TSS Publishing

Read the latest Fiction, CNF, Essays, Interviews and Reviews.

• Interview: Ian Murphy
  RD: Thank you for speaking with me, Ian. Let’s start with your short story ‘Ray’s House’ which was recently published on TSS. What was the inspiration behind the piece? Did it start with an idea, character, phrase or something else? IM: Hi, Rupert. It was an idea based on a situation I faced some years ago. I took a different path to Ray, so Ray’s House is an exploration of a path not taken. I had a close relationship with my grandparents, and when they passed away their house and possessions were left to me and my brother. My wife… Read more: Interview: Ian Murphy
• Flash Fiction: Not Like Us, by Catherine Chiarella Domonkos
  You made me a rap mixtape for my sixteenth. Ballet slipper pink balloons flooded my family’s den in Woodcliff Lake. A white cake settled into its blushing rosettes on the low table. The other girls whined when I snatched the unwrapped brick from your hand, clacked the cassette into the player. “Girls aren’t supposed to like rap. It’s about Black men and violence,” my cousin said. “Don’t you two know that?” My little sister said, “Better not let Mommy hear you listening to all those curse words.”  Senior year the two of us dressed like Wonder Mike and Big Bank… Read more: Flash Fiction: Not Like Us, by Catherine Chiarella Domonkos
• Short Story: Ray’s House, by Ian Murphy
  Ray said his mum’s house seemed different now it belonged to him. I said home is where the heart is. Ray grunted and we left it at that.             We collected his things from Kate’s. Didn’t take long. Kate had bagged, boxed and labelled, arranging all in a neat island in her living room before making herself scarce. All the doors to all the other rooms had been closed and her flat was dark despite the brightness of the day.             Once everything had been loaded into my car, Ray locked Kate’s door and dutifully posted the key through the… Read more: Short Story: Ray’s House, by Ian Murphy
• Interview: Gaynor Jones
  RD: It’s so great to have this chance to speak with you, Gaynor. I wonder if you’d be happy to give us a bit of context behind your short story ‘The Magician’s Assistant’? What inspired the pieces and what drew you to the themes the work explores? GJ: I would describe this as classic Gaynor story, it’s about a strange central character and a group of girls who fixate on her but really it’s about the blurred lines between childhood and adulthood and how incredibly fast that happens. My own teen years were simultaneously some of the most joyous and… Read more: Interview: Gaynor Jones
• Short Story: The Magician’s Assistant, by Gaynor Jones
  The magician’s assistant is lean and lithe, with a white rabbit tattoo etched high up on her left arm, and a black hat full of jokers peeping from the stocking on her right thigh. We don’t know which came first, the tattoos or the job. The magician’s assistant is the reason we beg our mothers to hire the magician for our parties, despite the, ‘Aren’t you too old for that now?’ We aren’t. We never will be. We want to know her tricks. The magician’s assistant knows how to disappear. She stands beside the black moon and star patterned box,… Read more: Short Story: The Magician’s Assistant, by Gaynor Jones
• Flash Fiction: An Art Deco Sideboard, by Clare O’Brien
               My parents bought our house from Mr and Mrs Ford. I never knew them. I never even met them. Years later my mother told me Mrs Ford was dead, hanged in the garage of their fancy new place. She’d been heard crying, over and over, “Oh, why did I leave my little house?”  I expected her to haunt us after that.  She never did, though. She and her regrets blew away on the wind like she was nothing. The night after I finally knew my marriage was over, I dreamed of a sideboard we had in that house, something the Fords left… Read more: Flash Fiction: An Art Deco Sideboard, by Clare O’Brien
• Short Story: An Anniversary Visit, by Nancy Ludmerer
  September 10, 1890. The invitation was unexpected, the neat sloping hand addressed to Miss Eleanor Marx.   It has been a year since Amy’s death, Isabelle Levy wrote. Please come. In the house in Endsleigh Gardens, porcelain cups and saucers rest on a silver tray. The resemblance is unmistakable. The fine dark eyes; the aquiline nose; the perfectly shaped lips that are also perfectly out-of-style, full and expressive in an age of parsimony. The figure slight but shapely – like Amy. Amy is the link between Mrs. Isabelle Levy and me.  Otherwise, I would not be sitting here across from… Read more: Short Story: An Anniversary Visit, by Nancy Ludmerer
• Short Story: What Days Are Like, by Alan Beard
  3rd Place in the Cambridge Short Story Prize 2025 * He lay with his son beside him telling him it was a beautiful day outside the window and he tried to say some thing back to him, something. Anything, but nothing worked, he couldn’t even squeeze his hand, acknowledge the life that was by him, from him, a block, a blink of movement and pulses and thoughts shooting down like lightning through him he could feel the life in his son’s hand while his own was hopeless, helpless, stone and he knew that today he would die it was all… Read more: Short Story: What Days Are Like, by Alan Beard
• Flash Fiction: Normal Person, by Jamie
  3rd Place in the Cambridge Flash Fiction Prize 2025 * He is sitting in his chair when I come. I close the door behind me. A girl I knew in high school told me that university staff are supposed to keep their doors open if they ever meet their students alone. He doesn’t tell me to open his again. There are two chairs in the office. The bookshelves behind him are full of thin works of criticism and fat novels written in the nineteenth century. I am wearing a skirt. He takes off his glasses, gesturing with them to the… Read more: Flash Fiction: Normal Person, by Jamie
• Short Story: Broke, Broken, Broker, by Stuart Watson
  2nd Place in the Cambridge Short Story Prize 2025 * Standing before the minister, TJ knew he was making a horrible mistake. He glanced at Gyn, and wondered where she was in her head, because she certainly wasn’t here, with him, getting married. I knew none of this, watching my best friend take the leap. Huge. Maybe the hugest leap of any guy’s life. When we became friends, working at The Schuss, he didn’t know Gyn. We were just guys, with a shared love of adrenalin. They hired me to rent the e-bikes. He handled kayaks in the summer, skis… Read more: Short Story: Broke, Broken, Broker, by Stuart Watson