ASHLEY MANGTANI
Ashley Mangtani is an author of speculative and slipstream fiction. Grounded in clinical psychological tension, his stories examine the mechanics of alienation, transformation, and the limits of survival.
His writing appears or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Litro, Washington Square Review LCC, Boudin, Expat Press, Thieving Magpie, Bull, HAWKEYE, Mobius, Neon Dystopia, Apocalypse Confidential, and others.
FEATURED SHORT FICTION
LITRO
The Late Night Show
A late-night host delivers his final monologue as something older than the Constitution peels the roof off the world. But the studio is emptier than it should be, the audience is quieter and he knows exactly who is waiting in the dark for permission to begin.
Mobius
Stand by for Redeployment
When a routine ambulance call leads paramedic Dan into the bowels of the Barbican, he discovers a city already succumbing to something monstrous. As London collapses above him, Dan must navigate the dark, the infected, and the terrible cost of choosing who to save.
expat press
The Satis House
Part Dickensian ghost story, part tragicomic literary autopsy, The Satis House follows an ageing failed writer who dies moments after finally producing the only sentence that could have saved him.
LITERARY GARAGE
Down the Rabbit Hole
A slipstream reimagining of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Down the Rabbit Hole follows a time-obsessed man who falls into a surreal underworld where distorted Wonderland figures force him to confront the years he sacrificed to work before a final reckoning with death, regret, and the family he neglected.
The Quasar Review
T–00:00:43
T–00:00:43 follows an astronaut aboard Space Shuttle Columbia as routine launch and flight procedures give way to memory, reflection, and the growing realization that something has gone catastrophically wrong.
The McNeese Review
Rakpabon (รักษ์ป่าบอน)
An Indigenous forest woman watches her ancestral home transformed into protected state land, where the people who have cared for the forest for generations are recast as trespassers on their own earth.
Empyrean Magazine
Dinner with the Myrtle
A continuation of Giambattista Basile's 1634 fairy tale The Myrtle, from the Pentamerone. In the original, seven jealous women destroy a girl who lives inside a myrtle plant and are thrown into cesspits as punishment. Here, the myrtle chooses her own justice.
The Thieving Magpie
The Warmth of his breath
A loyal dog searches a Thai island for the man he loves as the sea vanishes and an unimaginable catastrophe unfolds. Told through the eyes of its canine narrator, The Warmth of His Breath is a devastating story of love, instinct, and unwavering devotion in the face of disaster.
THIN SKIN
Pesos
A contemporary literary story about a trans Filipina confronting her estranged father's legacy, exploring identity, family obligation, grief, and the price of love measured in pesos. Set in the Philippines, Pesos examines faith, inheritance, and the painful distance between the family we are born into and the lives we choose to build.
Prosetrics
dust in the seams
Set between the rhythm of a modern city and the pull of an unforgettable past, this story explores ukiyo, impermanence, and the persistence of experiences that never truly leave us.
third wednesday
Forty-Three Labels
Forty-Three Labels is a poignant literary exploration of dementia, capturing the quiet heartbreak of a daughter watching her father's identity slowly rewrite itself. It delves into the raw, emotional realities of caregiving, love, and the fragile fragments of memory we desperately try to preserve.
Mercurius One
Life, Love & Gay Inhibitions In The Noughties
A nostalgic queer coming-of-age reflection on love, identity, and breaking free from early 2000s cultural myths to find self-acceptance and real connection.
Gopnik Press
emergency credit
A villanelle of austerity and quiet sacrifice, tracing the private calculations of a parent trying to keep a household warm while the numbers refuse to add up. Through repetition and accumulating pressure, the poem explores inherited poverty, dignity, and the unseen labour of survival.
FLASH PHANTOMS
mice
In a council flat where every unexplained sound is blamed on mice, a child discovers the scratching in the walls belongs to something that has spent eleven years trying to be remembered. A haunting story about buried truths, forgotten children, and the comfort of believing the lie.
neon dystopia
paper Winter
Paper Winter is an experimental slipstream horror story told through four interlocking forms: screenplay pages, literary prose, script supervisor logs, and production dialogue. Set on the filming of a troubled horror production, it explores the point at which performance becomes reality and asks what artistic institutions are willing to consume in pursuit of authenticity.
want to find out more
Get in Touch
Ashley Mangtani won the 2026 Geek Partnership Society Short Story Award.He is currently completing his debut short story collection, Unhappy Endings.For publishing enquiries, collaborations, or to discuss the work, he welcomes you to get in touch through the contact form or links below.
STORY GAMES
I write short stories, and I write technical documentation.For years, those were separate rooms in the same house. This is what happened when I knocked the wall through.The stories come from Unhappy Endings, a collection about people the culture would rather not look at directly. Addicts, liars, the bereaved, the complicit.Every story ends badly, which is the point and the promise. I am interested in what people do in the ten minutes before the worst moment of their life, and how ordinary those minutes look from the outside.I built these myself, hand-coded, no engine, one file that runs in any browser.FREE TO PLAY BELOW
FULL SERVICE
Three in the morning outside a gas station on Figueroa. He paid to go inside, then couldn't pull out.
HOW TO PLAY
Act I — Tap the ring on the beat. Tap fast when it flares red.Act II — Hold to ease him loose. Let go the moment he panics.Act III — Listen. Then tap to let go.
GROUNDHOG ROYALE
A looping speculative narrative that examines the psychological toll of a battle royale simulation, told from the perspective of an increasingly self-aware avatar.
HOW TO PLAY
Choose — tap an option. Fire or hold fire, help him or leave him.Hold — some actions need a press and hold. Release early and they fail.Wait — sometimes the move is to do nothing at all.
Welome
UNHAPPY ENDINGS
A short story collection, and a record of how it was made.Modern fiction has developed a nervous habit of apologising for its own endings. The bleak story earns a redemptive coda. The unresolved one gets a last-paragraph sunrise. We have trained ourselves to send readers away comforted, and comfort is the mechanism by which a story is forgotten.Unhappy Endings withholds it.Click on the gallery images below to view the "Unhappy Endings" Essays.
THE ARGUMENTNot cruelty, and not the belief that despair is more serious than hope. An ending that settles the account is an ending you can put down. These stories refuse the settlement.Some are tender. Some are funny before they are anything else. What binds them is a decision taken in the final movement, when the pressure to console the reader is at its greatest and the story declines. What you are left holding afterwards is the work.THE ESSAYSNot the mystified account where the piece simply arrived one morning. These are close readings of my own prose with the reasoning left in: the choice made at the level of the clause, the device that failed twice before it held, the line I cut three ways before trusting it small.I read submissions for other people's magazines, which means I spend most of my week inside the gap between an intention and its execution on the page. These essays are an attempt to close that gap in public, on my own work, where the failures are mine to name.THE STORIESEach piece finds its own home first, in journals that have taken a chance on work that does not end where the market prefers.Where a story is published, its essay links straight to it.