The story I picked is “The Snowbank” by Shelagh Power-Chopra and the very concept–taken from a life event Shelagh read about evidently–is exquisite: a man finds himself stuck in a snowbank. [Read more]

Recently:
   Checking In With Metazen
   Fictionaut Five: Michael Kimball
   Luna Digest, 3/9

Last March I drank a bottle of whiskey and woke up the next morning with a fiction blog. [Read more]

Recently:
   Fictionaut Five: Michael Kimball
   Luna Digest, 3/9
   Fictionaut Faves, 3/8

It’s always good to keep your agent happy. [Read more]

Recently:
   Luna Digest, 3/9
   Fictionaut Faves, 3/8
   Line Breaks: “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel

This past winter holiday, I got Cami Park a subscription to The Lumberyard for HTMLGIANT’s second annual indie lit secret santa—and I recently stumbled upon her ecstatic write-up of the first issue she received, issue 5. [Read more]

Recently:
   Fictionaut Faves, 3/8
   Line Breaks: “In the

Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel
   Fictionaut Five: Darlin’ Neal

Ms. Manivannan is a master at short story telling, because she knows how much to tell, how much to leave out and when to stop. [Read more]

Recently:
   Line Breaks: “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel
   Fictionaut Five: Darlin’ Neal

I wrote this story, my first, as a workshop assignment in Gordon Lish’s “Tactics of Fiction” class at Columbia in the late ’70s or early ’80s (I have no sense of time). The assignment, the only one we were ever given, was to write our worst secret, the thing we would never live down, the thing that dismantled our sense of ourselves, as he put it. My worst secret was that I felt I had failed my best friend when she was dying. And this is the story I wrote. [Read more]

Recently:
   Fictionaut Five: Darlin’ Neal
   Fictionaut Faves, 3/1
   Tweetable, 2/27

My first mentor would probably be my mother and all that reading and love of the classics. [Read more]

Recently:
   Fictionaut Faves, 3/1
   Tweetable, 2/27

I’ve given a lot of faves, more than eighty, some for friends, but most to writers I didn’t know and was pleasantly surprised by. All of them I stand behind, each of us putting together our own anthologies. And for those who don’t know, “recommended stories” can be sorted for “all-time,” where James Robison’s “Mars,” Kathy Fish’s “Spaceman,” and Pia Earhardt’s “Ambulance” crown the heap. [Read more]

Recently:
   Tweetable, 2/27
   Fictionaut

Five: Nicolle Elizabeth
   Line

Breaks: “Credentials” by John Holman