Where to Read Short Stories Online
A Writer's Guide to Short Fiction
I'll be honest with you: I did not set out to become a short story writer.
My grand plan — the one I outlined in my very first blog post with the confidence of a man who has never tried to publish a fantasy novel — was to spend a year entering competitions, shake a few hands, win a few awards, and then waltz into 2025 with a debut novel tucked under my arm and a modest but devoted readership waiting at the door. Short fiction was the warm-up act. The training montage. The part of the movie you fast-forward through to get to the good bit.
Except. Well. It turns out the warm-up act is where the real show happens.
Over the past year and change, my writing journey has taken me through flash fiction competitions, short story tournaments, micro fiction challenges, and literary contests I didn't even know existed before I stumbled into them. I've written werewolf romance in a knacker's yard, a Greek myth on a ghost train, and a piece about a little girl who should be walking by now that I will not be explaining further because if you haven't read it, I'd rather you experience it cold. Along the way, I've placed in contests, made leaderboards, and, once, in a particularly surreal moment, won first place — which I'll get to, because it genuinely surprised me, and I was there.
But none of that is actually the point of this post. The point is: short fiction deserves your attention. As a reader, not just a writer. And if you've never thought about where to find it, or why it's worth your time, allow me — a fantasy author with strong opinions and a newsletter that inexplicably promises whiskey — to be your unsolicited guide.
Why Short Stories Are Worth Your Time (And Mine)
Let's start with the obvious objection: you're busy. You have a novel on your nightstand that's been bookmarked on page 47 for six weeks. You have a to-be-read list that functions more as a monument to good intentions than an actual list. Why on earth would you add short stories to the pile?
Because short stories don't go on the pile. That's the point.
A great piece of flash fiction can be read in the time it takes your coffee to go from "too hot" to "acceptable." A short story, even a long one, asks for an evening — not a commitment. And the storytelling within those constraints is, arguably, some of the most technically demanding writing there is. You have no runway. You cannot spend three chapters establishing the world before something interesting happens. You have to arrive, matter immediately, and leave before you've overstayed your welcome. Every word is load-bearing.
I say this as someone who spent the better part of a year writing a novel with three separate storylines, a sex-addicted wizard, and enough world-building lore to fill a small museum. Brevity does not come naturally to me. And yet, flash fiction — the most brutal of the short forms, typically capped at one thousand words or fewer — has become one of the most instructive things I do as a writer. It tightens everything. It teaches you that most of what you thought was essential is, in fact, decoration.
Readers tend to underestimate how much a short story can hold. They're not lesser novels. They're a different animal entirely — closer to poetry in their economy, closer to film in their pacing. And the best ones leave you with something that takes a while to name.
Where to Actually Find Short Fiction Online
Now. To the part that might actually help you.
The internet is enormous and mostly useless, but there are pockets of it where genuinely extraordinary short fiction lives. Here's where I'd send you.
Literary Magazines and Journals
This is where the most celebrated short fiction has always lived, and the transition online has been, on balance, a good thing for accessibility. Publications like The New Yorker, One Story, Ploughshares, The Sun, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and Electric Literature publish short stories regularly, and many of them are available to read for free on their websites. The quality bar is high — sometimes intimidatingly so — but that's precisely the point. Reading published literary fiction alongside your own attempts is one of the fastest ways to develop your craft. You start to notice what the best writers do in their first sentences. You start to feel the difference between an ending that lands and one that merely stops.
For fantasy writing specifically, I'd point you toward Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, all of which publish short-form speculative and fantasy fiction from some of the best voices in the genre. If your reading diet skews toward the fantastical and the strange — and frankly, why wouldn't it — these are essential bookmarks.
Writing Competition Platforms
Here's something that doesn't get said enough: the submissions portals and results pages for writing competitions are some of the best free reading on the internet. Many competitions publish their winning and shortlisted entries, and reading them is useful in a way that's almost unfair. You're not just reading good fiction — you're reading good fiction that succeeded under specific, often unusual constraints. A prompt. A word limit. A mandatory object or setting or theme. That context makes the craft choices more visible. You can see exactly how a writer solved the problem.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to where I've been spending a significant portion of my writing life lately.
The Competitions I've Entered (And What I Found There)
I want to talk about writing competitions for a moment — not just as a reader, but as someone who has been actively entering them, occasionally placing in them, and learning an unreasonable amount from the process.
The first thing I'll tell you is that short story competitions and flash fiction competitions are not the same ecosystem, and they reward different skills. A traditional short story competition might give you three to five thousand words and a general theme. A flash fiction competition will hand you a prompt, a word limit that would make a haiku writer nervous, and a deadline that is not interested in your feelings about it. Both are valuable. Both are humbling. Both have produced some of my best work.
Not Quite Write
The Not Quite Write Prize is a flash fiction competition that I have complicated feelings about, specifically because I won it, and winning things tends to make you retroactively terrified about whether you deserved to. The piece I submitted was I Told You This Was a Poem — a story told in alternating registers: verse and prose, past and present, a father writing something he calls a poem and a mother in a kitchen getting on with things. It was, by some margin, the darkest thing I had written up to that point in my writing journey. It was also, apparently, exactly right.
Winning that particular literary award was meaningful not just because of the recognition but because of what the competition itself represents. Not Quite Write is built around the idea that writers don't have to be fully formed to be worth celebrating — a philosophy I find personally comforting and professionally useful. If you're looking for a flash fiction competition that takes the work seriously without taking itself too seriously, I'd start there.
Twisted Tournament
The Twisted Tournament is a bracket-style short story competition where writers go head-to-head, their work judged by readers and fellow competitors. I made the Leaderboard on my first entry — a retelling of the Orpheus myth set on an infernal train called Hades, in which our hero boards the locomotive playing songs for his dead beloved and arrives, eventually, at a god who offers him nothing but the most devastating piece of practical advice I have ever fit into a piece of flash fiction. The train only moves forward. I suggest you do too.
Making the Leaderboard in a competition like Twisted Tournament means something specific: it means real readers — not judges behind a curtain, but actual human beings with taste and preferences — found your work worth championing. That kind of feedback is different from a placement. It's participatory. It's the closest thing short fiction has to a live audience.
NYC Midnight
If you want to be tested, and I mean genuinely tested in the way that makes you question your life choices at eleven-thirty on a Sunday night, enter the NYC Midnight challenges. The Micro Fiction challenge gives you one hundred words. One hundred. You are handed a genre, a location, and a required object or word, and you are expected to produce something that feels complete. Not truncated. Not summarized. Complete.
My fourth-place finish in the NYC Midnight Micro Fiction challenge was for She Should Be Walking By Now, which is — and I want to be precise here — a story about a little girl, her mother, and the particular grief of watching someone you love struggle in a way you cannot fix. In one hundred words. I will confess that I have no idea how I did it. I am not sure I could do it again. But fourth place in a competition with thousands of international entrants is not nothing, and I'll take the small, terrifying victory.
What Reading Short Fiction Taught Me About Writing It
Here is the thing I did not expect when I started entering flash fiction competitions and consuming short fiction with something approaching obsession: it changed how I write everything. Not just the flash pieces. The novel. The longer short stories. The poetry that I write when I am feeling things I don't want to explain to anyone directly.
Constraints are not limitations. This sounds like the sort of thing that gets stitched onto a pillow, but I mean it practically. When you cannot afford a wasted word, you stop writing wasted words. When you have to establish a character in a sentence, you learn which details actually matter. When your ending has to earn its weight without the benefit of three hundred pages of setup, you become ruthless about what an ending actually needs to do. These are transferable skills. Desperately transferable.
Reading other people's short fiction — especially the competition entries, especially the ones that beat you — is equally instructive. You start to understand that there are a hundred ways to solve any given narrative problem, and that the best writers don't solve it the obvious way. They find the angle you didn't see. They make a choice that seems strange until it seems inevitable. And then you go back to your own work and ask whether you found the angle, or whether you just found the first one.
Where to Start If You're New to All of This
If you've read this far and you're thinking about dipping into short fiction — either as a reader or a writer — here's where I'd point you:
The best of the best would be my writings page, obviously.
But something more widely read would be Electric Literature, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the Not Quite Write archives are all excellent starting places, depending on your taste. If you write fantasy or speculative fiction, the genre-specific journals will show you what's possible in short form within worlds like yours.
Enter something. Pick one competition. NYC Midnight runs several throughout the year, including short story, flash fiction, and micro fiction challenges. Twisted Tournament is accessible and community-driven. Not Quite Write is warm and rigorous in equal measure. You do not have to win. You barely have to place. The exercise of writing toward a constraint — a prompt, a deadline, a word limit — will teach you more about your own writing than almost anything else I can recommend.
And read the winners. Not to be discouraged by them. Read them the way a chess player reviews a grandmaster's game: to understand the moves, to see the logic, to find the thing you would have missed.
Short fiction is not the warm-up act. It never was. It is, in its own right, one of the most demanding and rewarding forms storytelling has to offer. I came for the novel and stayed for the flash fiction, which is either a sign of artistic growth or a profound misallocation of my time.
Probably both. Usually both.