Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘lit magazines’

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Curl Up with some Good Stories…from Narrative

by Anne Stameshkin

Is SSM really almost over?! Thankfully we can read stories year round, but I still feel the urge (while they’re center stage) to list two recommendations this week. They both come from Narrative magazine, which does require (free) registration. But I promise, these stories are so good, it’s worth filling out a quick form to read them. And Narrative offers a huge, inspiring, and ever-growing archive of fiction from emerging writers to authors as well known as Margaret Atwood and T. C. Boyle; if I weren’t headed to a wedding this afternoon, I might curl up with this site all […]


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Journal of the Week: American Short Fiction

by Michael Rudin

In the end, I don’t have many literary magazines because I give most away. Leaving them at coffee shops and airports, with friends and family, I pay my journals forward, margin notes and all. But I kept American Short Fiction Volume 13, Issue 47. My experience with #47 began with its second-to-last-story—a sin the editors must forgive me, for I had not yet learned of the careful strategy with which they assemble every issue’s order. I started there because the story, “Walker, Wallace, Warren” had been written by Matt Bell, and his was the first name I recognized in the […]


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Where I've Been Reading (Online): a guest post by Matt Bell

by Celeste Ng

Editor’s note: As part of our continuing celebration of Short Story Month, we’re delighted to present a guest post by Matt Bell, editor at Dzanc Books and of the literary magazine The Collagist. There’s so much good fiction online that writing about only a few of the magazines out there seems an incredibly unfair task: During my reading for the Best of the Web anthology that we publish at Dzanc, I’ve read thousands of pieces from hundreds of magazines, and there are probably dozens of magazines you should be reading as often as humanly possible. To make my task in […]


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Five Ways to Celebrate Short Stories

by Erika Dreifus

Here at FWR, we’re certainly doing our collective best to honor the art and craft of the short story this month. But there are lots of ways that each fiction writer can celebrate short stories individually. Here are five possibilities: Participate in #StorySunday: Reminded each Sunday by @TaniaHershman, short-story fans are encouraged to share a link via Twitter to someone else’s short story using the hashtag #StorySunday. Quick. Painless. Free. Click here to see the latest #StorySunday tweets. Listen to Selected Shorts: As its brand-new website explains, Selected Shorts “is a weekly public radio show broadcast on over 130 stations […]


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Journal of the Week: BOMB

by Michael Rudin

In May of 1981, a bomb went off. At the time, a tribe of Tribeca artists thought their newly minted BOMB magazine would do just that: bomb. Tank. Fail miserably. They had the courage to print an ambitious first run of 1,000 issues but expected to sell just a fraction of them. Reader reaction was, to their surprise, explosive. BOMB’s hope for a forum in which artists could speak about their work in the same ways they spoke about it amongst themselves wasn’t just well received, it was rallied behind. For the first time, a journal pinned artists together regardless […]


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Last chance: BOMB's 2011 Fiction Contest—EXTENDED to April 25!

by Celeste Ng

Just a reminder: the deadline for BOMB Magazine‘s fifth Fiction Contest is tomorrow, April 16 deadline extended to April 25!. This year’s judge is Rivka Galchen, author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances. The winner will receive $500 and publication in First Proof, BOMB’s literary supplement. Full content details and submission instructions are here. And to learn more about the journal, check out BOMB’s website, back issues, and blog.


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Journal of the Week: Gulf Coast

by Michael Rudin

To the uninitiated, a group to which I belong and will forever remain, the literary journal circuit can be a daunting index of titles backed by an even more daunting list of founding universities, non-profits, and artistic heroes—a collage of mastheads and mission statements boasting achievements and honors that, after a while, blend into one giant ecosystem: The lit journal. Unless you subscribe to and read each one—yes, a brave few have tried—you’ll find yourself relying on friends and fellow readers, anthologies, and posts like these to learn about a particular journal’s taste and aesthetics, its history and goals for […]


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Thursday Morning Candy: DailyLit

by Celeste Ng

Welcome to Thursday Morning Candy, where we highlight some of our favorite online journals and writer resources. This week’s treat from our blogroll: DailyLit, which sends you literature in bite-sized installments via RSS or email—for free! Says the site’s FAQ: Why read books by email? Because if you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don’t find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read. You can choose from nearly a thousand titles, and DailyLit breaks the book or story […]


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Journal of the Week: One Story

by Michael Rudin

Since launching in September, Fiction Writers Review’s “Book of the Week” promotion has shipped seventy-nine books to readers located in twenty-four states and three countries. Whether we’re giving away debut novels or acclaimed collections, the enthusiasm on Facebook has less to do with free, signed first editions than what these books do and how their authors accomplish it. It’s exactly this enthusiasm that now allows us to expand the spotlight from books deserving your attention to literary journals deserving your attention. Starting this week, Fiction Writers Review will begin profiling publications we admire right here on the blog in a […]


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Tick, tick, tick… BOMB Magazine's 2011 Fiction Contest now open

by Celeste Ng

BOMB Magazine is now accepting submissions for its fifth Fiction Contest. This year’s judge is Rivka Galchen, author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances. The winner will receive $500 and publication in First Proof, BOMB’s literary supplement. The contest deadline is April 16, 2011. Don’t know BOMB? We’re pleased to introduce you. A quarterly lit mag, BOMB Magazine was founded in 1981 and features interviews, original writing, and reviews. Says the journal’s website: BOMB was named after Wyndham Lewis’s Blast, a 1917 journal edited by artists and writers. Following in this tradition, BOMB’s editors are also all practitioners of the arts. […]




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