I am not a patient person. People who do slow, meticulous things like needlepoint and whittling amaze and bewilder me. This impatience applies to my reading habits, too: when immersed in a book I love, I can’t stop myself from reading faster and faster, eager to see the whole picture, to wolf the [...]

Most of Leni Zumas’s stories in her exceptional (and stylistically exciting) debut, Farewell Navigator (Open City, 2008), are compact studies of paralysis in the tradition of Beckett and Ioensco. Sherwood Anderson could have been describing Zumas’s characters as they, too, are “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts.” In “Farewell Navigator,” one character envies a group of blind schoolchildren for having teachers “to pull them. Nobody expects them to know where to go.” And in “Leopard Arms”—a story told from the perspective of a gargoyle—a father fears “of doing nothing they’ll remember him for. Not a single footprint—film, book, record, madcap stunt—to prove he was here. Am I actually here? he sometimes mutters into his hand.”

The Shady Side Review is having a postcard contest. They’re seeking the best poetry or prose of 100 words or less. Winners will have their work published on–what else?–postcards. The submission deadline is March 17, and each entry is $1. From the Editors:
What can you get for a dollar these days?

A newspaper (but [...]

Yet another reason to read literary journals: they could help you find your soulmate. One Story has a great story up on its blog about how the magazine brought a couple together:
Outside the Harvard Bookstore we prepared to part, making the non-committal noises of people who are never going to see each other again. [...]

The slush pile: Beginning writers get lost in it. Beginning editors sift through it. The Wall Street Journal points out some of the effects of its disappearance:
As writers try to find an agent—a feat harder than ever to accomplish in the wake of agency consolidations and layoffs—the slush pile has been transferred from [...]

Author of the recently published short story collection Elephants in Our Bedroom, Michael Czyzniejewski grew up in the Chicago suburb of Calumet City, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1995 with a degree in rhetoric, and two years later, he received an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University.

While many publishers and literary magazines are closing their doors, Dzanc has opened theirs to Keyhole Press. As of January 1st, Keyhole will join Absinthe: New European Writing, OV Books, Black Lawrence Press, and Monkeybicycle, as part of the Dzanc collective.
This from the Dzanc press release: “Keyhole has an impressive list of writers including William [...]

I love giving magazine subscriptions as presents: it’s like a new gift every month. If there’s a reader–or a write–on your holiday gift list, how about a subscription to your favorite literary magazine? Most subscriptions run under $40, a bargain for a present that provides a fresh infusion of stories, poems, and essays [...]

McSweeney’s next issue will be packaged in the form of an old-fashioned newspaper. The New York Times’s ArtsBeat reports:
McSweeney’s No. 33 is to be in the form of a daily broadsheet — a big, old-fashioned broadsheet. The pages will measure 22 by 15 inches. (Pages of The New York Times, by comparison, are 22 [...]

Online-only literary mag Wag’s Revue’s third issue, like its previous two, is full of great features (among them charcoal renderings of scenes from Point Break!), but for fiction’s sake, I’ll stick to–fiction. In addition to stories from Daniel Wallace, Louis Wittig, Gerald Barton, and Donald Dewey, I highly recommend Will Litton’s interview with George Saunders. [...]