Short stories published in The Virginia Quarterly Review

Listing 67 stories.

A minister’s young daughter, whose mother suffers from depression, wears a controversial costume to an evangelical church gathering. While hiding from adults, she stumbles upon an exorcism.

A Native American boy finds himself sinking deeper and deeper into quicksand as his horse watches, hoping that someone somehow will know he's in trouble, despite the lack of evidence for such a suspicion.

In present-day New York City, a strained lawyer writes to a stranger, an eating disorder doctor, in hopes of confronting the man about an overheard phone conversation.

A woman has desired to become a nun since she was young, and nothing deters her until she must choose between her dream and the love of her life.

A Jewish doctor in New York loves his wife but is also a raging drunk. In response to his sustained outbursts, his wife grows distant from him. She accuses his five brothers for enabling his self-destructive behavior, leading to a reckoning about intergenerational trauma and familial pain.

A middle-aged man in a small Northern town is desperate to escape his mundane routines and imagines rash and violent actions that might give his life meaning.

During the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918, a young boy is left alone so his family can be treated in their town’s makeshift hospital. The boy tries his best to hold down the fort and prove his manhood, though the people around him make it more difficult than he expected.

A young boy travels around his snow-covered Southern town to find a doctor for his heavily pregnant sister.

Sometime in the twentieth or twenty-first century, a teenage runaway finds refuge working in Wyoming for over 15 years for an older cattle rancher whose unrequited love complicates the terms of her employment.