Newsletter Title: The Hyphen Literary Review — Fiction Spotlight

EDITOR'S NOTE

There is a particular courage required to write fiction — to insist, against all evidence of a chaotic world, that a story has shape, meaning, and consequence. This edition is a celebration of that courage.

In our Fiction Spotlight, we turn our attention to the writers who are doing some of the most quietly daring work being published today: those who resist easy resolution, who trust their readers to sit with ambiguity, and who understand that the sentence itself is an ethical act.

We're also sharing three books we've been unable to put down this month, and a few opportunities for writers in our community to get their own work into the world. As always, we're grateful you're here.

— The Hyphen Editors

FICTION SPOTLIGHT

The Art of the Unresolved: Why the Best Short Fiction Today Refuses to Comfort Us

The short story has always been a form hospitable to darkness — think Chekhov's gun, Flannery O'Connor's grace-through-violence, the cool existential dread of Carver's minimalism. But something has shifted in contemporary short fiction. The best of it no longer merely withholds comfort; it interrogates the very desire for it.

Consider the recent wave of writers — many of them publishing in The Paris Review, Granta, and smaller journals with outsized influence — who are building stories less around revelation than around the slow, accumulating weight of ordinary life resisting interpretation. Their protagonists do not learn. They endure. They notice. Sometimes they simply stop, mid-motion, and the story ends with the quiet violence of an open window.

This is not nihilism. It is, if anything, a more demanding form of humanism — one that asks readers to bring their own moral intelligence to the page rather than receive it pre-packaged. It is fiction that respects us enough to leave us uncertain.

In the coming months, we'll be profiling several writers working in this vein. We begin next edition with a conversation about form, failure, and the first draft.

WHAT WE'RE READING

Three books in our orbit this month:

1. The Vulnerables — Sigrid Nunez Nunez continues her meditation on solitude, grief, and the ethics of attention. Part novel, part essay, entirely its own thing. Essential for anyone thinking about what the novel can still do.

2. Chain-Gang All-Stars — Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah A ferocious, formally inventive debut that uses speculative fiction to interrogate mass incarceration. Brutal, necessary, and unexpectedly tender in its quieter moments.

3. The Bee Sting — Paul Murray A family unravelling told through four distinct voices, each rendering the same catastrophe in an entirely different register. Murray is doing something genuinely rare: literary fiction that also compels you to read at speed.

UPCOMING EVENTS & CALLS FOR SUBMISSION

→ Open Submissions: Hyphen Fiction Issue We are now accepting short fiction (1,000–5,000 words) for our upcoming print issue. We are particularly interested in work that engages with memory, place, and inherited silence. Deadline: April 30, 2026. Guidelines on our website.

→ Reading & Conversation: Contemporary Irish Fiction Join us for an evening exploring the new wave of Irish literary voices reshaping the form. Date and venue to be announced — follow our events page for updates.

→ Workshop: Writing Into Uncertainty A four-session online workshop for writers interested in exploring ambiguity as a structural device. Limited to 12 participants. Applications open now.

You're receiving this because you subscribed to The Hyphen Literary Review. To unsubscribe or manage your preferences, click below.

One Letter. Every Sunday Morning.

One Letter. Every Sunday Morning.