Winter Blooms Issue & Blank Canvas Issue
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THE
ART OF SHORT FICTION What
is it? Author
Charles Blackstone tells.
WRITING GREAT SHORT STORIES Elizabeth Kadetsky who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and at Columbia University’s School of Journalism serves up some advice.
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CRAFTING
CHARACTERS THAT JUMP OFF THE PAGE Punching
up your
fiction?
Where there's a tipster, there's a way. Discover Robert Gregory Browne's
secrets to
getting multiple book deals.
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BIOFICTION
INTRODUCED Even as she receives 5 stars
on Amazon for Trine Erotic while editing/publishing
Entelechy: Mind & Culture, Alice Andrews takes time
to chat about the esoteric world of this mind-bending read.
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Here's our winner of TOP PICK!
“Duotrope Digest ”
"...think of Duotrope’s Digest as a matchmaker of sorts.
If you write fiction or poetry, we can help you find appropriate markets
for your work."
--Shannon Wendt, Duotrope creator
flash
Ringworm By Sophie Bachard All day my neighbour Bennett (a redundant Geography teacher) traipsed round our council housing-estate alleyways, trying for the exit. I watched him from my balcony. By nightfall, he'd collapsed, defeated. From floor 8, I can see the whole quadrant. Excellent viewing of a graffiti-garnished concrete maze, in the back of Wandsworth, which we call Ringworm. Up by the alarm at dawn, I rushed to my pigeon-shit splattered balcony, homed in with binoculars to watch our trapped specimen ranting and flapping his filthy-raincoat arms about in the drizzle. He collapsed from exhaustion much earlier than on the previous day, about mid-day. Wednesday the same thing happened. And Thursday ... ... Friday ... On Sunday, I spied him standing in a pestilential dead-end, broken-glass, piss-stained mattress, skulls of slaughtered stray cats, his head down in defeat, spittle on incipient beard. Later in the hall I met up with other jobless poverty-trapped neighbours and we sat on my vertiginous balcony until dusk, drinking and poking fun at him. When he finally collapsed, everybody cheered and hooted, and then trooped back to their flats, promising to come again. Finally, day ten, he stumbled back into the quadrant, looking malnourished and half-insane. Everybody on my floor came out to the hallway and mockingly applauded as he trudged up to his flat. I didn't see Bennett again until about a week later when I met him on the rainy quadrant. He confirmed the failure of his “experiment” to explode the urban myth that it was possible to leave Ringworm. “There is no escape from this stinking council housing estate,” he said. I could have told him that. ...this lament dispatched by carrier pigeon ...
Sophie
Bachard was born and bred
in South London, UK, where she was raised as a feral child
by stray dogs on a council housing estate. After losing the
entire manuscript of her ten million word epic autobiography
at sea, she now writes fiction to stay sane. Her list of recent and forthcoming publication credits (all under my pen-name, Sophie Bachard): Rose&Thorn/ Brilliant Quarterly (Print Issue one)/ Poetic Diversity/ Bewildering Stories/ Sein und Werden (Issue twelve)/ Delivered, anthology of short fiction/Apollo's Lyre/ Mouth full of Bullets/ The Written Word/ and Ballista. A Margaret L. Carter's Top Pick |
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Everyone's a Critic! Where our guest assistant editors choose their top 10's or top 5's or... Read what they say about each one!
Shoe Schuster's TOP PICKS
1. Fake Fire and Rescue by Blake Butler 2. Homecoming by Bill Brocato 3. Sri Lanka by Byron D. Howell
Misty Day's TOP PICKS
Who's
made the cut so far? TOP PICKS
What
kind of work does she like? Do you agree?
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