John Gu

John Gu is a storyteller, critic, and journalist. His writing has appeared in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, The Chicago Review of Books, and Hobart.

Selected publications

Book Reviews

Book Review of The Applicant, in Hobart, August 2023
“An Inverse Mirroring of the Frame in Mouth to Mouth”, in The Chicago Review of Books, January 2022
Book review of Last Summer in the City, in The Massachusetts Review online, October 2021
“A Long-Awaited Return in Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost”, in The Chicago Review of Books, August 2021

Narrative Nonfiction

"The Train from Amsterdam", in The Reading Room, June 2024
"Sara", in The Reading Room, June 2024
"Gu Père", in Litbreak Magazine, September 2023
“Gone”, Five on the Fifth, Volume 5 Issue 12, October 2020

Fiction

"In the East", in Your Impossible Voice, November 2023
“A Contested Island”, in Eclectica Magazine, Volume 27 Issue 1, January 2023
“The High Castle”, in The Missouri Review, April 2022
“Some Reflections Occasioned By the Publication of the Revised Edition of the Practical Chinese Reader”, The Southern Review, Issue 251, Autumn 2020

Ranked list of the best literary magazines

My list of the best literary magazines to submit short stories to can be found here.

Other stuff

My interview with the Southern Review from 2020.
In 2022, I applied to a few creative writing MFA programs and was accepted to four of them. This is the fiction writing sample that I submitted. And here's the personal statement that I wrote.