Here are the latest newsletters for my followers to peruse:
Dear Reader,
Yesterday’s Flash Friday is live — and the new challenge is open if you want to write, not just read.
We’re launching Litro Flash Fiction Challenge: THE ODDS ARE IN — a future-facing theme built for the moment: prediction markets, probability, and the stories people tell when the world starts pricing outcomes.
THE ODDS ARE IN Write the future as a probability — make it personal, make it strange, make it true.
If you only do one thing: click the brief. It’s designed to be fast to understand and easy to share.
Now — Essay Saturday. Three pieces that share a quiet throughline: the small rituals people reach for when life gets unstable — memory, appetite, tenderness.
Yesterday’s Flash Friday is live — and the new challenge is open if you want to write, not just read.
We’re launching Litro Flash Fiction Challenge: THE ODDS ARE IN — a future-facing theme built for the moment: prediction markets, probability, and the stories people tell when the world starts pricing outcomes.
THE ODDS ARE IN Write the future as a probability — make it personal, make it strange, make it true.
If you only do one thing: click the brief. It’s designed to be fast to understand and easy to share.
Now — Essay Saturday. Three pieces that share a quiet throughline: the small rituals people reach for when life gets unstable — memory, appetite, tenderness.
Tuesday Tales is four pieces worth reading in one sitting - work that feels ordinary at first, then quietly tilts.
This week turns on small pivots: a look held too long, a request that carries years inside it, “rigour” that starts to read like threat, and a childhood fear you can’t laugh off once the light changes.
Elvis is at the bottom of the pool. A teenage lifeguard watches a children’s party tip toward catastrophe — darkly funny, tense, and brutally precise about what everyone pretends not to see.
A mother wants one simple thing: a photo with her daughter. The daughter hears the entire family history inside the request — second-person, sharp, and quietly devastating.
A future-facing letter of support, footnotes, figures — and creeping dread. Satire with real bite, where “rigorous curiosity” starts to look like a threat.
“The world will end tomorrow.” Two girls walk toward the barn as October darkens — prophecy, Catholic schooling, and childhood fear tightening into something you can’t shrug off.
The great Sir Tom Stoppard, who left us recently, once said: "I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity."
At Litro, we believe the only price that matters is the one we pay to keep imagination alive.
Today is Giving Tuesday. It is a global day of generosity. But for us, it is a day to secure the future of the narrative. We are looking to raise $25,000 today.
Why? Because culture is not a luxury. It is the oxygen of a thinking society. To honor the giants like Stoppard, we must feed the new voices standing on his shoulders.
Below is this week’s curated Tuesday Tales a collection of grief, workplace satire, and mythical realism. Read them. Enjoy them. And if they move you, help us keep printing them.
This Week on Litro
THE TRIBUTE
A Debt Measured in Time
When news broke of Tom Stoppard’s passing, we paused. In this personal homage, our Editor-in-Chief recalls a chance encounter with the playwright in the London Library. It is a testament to Stoppard's “wit, irreverence, and generosity of spirit”.
The modern office is a theatre of the absurd. We explore two novels that dismantle the “office nightmare,” asking why we labour and what it does to our souls. A perfect read for those logging off early today.
A boyhood encounter with a mythical figure blurs the line between the stories we are told and the reality we live. Enchanting and unsettling in equal measure.
This week's Story Sunday four pieces we think are worth reading in one sitting.
This week’s set moves through memory in different registers: childhood and war at a distance; a domestic world that starts to feel like a trap; the clean, brutal logic of consequence; and a family story where language slips and something darker edges in.
Start anywhere but if you read all four, notice what repeats: heat, fear, tenderness, and the moment a life quietly turns.
Help us keep publishing.
If you value independent writing, please subscribe — it directly supports our ability to publish and and keep Litro free to read.
We begin with A Gulf War by Alex Sheal a memoir vignette where childhood games, distance, and conflict overlap, and the smallest details carry the weight. From there, Pretty China by Elizabeth Cooke pushes the domestic into something darker: quiet menace, sharp detail, and a final reframing that sticks. The Diving Board by Sarp Sozdinler is a clean, escalating story of bravado and consequence — the ritual you swear is harmless, until it isn’t. And Funny Billies by Daniel Jeffreys closes the set with a family story where language starts to slip — tenderness turning unsettling, controlled and quietly devastating.
Yours, Eric Akoto
This Week on Litro
STORY SUNDAY
A Gulf War
By Alex Sheal
Childhood games, a fence line, and the distant hum of real conflict. A memoir vignette where memory does the heavy lifting — and the smallest details carry the weight.
This weekend’s selection circles one idea: place is never passive. A forest that seems to listen. A harvested field that keeps its own quiet ledger. Hills that hold on to who we used to be. And a work of nonfiction that asks us to look again at the intelligence in the living world around us.
It happens to land on the same weekend as the World Cup draw: pundits talk about “groups of death”, but what they are really arguing over are cities, atmospheres, and the stories we choose to belong to. The pieces below sit in that space where landscape, memory, and choice meet.
FEATURE REVIEW
The Light Eaters
Zoe Schlanger’s The Light Eaters asks us to take plant intelligence seriously. This review follows her into laboratories, forests, and speculative questions about perception, attention, and the ethics of how we look at the living world.
In a rural community bound by ritual, a single harvested field carries the weight of fear, debt, and expectation. A restrained gothic that lets the landscape do as much speaking as its characters.
A return to a familiar landscape becomes a reckoning with who we were when we last walked those paths. Quiet, precise, and steeped in the kind of memory only a particular stretch of countryside can hold.
A lone figure steps into a forest that seems to be watching back. A cinematic, slow-burn story about thresholds, instinct, and what happens when a place refuses to stay neutral.
Working on something of your own? Litro is always looking for new voices. Send us your best work — or, if you’d like a deeper read before submitting anywhere, you can request an editor-level report on your story. After checkout, you’ll receive instructions on where to email your manuscript.
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