead of an Inception.

2. My first favorite part was the contrast between the two women. The jealousy and love, which seem so contradictory, but what are we if not contradictory? – it just touched me deeply. I don’t know what exactly in the prose or in the construction of the story made it work, but I really want to learn how to do that, how to make those kinds of feelings so strong for the reader.

3. My second favorite was the husband’s descent into conspiracy theory. This was so well-written it was striking and nearly made me cry for our protagonist. It felt vivid, extraordinary, but also plausible at the same time. There was an awareness of what it means to become a conspiracy theorist that made it all seem obvious, when it could have sounded contrived or weird. Idk either why it works so well but that’s what i want to be doing.

Don’t judge me too hard, I’m still at the very baby steps of learning how to write fiction (when I barely manage to write the Substack essay) and I’ve decided to write in English which isn’t my first language either. In this moment I somewhat regret not going to college for literature or English, but then I remember the only reason I’m able to write this so freely is thanks to my computer science job, so there’s that.

Still, I desperately need an English or American literature course at some point so that I can get some fundamentals down!

“The Readers” by Ben Lerner, The New Yorker (June 29th)

Pitch: this is a letter, addressed by the main character to their therapist. They are a writer, and one of the main concerns is whether or not the therapist has read their work, and what would happen if they did or didn’t, liked or didn’t like, and what that means for their therapy.

The letter format is a very interesting one, and I haven’t tried it yet. Especially the letter to a therapist which means you can easily have a modern character express deep feelings without sounding contrived. We just don’t write letters like that to friends and parents anymore! So the format works super well in my opinion for fantasy with a medieval or renaissance feel, or with this trick of addressing it to a therapist.

Another craft lesson: this was a killer first paragraph! I wasn’t feeling like reading when I picked this one up, and it wasn’t so much a choice as the first New Yorker on the unread pile. I have a fraught relationship with the New Yorker’s fiction choices: some (like this) I love, but others bore me to death, or I just don’t see the point. All this to say, I didn’t open this – I read it on paper, it’s my no-screen newspaper of the year – without really wanting to be swept. And yet I was!

Down We Go Gently by M.L. Clarke, Clarkesworld 232 (Jan 2026)

Pitch: a young boy’s first time on a planet, as he accompanies his father to make some trades for their spaceship.

I didn’t love this as much as I wanted to. The start was excellent, I loved how the author contrasted the chaos of the merchant street with the calm, organized spaceship. This first “discovery” section was wonderful, and I liked the leitmotif of the boy getting disoriented by gravity and by the infinite horizon.

However, I feel like this story didn’t really have a point – well it did, and I see what the author wanted to do, but there just wasn’t enough meat to it for me to like it. There’s a very subtle comparison between the ship, named Goliath, and the father – a giant with clay feet.

I enjoyed this element, but I feel like the author opened a thousand other loops and didn’t close them – but I really want to know!

For example, near the end, sex workers come talk to the boy while his father is in the bar. They hint that their ship’s name isn’t just related to “strength”, like the boy’s been told, there’s another story to it – but that story isn’t told, there’s just a tiny hint of it at the start (that they scavenged on smaller ships to maintain theirs). I nearly missed it, and I think it would have gone completely over my head if I wasn’t reading so closely to learn from it.

This speaks to one of my biggest struggles when writing fiction: i don’t want to handhold the reader through everything, i want to trust them to put all the clues together, but I’m very afraid I’ll go too far in the other direction and end up like this, where i set up my mystery well, but didn’t give enough payoff to the reader by fear of being unsubtle.

Another tidbit: it’s excellent to start the story with something obvious that the character doesn’t understand and the readers think they do; only to immediately turn it on its head and have it be different from what the reader expected. Here we get a boy saying he doesn’t understand “merchant streets”, which isn’t that hard to get, but then we realize the mechanics of merchant streets are different when you come from a spaceship.

“Mutter”, by Esther Yi, The New Yorker (June 22nd)

Pitch: A daughter welcomes her mother for a visit, and accompanies her to visit the zoo she works at.

I really loved this! This is one of the few New Yorker stories that appealed to me on their own, thanks to the gorgeous color pencil art. Click on the story’s link to see it full size, it’s really well done and intriguing.

And, well, I wasn’t disappointed. The first 2 paragraphs are an excellent way to introduce a story: give expectations to the reader, then subvert them, twice in a row! I snorted and decided I loved this author.

I’m taking off half a star because there were a few tangents into philosophical stuff that weren’t even tangentially related to the story, and I found this part boring and not really integrated into the story. But this was really only 3 paragraphs and then the story sprang back into itself, to my delight. This is a good reminder for me not to waffle on about stuff – if you let me free, my brain will take you into all the somewhat related corners of my mind, and I have a love-hate relationship with that, both irl and in fiction.

Apart from that little excerpt, I adored the visit to the zoo. You could feel the feelings of the daughter so well, how much she loves the animals and how beautiful they are. I aspire to write descriptions like those.

Then, the story took a turn I didn’t see coming – we went out of the zoo, for the mother to (spoiler alert) reveal she has Alzheimer’s. I found the moment very touching, and her way of explaining it was perfect: she won’t let her daughter be her caretaker, because she doesn’t want to burden her. She makes a lovely comment about becoming one of the animals her daughter watches over: something a bit alien, a bit strange, but still somewhat loving towards its friends, even if sometimes the wild part of her brought by the disease will make her attack. The mother aspires to stay something her daughter loves, and that’s incompatible with witnessing her slow degenerescence.

That’s all for me for today! I hope you enjoyed my little run-downs (I don’t think they’ can quite be called reviews in all honesty) and that I either made you want to read the stories, or at least gave you a good time :)

Leave me a comment below if you read any of those stories (sorry I think the New Yorker ones are still under paywall, but Clarkesworld is free to read!) and whether you agree with me or not. I’m also happy to take suggestions! Those 2 magazines are the ones I’m subscribed to, but I definitely want to branch out as I go along this journey :)

Read you soon,

By the way, if you read on your email client, you can hit “reply”. I always wondered who would be able to see, and if I was emailing the entire mailing list, but rest assured only I will receive the answer (and won’t share it, pinky promise!). So if you want to tell me something, anything (except insults ty) privately, email or DMs on the app is the way to do!