NewPages.com

In March, I wrote a post about The Review Review – an online publication that publishes articles and reviews about literary magazines. Since then I’ve discovered another source that does the same thing. It’s called NewPages.com. It has a wealth of information on literary journals, and other things. Here’s the site’s description: News, information and [...]

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“The Children’s Grandmother,” Sylvia Townsend Warner

During my lunch break I often take a walk and listen to short stories on my headset. I really like the “Fiction Podcast” on The New Yorker website. According to the recording at the beginning of each broadcast, “Each month, we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine’s archives to read and [...]

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The Review Review

Last week, Lauren Rheaume, director of marketing and outreach at The Review Review, sent me an email letting me know that my story “Black String Bikini” had been mentioned in a review: As another example, many sections of Mark Richardson’s short story, “Black String Bikini” are written as flash-forwards, insights into things that will happen, [...]

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“Miracle Polish,” Steven Millhauser

It had been months since I’d last read a New Yorker short story. My mind had been occupied with thoughts of family, moving, and work. I hadn’t planned to read this week’s story, but after I finished the Malcolm Gladwell’s article on Steve Jobs, I flipped to the fiction section, skimmed the first sentence, and [...]

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The New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue

My latest issue of The New Yorker is a double issue (June 13 & 20, 2011), and it’s a particularly good one. It’s the special Summer Fiction Issue, and there are three separate short stories, and essays by famous writers discussing writing. Two authors I really like – Juhumpa Lahiri and Edward P. Jones – wrote [...]

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Rum, Sodomy, and False Eyelashes, by Scott Phillips

Two years ago Jen Jordan published a short story anthology called Uncage Me. There were 22 separate stories, each written by a different author. All were crime/noir stories, and most rather twisted. The collection was an eye opener for me. I’d been reading a lot of literary fiction, and the contributors to Uncage Me showed [...]

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New Yorker: “Axis”

I finally got around to reading “Axis,” the Alice Munro story from the January 31, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. The story starts by following two young women, Grace and Avie, fifty years ago, as they wait at their university campus gates for a bus that will take them each home. They are “serious [...]

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New Yorker: “The Years of My Birth”

This week’s story in The New Yorker – “The Years of My Birth,” by Louise Erdrich – is very good. It’s about a girl called Tuffy who is born with a congenital deformity. We’re never exactly clear what her deformity is, but we know that her father declines to “use extraordinary means” to save her. [...]

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New Yorker: “Boys Town”

In my last post I talked about Ploughshares and how Jim Shepard edited the most recent issue. I commented that I’d never read anything written by Shepard, and then what arrives in my mailbox this week but The New Yorker with the feature fiction story written by him. Life seems to work that way sometimes. [...]

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Ploughshares and Magical Realism

A couple of years ago I decided to subscribe to one new literary journal a year. I’ve been reading The New Yorker and it’s short stories for a long time now, but I wanted to see what else is out there. In 2009, my publication of choice was One Story. It gets its name because [...]

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