Heads up! Fantasy Magazine is looking for submissions for their special issue, “People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy.” Per the guidelines: “We’re looking for original, unpublished fantasy stories of up to 7500 words written by People of Colo(u)r. The stories can be set in this world with fantastical elements or they can take place in another world entirely. Please avoid timeworn cliches like the White Savior, the Magical Negro, and the Woman Who Is Only A Sex Object.”
POC Destroy Fantasy
Dovlatov in PEN
It appears that our own Sonya Chung’s consideration of underappreciated Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov played a role in getting one of his stories published in a forthcoming issue of PEN America.
●
●
My Backward People
“Our literary culture has distended and warped by focusing so much power in a singular place, by crowding the gatekeepers into a small ditch of commerce. A review in the Times trumps everything else. You can’t tell me that this doesn’t affect what is, finally, bound into books, marketed, and sold. Which designates what can be said and how one says it. Why do we cede American letters to a handful of corporations that exist on a single concrete patch?” This piece by Matthew Neill Null at The Literary Hub raises a lot of extremely important questions about what gets published and why.
●
●
Everything I Say
Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt by Kristin Hersh is a downright mesmerizing elegy to the eclectic singer-songwriter. Part idiot-savant, part deliberate curmudgeon , Vic Chesnutt (who Rolling Stone has called one of the greatest songwriters of all time) was notoriously difficult to spend a lot of time around. Hersh stopped by Electric Literature for an interview about the book and about losing her dear friend Vic. Bonus: for anyone unfamiliar with Chesnutt’s work, this video will get you close.
●
●
Auditing The Pale King
Two writers dive deep into David Foster Wallace’s posthumous Pulitzer finalist novel, The Pale King. Seth Colter Walls takes a look at the tax classes the author took before he began writing, and Eliot Caroom checks the facts laid out in Wallace’s portrayal of the IRS. (Related: the opening lines of The Pale King, and a previously unpublished scene as well.)
●
●