The Atlantic: Fiction 2011

Essays

Brett Anthony Johnston - Don't Write What You Know. Why fiction's narrative and emotional integrity will always transcend the literal truth.

John Barth - Do I Repeat Myself? The problem of the "already said".

Stories

Ariel Dorfman - The Last Copy. As soon as his book was published, Antonio realized that the pure vision of him that only she harbored would be shattered— and that he would do anything to keep her from reading it.

Wendell Berry - Sold. "I knew that all the things we'd gathered there so many years would be scattered and gone. All that had held it together would come apart and be gone as if it never was."

Stuart Dybek - Vigil. The old Bohemian hadn't come to disturb the family on Holy Night, only to deliver an enormous, misshapen gift.

Austin Bunn - How to Win an Unwinnable War. His parents were separating, but all Sam could think about was preparing for nuclear holocaust.

Jerome Charyn - Little Sister. Marla had felt she'd never really had a sister, that she'd been visited by some strange goblin or ghost. But then she went into Daddy's bank vault after he died.