'Once you’re writing to convey information, the prose is dead.'

Every week we identify the best-written works of fiction, speculative fiction, and nonfiction from recent releases and shortlists for major prizes, and from our subscribers’ submissions. We also publish articles by their authors on prose technique and AI writing, and on the last Friday of the month we publish for paid subscribers the best-written book of the month.

Recent literary fiction»

‘A brutal, joyful, surprising, and gorgeous novel of human contradictions. It’s a stunner.”—Julia Phillips

I lived in a box in the desert. I slept in stiff white sheets. All night my dreams swam with the things the girls drew on class assignments and birthday cards: lilies and blades and lopsided skulls, impossible planets lit like lamps from within. They didn’t know how things worked. I had to tell them: Stop drawing. Pay attention. Listen.

Every two weeks, I received a paycheck, which I spent on bleach and wine, and then, at home, delighted, I changed my sheets, I wiped the window, I touched the floor, thrilled to be someplace clean. The things that happened at work—the vomit, the mania, the tampons thrown at heads—all that I kept in a hazard-orange bucket in my heart, which was sealed the moment I walked out the doors of Twin Bridge. Home was safe. Work was work. I had a system. I had a system in Askewn, in Texas, a system of complicated invisible mental pulleys which functioned so that I could successfully oversee the girls, who started every morning sleepy in the cafeteria, learning to dance.

Our pick is here»

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Information about submitting to Auraist is here. If we publish your work, we’ll invite you to answer our questions on prose style. Your answers will be considered for inclusion in the print publication of these answers by many of the world’s best writers.

Guides to prose style»

‘I am, ultimately, hoping to emulate these writers at moments when their work comes close to music’

DELANEY NOLAN received her MFA in fiction from the lowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, and a Fulbright Fellowship in fiction; her fiction has appeared