“A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage.” —Lorrie Moore

“Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.” —Neil Gaiman

“Short fiction seems more targeted—hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them.” —Paolo Bacigalupi

May is National Short Story Month, a time to embrace love affairs, peer through tiny windows, and catch hand grenades of ideas. I’ve selected a few stories to get your literary celebration started. From a longer short story broken up into subtitled sections, to a flash fiction piece of just a single paragraph without a stitch of dialogue, to a story written entirely through dialogue, these three stories illustrate some of the wonderfully various forms short fiction can take.

Check out my picks in the complete web rove, “Love Affairs, Tiny Windows, and Hand Grenades,” at Flight Patterns, the Flyway blog.