Introduction

What’s the relationship between fiction and truth? Any piece of writing is both a fabrication and “based on a true story” (the story behind its author’s decision to write it, for example). Nowhere is this more manifest than in the short story genre, whose very definition can be bent in various ways. It shows that truth is rarely absolute and, moreover, that no two readers understand the same word in the same way. These stories were chosen for the spectrum of interpretations they offer: one that spans the entire space of meaning, from false to true.