Finding books you like can take hard work, huge emphasis here on the you. Because chances are, what you like isn’t necessarily the same as what your mother likes or what your friend likes or what a New York Times critic likes or even what the judges of the Man Booker prize like. My point being, our tastes are all our own. The secret to enjoying reading is to know what you like – and then how to find it.

Thankfully, for books, there are some great tools out there to help us. There’s the popular Goodreads as well as the popular-among-librarian-types LibraryThing. Both websites have in their databases pretty much every in-print book out there (barring the very obscure and very old) along with a synopsis, user ratings, and user reviews. The sites will suggest similar titles to a book. They’re excellent resources. With a bit of work, you can more or less comb through the plethora of books out there, cherry-picking the ones that might appeal to you, based on real data.

It is a different story unfortunately for shorter works – short stories and creative nonfiction articles specifically (hereon, for simplicity’s sake, both are referred to as ‘short stories’). I have yet to find a resource out there that makes it easy – or forget easy, possible, to comb through the content out there to find pieces that will speak to you.

In my mind, here is the current landscape: In order to obtain an overview of current short stories, one would have to manually check a multitude of websites, magazines, and lit journals. To catch even a sampling of what exists would mean regularly checking dozens of websites on a regular basis.

Like with books, there are various ‘gold standards’ one can refer to that do some of the curation work for you, that select from the sludge piles the ‘best of the best’ – lists of award winning short stories, anthologies of ‘the best’ short stories of 2017, noteworthy magazines, etc. But as with books, I buy very much into the theory that tastes differ and tastes matter. So – how then to find what we like?

The current landscape of the short story world to me is books pre-Goodreads, music pre-Spotify, and recipes pre-Pinterest. It is a cumbersome, manual business to sift through and find what one likes.

An ideal scenario would be the existence of some sort of platform that allowed users to rate and review short stories, tag them according to subject matter, mood, or other descriptive terms (ex: funny, historical, grief), keep track of what they’ve read and liked, and receive suggestions for new pieces they might like based on past activity. Sadly, I have yet to find such a tool.

So while I wait, I’m still finding short stories that speak to me and am still very grateful for the content and authors out there. I just have to work a little harder to find them. Here’s my current approach.

The Work I do to Find Short Stories

My Tool of Choice: Surprisingly, Twitter. Why Twitter? Most magazines, online literary journals, and authors themselves will promote new content on Twitter. By following these various accounts, you can quickly build up a constantly updated feed of new short work to consider – your pool. (Medium, WordPress, and others are also options – but I’ve found publications/authors are more likely to have Twitter accounts than accounts on other platforms.)

Cast a Wide Net: At time of writing, I currently follow 1,186 accounts. Is this too many? Quite possibly to almost definitely. However, whenever I come across a writer, magazine, or website that I think I *might* be interested in, I follow them. My theory is: cast a wide net and then from that, filter. I’d prefer to be able to consider and then rule out something rather than not consider it at all (and potentially miss something good).

Go Down Those Rabbit Holes: How do you find the right accounts/writers/magazines to follow? First, start with following a couple of accounts of names you know (look for a favorite magazine or author). From there you have a few options.
– Twitter is great at suggesting new and similar accounts to follow. Sometimes these suggestions are terrible, and sometimes they’re good.
– Look at the feed of an account you’re following. Who are they retweeting? Whose tweets are they liking? Which Twitter accounts do they follow? Could these be possible accounts you might be interested in? Has anyone added the account you’re following to a List of accounts? If so, could other accounts on this List also be interesting?
– Whenever you come across an author, magazine, or website whether on Twitter, elsewhere online, or offline, check to see if there are related Twitter accounts you can follow.

Sort and Categorize: Now that you have all these accounts that you follow, make it easier on yourself and categorize them into your own Lists on Twitter. Are there natural groupings that occur – possible distinctions could be by account type: ‘Writers’ versus ‘Lit Magazines/Sites’ or by work type, ‘Short Story’ versus ‘Creative Nonfiction.’ You may pull out a few you love especially and create a ‘Favorites’ List.

Read: Read through your feed and Lists. Look for tweets that are linking you to possible new material. Follow a link. Browse through the piece. If you enjoy it, ‘like’ the tweet. This will also bookmark it for you under your likes.

Weed Regularly: This is the part I could be better at. In addition to looking for accounts and pieces to love, be on the constant lookout for accounts that just aren’t working for you. After a couple of irrelevant or disappointing tweets, consider unfollowing an account.

Repeat: Keep adding new accounts, keep updating your lists, keep finding new material you like, review your likes every now and again for clues as to which accounts you’re liking again and again (and which you can then bump up to a ‘favorites’ List), weed out/remove accounts that don’t match your tastes.

This process saves me the work of one-by-one checking a very long list of websites. Again, it’s definitely not perfect, not by a long shot. A few notable downsides: I’m only considering online free material, and material not backed somehow by an active twitter account is significantly handicapped. I also don’t use this method exclusively. In addition, I subscribe to the mailing lists and newsletters of sites that I know I love.

Still looking for a better way – so if someone has ideas – or wants to invent something (an app of Goodreads quality or higher?!), I’m all ears.

As a side note, here are a few great sites out there that I’ve stumbled across as well as a few pieces I really enjoyed in 2017.

Sites I frequent:
Hippocampus Magazine – “an exclusively online publication set out to entertain, educate and engage writers and readers of creative nonfiction. Each issue features memoir excerpts, personal essays, reviews, interviews and craft articles”
Catapult – “produces an award-winning daily online magazine of narrative nonfiction and fiction”
Guernica – “a magazine of global arts and politics”
Narrative Magazine – “A renowned modern library of fiction, poetry, essays, and visual art by celebrated and emerging artists, provided free to readers.”
The Rumpus – “features interviews, book reviews, essays, comics, and critiques of creative culture as well as original fiction and poetry”
Dear Damsels – Dear Damsels is an online platform championing young female voices – a place where women can come together online, to read and write about the things that matter to them

A few great pieces:
“Ice” – River Teeth Journal
“Woven” – Catapult
“Zhiyu/Jerry” – The Rumpus
“I Knew She Was Beautiful” – The New Yorker