So the Story Goes: Twenty-Five Years of the Johns Hopkins Short Fiction Series

Since its founding in 1979, the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction series has published forty volumes of short fiction, beginning with Guy Davenport's acclaimed Da Vinci's Bicycle. The series was launched with two guiding principles: to publish works of short fiction exhibiting formal excellence and strong emotional appeal and to publish writers at all stages of their careers.

So the Story Goes gathers the best short fiction of the series, works exhibiting wit, elegance, and wisdom. Writing about a wide variety of subjects and in a multitude of styles, the twenty writers collected here share a mastery of language and an extraordinary ability to entertain.

Ellen Akins from World Like a Knife, Her Book
Steve Barthelme from And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story, Zorro
Glenn Blake from Drowned Moon, Marsh
Jennifer Finney Boylan from Remind Me to Murder You Later, Thirty-six Miracles of Lyndon Johnson
Richard Burgin from Fear of Blue Skies, Bodysurfing
Avery Chenoweth from Wingtips, Powerman
Guy Davenport from Da Vinci's Bicycle, A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg
Tristan Davies from Cake, Counterfactuals
Stephen Dixon from Time to Go, Time to Go
Judith Grossman from How Aliens Think, Rovera
Josephine Jacobsen from What Goes without Saying, On the Island
Greg Johnson from I Am Dangerous, Hemingway's Cats
Jerry Klinkowitz from Basepaths, Basepaths
Michael Martone from Safety Patrol, Safety Patrol
Jack Matthews from Crazy Women, Haunted by Name Our Ignorant Lips
Jean McGarry from Dream Date, The Last Time
Robert Nichols from In the Air, Six Ways of Looking at Farming
Joe Ashby Porter from Lithuania, West Baltimore
Frances Sherwood from Everything You've Heard Is True, History
Robley Wilson from The Book of Lost Fathers, Hard Times