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Black Sun Lit is open for submissions year-round, will read only unpublished manuscripts, takes into consideration unsolicited material and accepts multiple submissions in the limit of two pieces of prose, five poems/pieces of verse and two pieces of non-fiction. We accept simultaneous submissions in the good faith that the writer notifies us when his or her work has been accepted elsewhere. Larger manuscripts, such as full-length novels, collections of short stories, books of verse, etc., will also be considered.

Black Sun Lit does not have a limit or minimum in regards to length; however, shorter work will be considered for Vestiges, our print journal, or online publication through our website. We are also open to works of drama and enjoy debate on any artistic endeavor as it relates to our mission statement. Please allow up to three to five months for a response.

Please also be advised that we require every writer to submit a brief cover letter, which may include:
– Influences
– Genesis of the work
– Technical details
– Contact information
– Author biography (optional)
– Where previous work has appeared (optional)
– Forthcoming work to be published (optional)

To submit, please visit our Submittable page.

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Luminis Books is an independent publisher of 'Meaningful Fiction.' We are seeking submissions of thought-provoking adult literary fiction, new adult, young adult and middle grade fiction that explores the intricacies of human relationships. We look for beautifully crafted prose above all—writing that is compelling and stories that are thought-provoking. 

For consideration, please submit a synopsis telling us about your book including the beginning, middle and end. We want to know exactly what the book is about. Also include a 10-page sample of the manuscript. We only accept online submissions. 

Email your submission to:

editorATluminisbooksDOTcom (Change AT to @ and DOT to . ) 

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For Strange Horizons, I reviewed Glen Hirshberg's Motherless Child.

Motherless Child is a vampire novel that isn't much interested in vampires. Instead, as its title suggests, more than anything else it is a novel about motherhood. Most of the main characters are mothers, the primary themes are ones of parenthood and responsibility, and the basic storyline sends vampirized mothers running away from their children and then fighting against the urge to return, fearing that they will no longer see their kids as offspring but as prey.

First published by Earthling Publications in 2012, Motherless Child has now been reprinted by Tor. Glen Hirshberg has won a number of awards for his horror short stories (collected in The Two Sams [2003], American Morons [2006], and The Janus Tree [2012]), and Tor may see Motherless Child as a breakout book for him, one that will bring a wider audience for his fiction. It clearly displays some of the hallmarks of a tale that could be embraced by a wide audience, certainly more than his often subtle, enigmatic short stories do. Whether this is to its benefit as a novel depends entirely on what you want your novels to do, both in the prose itself and in the story that prose tells.

Continue reading at Strange Horizons.

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Please visit our website for additional information.

Guidelines for the Catholic novel (1st  Place $5K): 
--50,000 words or more 
--It captures the readers' imaginations. 
--It has a distinct beginning, middle, and end. 
--It has well-formed characters. 
--Its dialogue is authentic—and the dialogue furthers the plot (rather than being dialogue merely for speaking's sake). 
--It is moral fiction (but is not "preachy"�definitely no homiletics) that point to sustaining values.
--The story represents Catholicism in more than a limited sense (e.g., characters that simply pray or say the Rosary). Instead, it shows Catholicism in the broad sense of John Paul II and Flannery O'Connor. 
--Catholic meaning—that is, small instances of the theme(s) being explored, sprinkled throughout the story, culminating in a Catholic theme that somehow presents a Catholic message or truth that we (and maybe the protagonist) can discover or realize more fully or in a new way.
--It has "closure" of some kind—in all the ways the acclaimed John Gardner states.

For more information, please see the Tuscany Press website, the Writers Resources tab on the menu bar: Required Reading for Writers of Catholic Fiction. We strongly recommend you read Pope John Paul II's Letter to Artists and the recommended books.

Note: All submitted manuscripts, not just the prize-winner, are considered for a publishing contract.

 Guidelines for the YA Novel (1st Place $3K): 
--50,000 words or more.
--The protagonist/narrator must be young (between the ages of 12 and 17).
--Characters must be well drawn and believable. The actions and dialogue should be appropriate for the ages of the characters.
--The story must contain a Catholic perspective. Our young adult fiction must have characters or heroes that support and exemplify a Catholic worldview. (See our "novel guidelines" for an explanation of what makes Catholic fiction.) 
--The characters may not start out with a Catholic perspective, but should end with a Catholic perspective. Also, not all characters will have a Catholic perspective. Good fiction contains conflict. Young adults understand that not everyone or every action is morally good. 
--Please note that good Catholic young adult fiction might never mention Christ, the Church, or the faith. Instead, Tuscany Press YA fiction is infused with grace and a morality consistent (through characters and their actions) with Catholic teaching. 
--Tuscany Press YA fiction must be good writing for a YA audience. 
--Young adult fiction is not an excuse for poor writing. Teens don't appreciate (or tolerate) being talked down to. Don't shy away from or sanitize real life. The story must be entertaining. The story must capture readers' imaginations, engage their interest immediately and be well paced throughout the book and chapters.

Guidelines for the Short Story (1st Place $1K): 
--Greater than 1,000 words; less than 9,000 words.
--Distinct beginning, middle, and end. "Set-up", the first two paragraphs, must have tension/conflict to drive the reader forward. 
--Protagonist has development or growth in character.
--It is moral fiction (not preachy or didactic) that points to sustaining values.
--The short story represents Catholicism in the broad sense of John Paul II and Flannery O'Connor, not a limited sense (e.g., characters that simply pray or say the Rosary).
--The story's central character or protagonist and/or reader has an epiphany at the story's end.
--The story ends on Christian hope. It captures the reader's imagination.
--All submissions considered for a publishing contract, not just winners. Multiple submissions OK. Additional runner-up prizes in all categories.

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I reviewed Mary Rickert's novel The Memory Garden for the Los Angeles Review of Books.I loved the book, but it was a difficult review to write because it's just about impossible to say anything about this novel without ruining a significant effect of the last quarter of it. I'm not a fan of spoiler warnings, and generally think such things give way too much emphasis to plot, but in this case I think it is a book that needs some sort of warning before you read anything about it, because the effect of the last quarter is just so powerful and so much more than merely about the plot. So I said that in the review. Which in and of itself is almost saying too much.

Here's a better review of The Memory Garden: Go read this book!

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Hogarth Press first edition, cover by Vanessa Bell

Published in 1937, The Years was the last of her novels that Virginia Woolf lived to see released. Coming more than five years after the release of the poetic and, to many people, opaquely experimental The Waves, The Years seemed like the work of a totally different writer — it looked like a family novel, something along the lines of Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, the sort of book a younger Woolf had scorned.  

The Years became a bestseller in both the UK and the US, and garnered some good reviews — in the New York Times, Peter Monro Jack declared it "Virginia Woolf's Richest Novel". Its fame quickly faded, however. After Woolf's death, her husband Leonard claimed he didn't think it was among her best work, though he'd been afraid, he said, to tell her that, given how long she had worked on it and how hard that work had been for her. As Woolf's reputation increased in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly among feminist academics, The Years tended to get shuffled aside in favor of the other novels and essays. Despite some advocacy from scholars and an extraordinary edition as part of the Cambridge Woolf, The Years remains relatively neglected. This is unfortunate, as it is a magnificent book.

12 April 1937, photo by Man Ray

Some of the best scholarship on The Years occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when scholars began looking at the drafts of the novel. The progress of Woolf's writing of The Years was of interest not just because it took her so long and so much effort, but because her original conception for the book was much more obviously experimental than the final version proved to be. She had conceived it as what she called an "essay-novel" titled The Pargiters (the name of the central family in the book) where essayistic chapters would alternate with novelistic chapters. At one point, she planned on the book covering the years 1880 to 2032 — yes, for a moment, Virginia Woolf planned to write a science fiction novel. But she found the structure she had planned unwieldy, and never wrote beyond the 1880 years in The Pargiters. Instead, she reconceived the book as a novel that would proceed from 1880 to a final section titled "Present Day" (early 1930s), and incorporated much of the research she had done for the essayistic sections into her book Three Guineas.

One result of the research into the early drafts of The Pargiters/The Years — and particularly the publication of The Pargiters (edited by Mitchell Leaska) in 1977 and Virginia Woolf's The Years: The Evolution of a Novel by Grace Radin in 1981 — was a growing perception of The Years as a failed novel, a failed experiment. Both Leaska and Radin seem saddened by Woolf's failure to realize her original plan for a book that alternates between essayistic and novelistic chapters, and they judge the published version of The Years to be incoherent.

But The Years is far from incoherent and far from a failure. I've spent much of the last few months researching and drafting an academic article about the book (which some of the following is part of), and the more time I spent with The Years, the more I marvelled at it.

I first encountered The Years when I took an undergraduate seminar in Woolf in the late 1990s. We didn't spend much time on the book. Nonetheless, I remember liking it, perhaps for similar reasons as some readers in the 1930s: it felt like a nice break after the challenge of The Waves. I thus always had a fondness for it, but didn't return to it until a few years ago, when Samuel Delany said somewhere that he was extraordinarily impressed by it. I returned to it then, and really fell in love with it, but also knew I needed to spend significantly more time to delve into its complexities. Thanks to a seminar this term on British Modernisms, I was able to do so.

The perception of The Years as a failure is tremendously inaccurate. The book is, indeed, a failure of Woolf's original plan, but Woolf's original plan was too schematic and awkward, as she quickly discovered. It's not that she then gave up and wrote a traditional family novel, but that she found a way to create a book that would take the form of a traditional novel while achieving most of her original goals. The Years only looks like a traditional novel — once you slide below its surface, it proves to be nearly as radically experimental as The Waves.

The challenge is to see The Years not as a novel in the traditional sense (much less a family novel) but as a text that uses our assumptions about the novel form to highlight and reconfigure our knowledge and desires. In a way, the text wants us to misperceive it as a traditional novel, but then to recognize — in an almost Brechtian way — that we must shift our perception, and that this shift is, in fact, not merely aesthetic but also ethical.

At the time of writing The Years, Woolf was deeply concerned with fascism: the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, as well as the presence of fascist groups and sentiments in Britain. Leonard was Jewish, and together they traveled through Germany and Italy in the spring of 1935, seeing the fascist states first-hand, a "letter of protection" from Prince Bismark at the London Embassy in Leonard's pocket. (It didn't end up needing to be used, even as they passed through a vehemently anti-Semitic crowd waiting for the arrival of Hermann Göring. The Germans were won over by the pet marmoset Leonard often kept on his shoulder — something that, apparently, they figured no Jew would do.) Virginia's perception of Leonard's Jewishness, and of Judaism in general, has been the topic of much writing and controversy, more than I can get into here. (Julia Briggs thoughtfully considered the question of Woolf's use of Jewish stereotypes, and Lara Trubowitz has recently provided some fascinating context to Woolf's relationship to and representations of Jewishness. Helen Carr gives a good overview of discussions of Woolf, imperialism, and racism in her chapter of the Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, "Virginia Woolf, Empire, and Race".)

But Woolf wasn't only concerned with fascism as fascism. Three Guineas makes utterly clear that to Woolf, fascism and patriarchy were linked. The challenge for Woolf was to find a kind of unity or harmony, something she often referred to throughout her writings from an early age — but not a fascist unity.

In September 1908, as she traveled in Italy and worked on the manuscript of Melymbrosia (which, revised, would become her first published novel, The Voyage Out), the 26-year-old Virginia Stephen wrote in her diary, contrasting her writing with the art of Italian painters:

I achieve a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the minds [sic] passage through the world; & achieve in the end, some kind of whole made of shivering fragments; to me this seems the natural process; the flight of the mind.

Though she had yet to publish her first novel, a central element of Woolf’s aesthetic sense had already formed. Up through The Waves, this credo served her well, but it seems that by the time she began imagining The Pargiters, she desired something more than tracing the mind’s passage through the world — or, rather, she desired to emphasize the world in a way she had not done since Night and Day (when she was not yet as practiced and skilled at tracing the mind’s passages). As so many of her books (fiction and nonfiction) are, The Years is “some kind of whole made of shivering fragments”.

What Woolf discovered in the 1930s, though, was that the aesthetic and psychological unities she had explored earlier could be developed into a more social, political, and historical unity that was not fundamentally fascist.

U.S. first edition

The Years presents ideas of unity in a variety of ways. Characters yearn for forms of unity, and the text itself unifies through its narrative voices. In The Years, the characters of Peggy and Eleanor — who approach the world in quite different ways — both yearn for a unity that will bring freedom and peace, but both fail to be able to express this desire coherently in words. Peggy tries to share her vision of “a state of being, in which there was real laughter, real happiness, and this fractured world was whole; whole and free”, but “she had broken off only a little fragment of what she meant to say”. Eleanor is the character who returns most often to ideas of wholeness, but words always fail her: “…it was impossible to find one word for the whole”. Again and again, the text demonstrates that the desired wholeness cannot be achieved only through words or only through an elite view — it requires a perspective that can see a system, a distance that delineates the movement of groups.

Each chapter of The Years begins with a kind of prelude, one that shows the world from a distance. It's useful, I think, to see the prelude narrator as a separate voice from the narrator of the main text. The prelude narrator shows that distanced perspective is key to achieving the desired unity: it brings time, space, and event together in a way that doesn’t let any one element dominate. To be more than just a distant, frozen image, though, other elements are necessary, and that's where the novel form's particular ability to represent both a multitude of consciousnesses and a multitude of material details proves useful for Woolf's purposes.

The details of people, places, and things contribute to traditional verisimilitude, but their excess is not the excess of Barthes's reality effect; instead, the details are not excessive enough. This is what causes many readers' frustration with the book — what, they wonder, is the purpose of all these random details?

The details, though, are not at all random, but are, instead, part of a very complex system, a careful pattern built from repetitions and echoes. (Critics such as Alice Van Buren Kelley, Michael Rosenthal, and Julia Briggs have delineated the pattern of echoes and repetitions that produce the book’s meanings, even if, as with Briggs, they find the results “ultimately less consistent than earlier novels”.) On one level, the details provide us information about the characters and their place within the social and material setting. But the characters and setting work in a more fluid, less individual way than they do in traditional novels. (Indeed, some readers' major complaint about the book is that it's difficult to keep the characters straight, since they flit in and out of the text. This is true, but also, I think, a desired and important effect.) The characters and setting are united in memory, both the characters' memories and the readers'. The material world melds into the personal, and vice versa.

On another level, all the details highlight the contrivance of narrative, a contrivance the characters themselves frequently run up against. During a dinner party, for instance, Martin tries to be friendly and to share stories of his life with the young woman he has been made to sit beside, but “what little piece of his vast experience could he break off and give to her, he wondered?”. Novels are too clean in their causalities and inferences, as North thinks when regarding his cousin: “She left the room without looking in the glass. From which we deduce the fact, he said to himself, as if he were writing a novel, that Miss Sara Pargiter has never attracted the love of a man.” Novels, though, provide false certainty: “Or had she? He did not know. These little snapshot pictures of people left much to be desired, these snapshot pictures that one made, like a fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here’s the nose, here’s the brow”. Then North struggles to reconcile the brute facts of Sara with her personality: “The actual words he supposed — the actual words floated together and formed a sentence in his mind — meant that she was poor; that she must earn her living, but the excitement with which she had spoken, due to wine perhaps, had created yet another person; another semblance, which one must solidify into one whole”.

These are, Woolf shows us, failed strategies, failed epistemologies. Vast experience cannot be captured by stories: it always exceeds them, and the excess pushes the honest storyteller toward silence. In a world of fascism, though, silence can too easily become consent or complicity (normalizing discourses don’t mind silence). There is an energy to people, an unpredictable excitement, that exceeds sentences and yet must be accounted for.

Yet Woolf is not Samuel Beckett. Failure and silence are present, but they are not the end point. We must remember the prelude narrator. Without that narrative voice, it would be more difficult to make sense or meaning of the many scattered moments that make up The Years. The prelude narrator does not simply stand (or hover) at a distance, looking down on the unindividualized people below, but rather has the freedom to dart from perspective to perspective, fact to fact, moment to moment — and even genre to genre. While traditional novelistic form totalizes, absorbing into it all other genres and forms,  The Years allows the pieces autonomy within the whole. Its pieces have pieces, its whole is never whole.

We return to the sky at the end of the novel, when the prelude narrator becomes the epilogue narrator: “The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace”. By now, the narrative has taught us some of what is in the houses, and so the word “houses” possesses an extraordinary resonance, as we have observed life and conversation in houses of many sorts across the city and across the years. There is no simple answer to any of the questions the novel raises, any of the possibilities it explores. The houses possess memories of nightmares and dreams. The oppressive power of their walls is undeniable. It is, perhaps, not the houses that we should look to, but the sky, for the possibility of peace resides there, in simple beauty. The novel seems to understand, as Virginia Woolf certainly understood, that that sky might quickly become clouded, its possibilities wiped out by Stukas, bombs, and fire.

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Continuing on from yesterday's post about Amit Chaudhuri's A Strange and Sublime Address (a novella included in the collection Freedom Song), here's a bit more academic writing about the book. This time, my goal is to undermine, or at least question, the common opposition of Chaudhuri's "realism" to Salman Rushdie's "magical realism". The two writers have frequently been set against each other as polar opposites, but my argument here is that they have far more in common than might be obvious at first...

In his 2009 essay “Cosmopolitanism’s Alien Face”, Amit Chaudhuri tells of a conversation he had with the Bengali poet Utpal Kumar Basu:

We were discussing, in passing, the nature of the achievement of Subimal Misra, one of the short-story writing avant-garde in 1960s Bengal. ‘He set aside the conventional Western short story with its idea of time; he was more true to our Indian sensibilities; he set aside narrative’, said Basu. ‘That’s interesting’, I observed. ‘You know, of course, that, in the last twenty years or so, it is we Indians and postcolonials who are supposed to be the storytellers, emerging as we do from our oral traditions and our millennial fairy tales’. ‘Our fairy tales are very different from theirs’, said Basu, unmoved. ‘We don’t start with, “Once upon a time”.’ (91-92)

Chaudhury goes on to explore the implications of this statement, and of the desire to solidify an idea of pure cultural identity (“Our fairy tales … We don’t start with…”) against ideas of modernism and cosmopolitanism, but here I would like to take the statements in the above paragraph more on their surface and to explore the effect of the stated and implied Once upon a time…
   
Salman Rushdie’s Shame does not begin with exactly those words, but the sense of a fairy tale beginning is strong: “In the remote border town of Q., which when seen from the air resembles nothing so much as an ill-proportioned dumb-bell, there once lived three lovely, and loving, sisters.” The narrator quickly assumes the role of storyteller: “…the three sisters, I should state without further delay, bore the family name of Shakil…” (3), the narrative voice here asserting, for the first of many times in Shame, the kind of presence that most European novels of the 19th century sought to vanquish in the name of realism.

The idea of realism led to third-person narratives unburdened by the presence of a narrator, and the success of that style has created a sense that storytelling was a more primitive tradition, a tradition that the 19th Century European novel first refined and then progressed beyond. The realist European novel is inextricable from a particular idea of European progress, and the aesthetic is strongly located within a specific, and quite narrow, time and place. Storytelling may be universal, written narrative may have a long and multicultural history, but the realistic novel is a particular technology.

The first sentences of Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address draw from that technology: “He saw the lane. Small houses, unlovely and unremarkable, stood face to face with each other.” The narration is submerged within the perception of the character, and in these first lines we don’t even know the character’s name — the character is nothing but a gendered pronoun, and the normal, sense-making syntax of noun followed by pronoun is reversed (there is no antecedent). The first name we encounter is not that of the viewpoint character, but rather what the viewpoint character sees: “Chhotomama’s house had a pomelo tree in its tiny courtyard and madhavi creepers by its windows.” Here, the unnamed viewpoint character possesses knowledge that is not allowed to readers: Who is Chhotomama? How do we know it’s Chhotomama’s house? We begin in medias res, but not so much in the middle of events as in the middle of perceptions. Perceptions are foregrounded, and we, the outside observer, build our knowledge from them. Only once we have perceived can we be provided with even some of the necessary information for ordinary meaning to be possible, but the importance of that information is de-emphasized: our viewpoint character’s name doesn’t appear until a parenthetical remark in the final sentence of the first paragraph: “A window opened above (it was so silent for a second that Sandeep could hear someone unlocking it) and Babla’s face appeared behind the mullions” (7). The technology of the realistic novel doesn’t require this technique; the technique emphasizes a decisive rejection of the storytelling tradition. Not only is there no narrating “I” situating the reader in relationship to the tale, but there is a determined lack of information about the character.

The first paragraph of A Strange and Sublime Address thus forces readers to make connections and draw conclusions, to connect that first “He” to “Sandeep”, while also showing us what may matter in the novel and what may not. Where Shame emphasizes storytelling, A Strange and Sublime Address emphasizes perception. The apparently radical differences between the two books — and the ostensibly opposite aesthetic approaches of Rushdie and Chaudhuri — diminish if we look at the novels’ types of storytelling and thus analyze both texts as metafictions that take different paths to similar conclusions about history, place, and representation.

Saikat Majumdar applies Walter Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur to Chaudhuri, but here we might draw on some other of Benjamin’s ideas, these from the 1936 essay “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”, particularly section XVI, in which Benjamin writes of fairy tales:

The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest. … The liberating magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this complicity only occasionally — that is, when he is happy; but the child first meets it in fairy tales, and it makes him happy. (157)

This view of the fairy tale as a tool for liberation from myth is one that aligns well with Shame, but it’s harder to locate the engines of “Once upon a time…” within A Strange and Sublime Address, despite that novel mostly being presented through the point of view of a child. To find the fairy tale, we must locate the pedagogical imperative of the text. Benjamin concludes: “…the storyteller joins the ranks of the teachers and sages. He has counsel — not for a few situations, as the proverb does, but for many, like the sage. … The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself” (162). Chaudhuri clearly wants to teach readers something about perception, materiality, and history, and his writing is determinedly anti-mythic. Further, the novel is strongly concerned with how stories represent the world, and how language and perception intertwine in narrative, which is why I call it a metafiction. To limn the liberatory magic of A Strange and Sublime Address, though, we should begin with the more obvious metafiction of Shame.

Though Chapter 1 of Shame is filled with asides from the narrator, it is Chapter 2 that truly breaks out of the established narrative, bringing us into a more recognizable reality with the first sentence: “A few weeks after Russian troops entered Afghanistan, I returned home, to visit my parents and sisters and to show off my firstborn son” (19). The narrative voice here is more straightforward and unified, and the details fit Rushdie’s known biography to such an extent that some readers and critics have confidently asserted that the voice is Rushdie. It is problematic to associate the writer with a textual effect in any book, and especially so in a book as wild, imaginative, and concerned with questions of history, identity, and representation as Shame, so here I will simply call this Voice 2, as opposed to the narrator of the more obviously fantastical sections, Voice 1.

Voice 2 is intimately related to Voice 1, however, and may logically be seen as the creator of Voice 1 (“I tell myself this will be a novel of leavetaking…” [22]). Voice 2 is an explainer and a ruminator, and the Voice 2 sections read like personal essays. But the genre (or mode) of the novel is remarkable in its ability to contain and recontextualize other genres (and/or modes) — the personal essay becomes embedded within the novel, and so its identity as an essay can no longer be trusted, because it is being put to use for novelistic purposes. It is thus rendered impure, and in a novel about impurities of identity and the translation of being and substance. “I, too, am a translated man,” Voice 2 says. “I have been borne across” (23), and this translation, this bearing across, is as true for the voice’s genre as for the character evoked by that voice.

The problem for Voice 2 is that the storytelling force of Voice 1 comes from a different age and place, and translating the form and tendencies of old aesthetics is, like all translation, a process that deforms and reforms the original, skewing the results. Even if the original could be moved perfectly into a new time and place, the result would still get skewed, as Borges proposed with Pierre Menard’s Quixote. Voice 2 must break in because Voice 1 is inevitably doomed to fail — or, if not fail exactly, to sputter unforseen effects all over the page. Voice 2 is forced to acknowledge this late in the novel:

I had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to have taken over; they marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand the inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all manner of sinuous complexities, to see my “male” plot refracted, so to speak, through the prisms of its reverses and “female” side. It occurs to me that the women knew precisely what they were up to — that their stories explain, and even subsume, the men’s. (180-181)

Voice 2 here blames the failures and fragmenting of Voice 1 (or, perhaps, Voice 1-1.∞, as the possible voices within Voice 1 are infinite) on “the women”, thus giving the characters an autonomy that might be better ascribed to aesthetic and ideological forces rather than to a plane of reality in which the characters are real people and not textual figures. (Voice 2 is a textual effect that ascribes blame to other textual effects for the shape of the narrative.) We might more productively say that the phantasmagoria is overtaken by what resists fantasy — the factitious overcome by the factual.

This would seem to be a triumph of realism over fantasy, but that would only be true if the fantasy were wiped out, and it is not. The majority of Shame remains phantasmagoric, but differently so, and differently in multiple ways. The reader cannot erase the knowledge of Voice 2 within Voice 1, and so, from Chapter 2 on, we read the phantasmagoria differently than we might were Voice 2 never introduced. Were the book only to include Chapter 1, we could assume a unity to Voice 1 as, simply, the narrator. The introduction of Voice 2 in Chapter 2 offers the reader another hypothesis: Voice 1 is really Voice 2, the controlling power from our own recognizable reality. Passages such as the one quoted above, though, demonstrate that Voice 1 is not entirely controlled by Voice 2, and that, rather than a single narrator, it should be perceived as an assemblage of narrators. As a textual function, then, Voice 1 is plural (though its plurality is often indeterminate) and Voice 2 is singular.

The passage I quoted above begins with the crucial phrase that is missing from the first paragraph of the novel: “Once upon a time there were two families, their destinies inseparable even by death” (180). That could have been the first sentence of the book, but instead Voice 1 fumbled around a bit more. By here, Once upon a time can begin the section, but the section it begins is one about liberation. We have located the liberatory magic. Once upon a time there were “destinies inseparable even by death”, but the past of this tale may not be — or may not have to be — the present of this novel.

We have here located what Fredric Jameson has recently called “the antinomies of realism”.  Jameson’s dialectical approach sets the récit against the roman, the tale against the novel, with the récit as, philosophically, a narrative form based on ideas of destiny and fate (crucially linked to the past) and the roman as a work that creates a narrative and existential present through the use of scenes. The récit relies on telling, while the roman subsumes telling within an overall strategy of showing. (Hence the common 20th Century command to aspiring writers of narrative: “Show, don’t tell!”) The difference between the two forms is, Jameson says, important “not as récit versus roman, nor even telling versus showing; but rather destiny versus the eternal present” (26). In Shame, Voice 1 is the voice of the récit (the [story]teller), Voice 2 is the voice of the roman, with the informational moments of telling subsumed within specific scenes, most dominantly the scene of writing. While the majority of the novel is written within a storytelling mode, the presence of Voice 2 infects that mode and inflects our reading, making Voice 1 into instances of what Voice 2 seeks to show.

Yet Voice 2’s will is a construction, and “what Voice 2 seeks” is itself an instance of “showing” within the text as a whole. The novel is the story of Voice 2 constructing and wrestling with Voice 1.

Jameson points out implications to his antinomies that may be useful as we return to Chaudhuri. In a discussion of the way that an aesthetic that constructs everyday existence as exterior/outside and an aesthetic that constructs existence as interior both avoid and resist genres that impose a prototypical destiny onto lived material, Jameson writes:

It is precisely against just such a reification of destinies that the realist narrative apparatus is aimed, which reaffirms the singularity of the episodes to the point at which they can no longer fit into the narrative convention. That this is also a clash of aesthetic ideologies is made clear by the way in which older conceptions of destiny or fate are challenged by newer appeals to that equally ideological yet historically quite distinct notion of this or that “reality,” in which social and historical material rise to the surface in the form of the singular or the contingent. (143)

In Shame, the two aesthetic ideologies clash through the conflict between Voice 1 and Voice 2, and the synthesis they achieve is literally apocalyptic — the entire dialectic is blown away, making space for something new. The apocalypse synthesizes, perhaps, a new voice. Who is the blinded “I” in the final sentence (“…I can no longer see what is no longer there…” [305]), Voice 1 or Voice 2? We could choose to see them as merged, and thus the new possibilities of Voice 3 — or Voice ? — are born into the blank space.

The two ideologies clash in A Strange and Sublime Address, too, but not as obviously, because the text avoids any first-person narration. Nonetheless, its perspectives shift and there is a strong authorial voice guiding readers through the novel’s paths, a storyteller. We are given information by this voice, for instance: “There are several ways of spending a Sunday evening” (16). The storyteller also provides commentary: “He would become an archetype of that familiar figure who is not often described in literature — the ordinary breadwinner in his moment of unlikely glory, transformed into the centre of his universe and his home” (20). At times, the storyteller presents us with interpretations of what we are reading that are nearly as prescriptive as the interpretations offered by Voice 2 in Shame: “This kind of talk, whether at the dinner-table or in the bedroom, did not become too oppressive: it was too full of metaphors, paradoxes, wise jokes, and reminiscences to be so. It was, at bottom, a criticism of life” (48).

These examples of storytelling clash with the expectations created by the first paragraph of A Strange and Sublime Address and highlight this novel’s heteroglossia. Its polyphonies are not only at the level of narrative voice, but also of perspective, and it is through shifts in point of view that A Strange and Sublime Address makes its case for the location of reality within perception. From the first paragraph, we are set to expect the viewpoint character to be Sandeep, and certainly Sandeep is the primary viewpoint character, but the text moves away from his point of view with some regularity. Early in the novel, a mention of dust moves the narrative away from the room and out of Sandeep’s immediate perception to a simple declaration: “Calcutta is a city of dust,” which then leads to a portrayl of the servants who clean the dust from the rooms (14-15). Later, the text shifts a couple of times into Chhotomama’s point view, sometimes only for a few paragraphs (97), but once he is in the hospital, his point of view is the strongest and most defining (e.g., “But there were times, in the afternoon, when Chhotomama would wake from a nap and find himself facing a bright, hard wall. At first, it surprised him with its sheer presence. Slowly, he came to realise that it was his future he was looking at” (113).

Soon after highlighting Chhotomama’s perceptions, the text unifies the family’s perceptions as they drive away from visiting him: “Watching the lanes, they temporarily forgot their own lives, and, temporarily, their minds flowed outward into the images of the city, and became indistinguishable from them” (115).

Like Shame, A Strange and Sublime Address ends with a kind of obliteration, and one that is, in its implications, nearly as apocalyptic. Chhotomama sends Abhi and Sandeep out to the garden to look for a kokil, and his command is described as sounding “like a directive in a myth or a fable” (120). The search for the kokil puts the boys into the discourse of the pre-novel, the land of the fairy tale. They get distracted, though, and only find the kokil by mistake while playing hide-and-seek with each other. The bird is real, not a creature of myth. It has details that can be shown; it can become a character and not an archetype. The boys watch it eat an orange flower (the sort of apparently meaningless detail that creates, in Barthes’ sense, a reality effect). The first sentence of the final paragraph gives us a representation of perception tempered by probability and inductive reasoning: “But it must have sensed their presence, because it interrupted its strange meal and flew off”, which both provides us with an idea of perception and limits that perception, for it highlights that the kokil’s own perception cannot be known. The sentence is not finished, however. A dash slashes us into a revision: “—not flew off, really, but melted, disappeared, from the material world.” It’s as if the bird goes back into the mythic discourse of Chhotomama’s command. We, the readers, are left with the characters in the material world from which the bird has disappeared. What is that material world, though? It is the words of the book itself, because that is the world we share with the characters. The final sentence is mysterious: “As they watched, a delicate shyness seemed to envelop it, and draw a veil over their eyes” (121). The “it” of that sentence is nearly as mysterious as the “He” of the novel’s first sentence, and much more uncertain, because here we have no subsequent sentences to clarify it. The antecedent could be either the kokil or the material world. (Grammatically, it would be the latter, which is closer to the pronoun.) The kokil, having melted back to myth, cannot be the material world. But the ambiguous pronoun makes the force that veils the children’s eyes uncertain: is it myth or is it reality? Is it the absence of myth within reality?

The “I” of the last sentence of Shame could also have a few antecedents. The indeterminacy is meaningful because it makes us reflect on the importance of the antecedent as opposed to other elements of the sentences. Both novels offer an uncertain pronoun and a certain statement of blindness. “I can no longer see what is no longer there” could be a statement from one of the children in A Strange and Sublime Address. The voices of Shame are united in the indeterminant “I” of the end, as are the children of Chaudhuri’s novel. Both groups are blinded, and the blinding suggests that the mythic and historical past have been obliterated in favor not so much of a meaningful present as for the potential of a future. (In Chaudhuri, our group is, after all, a group of children, who, for all their claims of materiality, can’t help but stand for some sort of future.) Destiny is gone, fate is unknowable. The storyteller’s tale of the past became present voices and present details of the material world, but the present is temporary, as is perception, even when it flows out toward images of a city.

Speaking to Basu, Chaudhuri said Indian and postcolonial writers have been characterized as storytellers “emerging … from our oral traditions and our millennial fairy tales”, and the tone suggests he is skeptical or dismissive of this simplistic characterization, just as Basu is skeptical and dismissive of fairy tales beginning, “Once upon a time…” Both Shame and A Strange and Sublime Address conclude by obliterating fairy tales, myths, the past, and the present. The storyteller is a figure of the present because the story is the antecedent of the teller. The reader is more free, and may be, in fact, freed by the storyteller to shake off the nightmare of myth and the weight of history, to speculate on a future, to see a blankness, a potential, a voice marked by the question of infinity.

The paradox of once upon a time is that the storyteller’s recitation of the past may unleash the liberatory magic that we need. Once the present is named, it is past. Cities produce and receive perceptions and stories, but though their materiality may flow more slowly than perceptions and stories of that materiality do, even concrete and steel bend, weather, erode, melt, disappear. This is what the storyteller teaches, the knowledge that, in Benjamin’s terms, the righteous person keeps hidden until the story pries it loose, pulling away the veil, providing sight. Whether récit or roman, myth or material, the future always looms, a blank space like the blank page after the last sentence of a book.


Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” Trans. Harry Zohn. Selected Writings. Ed. Michael William Jennings and Howard Eiland. Vol. 3: 1935–1938. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1996. 143–166.

Chaudhuri, Amit. A Strange and Sublime Address. Freedom Song: Three Novels. New York: Vintage International, 2000. 1–121.
---. “Cosmopolitanism’s Alien Face.” New Left Review 55 (2009): 89–106.

Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. New York: Verso, 2013.

Majumdar, Saikat. “Dallying with Dailiness: Amit Chaudhuri’s Flaneur Fictions.” Studies in the Novel (2007): 448–464.

Rushdie, Salman. Shame. 1st Owl Book ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.

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Here are some thoughts after reading Amit Chaudhuri's first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, which I read in the collection Freedom Song (which is what the page numbers below reference). I struggled with Chaudhuri — his goals for fiction are not mine. Nonetheless, I found it to be a productive struggle, and enjoyed writing about the book for a seminar on postcolonial fiction from Southeast Asia.

Over the next few days, I'll be posting here some of the material I came up with during that seminar that I doubt I'm going to develop into something more polished, at least immediately, but which seems worth preserving, even if my ideas are based on false premises, misreadings, or other potential pitfalls of quick apprehension...




 

Gariahat Road and Rashbehari Avenue Crossing, 1993 (Wikimedia)

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Do you have a crime novel waiting to be discovered? The Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA's Alumni Association has your chance to be discovered! Turn in your synopsis by May 23rd, 2014 for consideration. Details below and at our website.
 
New York Times Bestseller Robert Dugoni will read and vet the finalists and the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners, and agent Laurie McLean of Foreword Literary will review the winning entry for possible representation.

How to Enter
- Submit via Submittable

. . . (a) a synopsis of up to 500 words;
. . . (b) an extract of the FIRST 5,000 words (or fewer) of your completed CRIME
. . . . . . . FICTION manuscript; and
. . . (c) the non-refundable entry fee of $25.00.
Format Requirements
- The entire entry must be written in English, in 12-point Times New Roman
. . . . . . .or Times, and be double-spaced
- Must have 1” margins
- Your manuscript pages must be numbered
Your name must NOT appear anywhere on the synopsis or the manuscript. You will be disqualified if your name appears anywhere in the synopsis or manuscript.
Attach your synopsis as the last page(s) of your submission.
Synopsis
- Synopsis must not be longer than 500 words.

Manuscript
The novel must be crime fiction: thriller, suspense, mystery. No true crime. Maximum length is 5,000 words. The entry must be the first 5,000 (or fewer) words of your novel.
If you are selected as a finalist, you will be asked to provide an electronic copy of your completed manuscript (minimum 55,000 words, maximum 100,000 words). Failure to provide the completed manuscript within three days after the request will result in disqualification.

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Here are the categories I’m dealing with lately: planning a new backpacking adventure. Planning a new book series. Planning another new series in a whole new genre. Which right now equals about 15 new books. I’m not even kidding.

And this morning it was starting to feel a little . . . daunting. As in, Can’t do any of them, just have to sit here and think about what I want to do.

That kind of stupor that could easily go on for days.

But I’m going to approach it a different way this time. Because recently I heard a great talk from outdoor adventurer (and mother and wife and owner of my favorite outdoor store Summit Hut) Dana Davis.

Dana has hiked up Mount Rainier. That right there qualifies her as badass. But she’s accomplished many other physical feats, and is currently training for her first Ironman triathlon, even though as she tells it she has bad knees, bad ankles, can’t run, isn’t so hot at either biking or swimming (I can’t remember which)–clearly not ideal when you’re going to be doing all three for miles and miles in one day.

But somehow that sounds fun to Dana.

And that fun is infectious. While it’s possible that some of the people in the crowd the other night might have thought to themselves, “Dang! I’m going to Ironman it, too!” I have the feeling they reacted the same way I did, which was to take Dana’s lessons about training for something hard and think about how we might apply them to some of the upcoming challenges in our own lives.

I think my favorite piece of her advice was this: Embrace the suck. Recognize that somewhere along the way you’re going to have to deal with a certain amount of discomfort, pain, and unhappiness. But if you recognize that ahead of time, really reconcile yourself to it, then when it shows up you can calmly tell yourself, “Yep, here it is. I knew it was coming. Here’s the suck. Let’s keep going.”

What’s “the suck” for me? There are times in every single backpacking trip when it’s as if I turn to myself and ask, “Did you really think this was fun? Are you really doing this on purpose?” Because mountains are high, trails are long, lightning storms scare the crap out of me, mosquitos bite, dogs roll in human feces (don’t get me started on people not properly disposing of their turds), and things just plain go wrong. That is the nature of outdoor adventures. Of any adventure, really.

I see it with my book adventures, too. When I set out to write something new, I know the time will come when my hands will feel like claws from typing for so many hours at a time, my brain will feel completely exhausted and empty, and yet the drill sergeant in me will try to force me to keep going even though all I really want to do is take the day off and watch Pixar movies. There’s a reason why The Incredibles exists. It is there to restore the worn-out brains of adults all over the world.

In a few days I’ll be posting Dana’s full list for psyching yourself up and preparing for something big, but for now I just wanted to whet your appetite for the whole thing.

Until then, you might want to reread a few earlier posts (that’s right, to psyche yourself up for the next big post. See how it works?):

How To Know When It’s Time To Make a Change In Your Life

Becoming the Possible You

The 100 Things You Keep Meaning To Do

Deciding To Worry About That Tomorrow

Stay tuned!

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This commencement speech by Neil Gaiman about carving out a life of creativity is one of those things I’ve been meaning to watch for a long time, but never seemed to get around to.

Which is why we need people who say, “Here! Look!” and send you the link. Thank you to author and illustrator Guy Porfirio for being that person for me today.

And now I get to be that person for all of you. Here! Look!

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Pressgang Prize

Pressgang, the small press at Butler University, is looking for the following: Novels, memoirs, or book-length collections of stories or essays.
Submissions will be accepted online along with a $25 entry fee. We're okay with simultaneous submissions, and we comply with the CLMP contest code of ethics.

Prize: $1500 + publication + a reading at Butler University

Judging: Winner will be selected by Editor and editorial board, and announced in August. All other entries will be considered for standard publication.

Deadline: 5/31/2014

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Shade Mountain Press seeks novel manuscripts by women of color: any topic, any style (as long as it’s literary rather than genre). Please email a query letter, containing a short synopsis of the novel and your bio, including publishing credits, if any, to:

submissionsATshademountainpressDOTcom (Change AT to @ and DOT to . )

If we want to read further, we’ll request hard copy of a longer synopsis and the first ten pages or so.

Deadline: August 1, 2014

Shade Mountain Press is looking for literary fiction that’s politically engaged, that challenges the status quo and gender/class/race privilege. We look for work that’s wise, raucous, joyful, angry, alive. Both realism and its various alternatives (magic realism / fabulism / slipstream / the fantastic/ dystopianism) are welcome, as long as the work is literary rather than genre fiction.

For more information, please visit our website.

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On Monday I got a nice surprise in my mailbox. 

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This annual award was created in 2006 to honor the best first novel of the year and carries with it a $10,000 prize. Each shortlisted author will receive $1,000. The shortlist for the award will be announced in September 2014 and the prize will be given at The Center for Fiction’s Annual Benefit and Awards Dinner held in December this year.

2014 Submission Guidelines

Any U.S. publisher may enter books that will be published between January 1, 2014 and December 31, 2014. We prefer that these be submitted as finished copies, if available. Bound galleys and bound, edited manuscripts are also acceptable. There is an entry fee of $50/title. You may pay online and apply with this entry form, or you may send the entry form and fee directly to:

The Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize
The Center for Fiction
17 East 47th Street
New York, NY 10017

Small independent publishers may apply for a fee reduction; please contact us at:

saraATcenterforfictionDOTorg (Change AT to @ and DOT to .) or call 212-755-6710 for more information.

All entry forms and books must be postmarked no later than March 14, 2014. Entry forms and books may be sent separately. The Center for Fiction must receive eight copies of each book, bound galley, or bound, edited manuscript.

Publishers are urged not to hold submissions until the last possible date, but to send books, bound galleys, or bound, edited manuscripts AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE. Our reading process begins immediately upon receipt.

ELIGIBILITY

Only first-time novelists who are American citizens or permanent residents are eligible for this award.

Only full-length first novels written in English are eligible. Novellas, collections of short stories, whether related or unrelated, and YA novels are NOT eligible.

Novels in ALL genres are welcome.

Only books published for the first time in the United States between January 1, 2014 and December 31, 2014 are eligible.

Books previously published elsewhere are NOT eligible.

Self-published books and eBook-only editions are NOT eligible.

There is no limit on the number of books entered by each publisher, provided each submission complies with the rules as above.

In the event of a dispute as to eligibility, The Center for Fiction will decide whether a book is eligible, and its decision will be binding.

Any books entered for the Awards process by the publishers that are subsequently determined to be ineligible, will still be subject to the stated entry fee of $50 per title.

The panel also may request titles that have not been submitted by publishers. Publishers are then asked by the Center to submit these titles for consideration and the entry fee will be waived.

SELECTION PROCESS

The selection of the shortlist and winning novel is determined through a two-tiered process. The Center’s network of booklovers, which includes writers, librarians, and staff, will act as first-tier readers. The long list recommended by these readers is then forwarded to a committee of distinguished American writers. From those recommended novels, our panel of judges chooses the shortlist and the winner. (Our judges in 2013 were Victor LaValle, Roxana Robinson, Christine Schutt, Luis Alberto Urrea, and the previous year's winner, Ben Fountain.)

ADDITIONAL CONDITIONS OF THE AWARDS

Publishers of the winning and shortlisted books must agree:

A. To indicate that the book is a finalist or winner of the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize by including the award medallion or approved text on future editions.

B. To inform authors of entered books that if chosen for the shortlist they must be present at the Center for Fiction’s Annual Benefit and Awards Dinner in New York City and The First Novel Fête, both held in December. Travel and accommodations for each shortlisted author will not be covered by The Center for Fiction.

C. To inform authors that, if shortlisted, they must agree to participate in the Center’s related publicity, including a finalist reading (The First Novel Fête), at The Center for Fiction, just prior to the Annual Benefit and Awards Dinner. The shortlisted authors agree that their readings may be used in audio and/or video formats on The Center for Fiction’s website.

D. All shortlisted writers agree to be interviewed for the Center’s website in audio and/or print formats. The shortlisted writers also agree that the interview may be used in an anthology of first novel finalist interviews.

E. The recipient of the Award must agree to allow his/her acceptance speech to be published in print, audio or video formats by The Center for Fiction on its website, and to be published in the Center newsletter and in a future anthology of first novelists’ interviews.- See more at our website.

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The 2014 Devil's Kitchen Reading Awards in Poetry and Prose

The Department of English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and GRASSROOTS, SIUC's undergraduate literary magazine, are pleased to announce the 2014 Devil's Kitchen Reading Awards. One book of poetry and one book of prose (novel, short fiction, or literary nonfiction) will be selected from submissions of titles published in 2013, and the winning authors will receive an honorarium of $1000 and will present a public reading and participate in panels at the Devil's Kitchen Fall Literary Festival at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. The dates for the 2014 festival will be October 22-24, 2014. Travel and accommodations will be provided for the two winners.

Entries may be submitted by either author or publisher, and must include a copy of the book, a cover letter, a brief biography of the author including previous publications, and a $20.00 entry fee made out to "SIUC - Dept. of English."

Entries must be postmarked December 1, 2013 - February 1, 2014. Materials postmarked after February 1 will be returned unopened. Because we cannot guarantee their return, all entries will become the property of the SIUC Department of English.

Entrants wishing acknowledgment of receipt of materials must include a self-addressed stamped postcard.

Judges will come from the faculty of SIUC's MFA Program in Creative Writing and the award winners will be selected by the staff of GRASSROOTS. The winners will be notified in May 2014. All entrants will  be notified of the results in June 2014.

The awards are open to single-author titles published in 2013 by independent, university, or commercial publishers. The winners must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents and must agree to attend and participate in the 2014 Devil's Kitchen Fall Literary Festival (October 22-24, 2014) to receive the award.
Entries from vanity presses and self-published books are not eligible. Current students and employees at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and authors published by Southern Illinois University Press are not eligible.

Past winners of the Devil's Kitchen Reading Awards

Entries must be postmarked December 1, 2013 - February 1, 2014 (please do not send materials early or late).
Send all materials to:

Devil's Kitchen Reading Awards/GRASSROOTS
Dept. of English, Mail Code 4503
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
1000 Faner Drive
Carbondale, IL 62901

(please indicate "Poetry" or "Prose" on envelope)

For further information, e-mail:

grassrootsmagATgmailDOTcom (Change AT to @ and DOT to .)

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Each year Black Lawrence Press will award The Big Moose Prize for an unpublished novel. The prize is open to new, emerging, and established writers. The winner of this contest will receive book publication, a $1,000 cash award, and ten copies of the book. Prizes will be awarded on publication. Past winners include Tracy DeBrincat, Jen Michalski, and Betsy Robinson.

Submit your novel here.

Deadline: January 31, 2014

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Tuscany Prize Fiction

Tuscany Press asks for a $10 reading fee, not for financial reasons, but to insure that writers pause before sending in their manuscript and ask: “Does my manuscript have the presence of God and faith — subtly, symbolically or deliberately?” Thank you for your understanding.

For more information, please see the Tuscany Press website, the Writers Resources tab on the menu bar: Required Reading for Writers of Catholic Fiction.

All manuscripts will be considered for the Tuscany Prize and for publication. Last year, we offered many publishing contracts in addition to the prize winners

Categories for fiction prizes include: Novel, Young Adult Novel, and Short Story.

Opens: January 1, 2014 --- Deadline: June 30, 2014

For more information and to enter, please visit our website.

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Waxing Press announces its inaugural contest for works of fiction, the Tide Lock Prize. We are seeking new work in the form of a novel, novella or collection of short stories. A single prizewinner will be selected and awarded with publication in both print and digital editions. There is a modest $5 entry fee.

Submissions are due February 1st, 2014.

For more information and guidelines, please visit our website or our submissions page. We are also on Facebook and on Twitter.

About the press:
Based out of Cincinnati, OH, Waxing Press is an independent small book publisher. We prize, above all else, literary excellence and work that pushes the bounds of what fiction does, what fiction can do and what fiction should do. Writing that is deeply intellectual. Work with big ideas, and navigates risk and experimentation with a masterful hand.

All other inquiries can be directed to us at:

info[AT]waxingpress(DOT)com (Change [AT] to @ and (DOT) to .)

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The 2014 Devil's Kitchen Reading Awards in Poetry and Prose

The Department of English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and GRASSROOTS.

SIUC's undergraduate literary magazine, are pleased to announce the 2014 Devil's Kitchen Reading Awards. One book of poetry and one book of prose (novel, short fiction, or literary nonfiction) will be selected from submissions of titles published in 2013, and the winning authors will receive an honorarium of $1000 and will present a public reading and participate in panels at the Devil's Kitchen Fall Literary Festival at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. The dates for the 2014 festival will be October 22-24, 2014. Travel and accommodations will be provided for the two winners.

Entries may be submitted by either author or publisher, and must include a copy of the book, a cover letter, a brief biography of the author including previous publications, and a $20.00 entry fee made out to SIUC - Dept. of English.

Entries must be postmarked December 1, 2013 - February 1, 2014. Materials postmarked after February 1 will be returned unopened. Because we cannot guarantee their return, all entries will become the property of the SIUC Department of English. Entrants wishing acknowledgment of receipt of materials must include a self-addressed stamped postcard.

Judges will come from the faculty of SIUC's MFA Program in Creative Writing and the award winners will be selected by the staff of GRASSROOTS. The winners will be notified in May 2014. All entrants will be notified of the results in June 2014.

The awards are open to single-author titles published in 2013 by independent, university, or commercial publishers. The winners must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents and must agree to attend and participate in the 2014 Devil's Kitchen Fall Literary Festival (October 22-24, 2014) to receive the award. Entries from vanity presses and self-published books are not eligible. Current students and employees at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and authors published by Southern Illinois University Press are not eligible.

Entries must be postmarked December 1, 2013 - February 1, 2014
(please do not send materials early or late).
Send all materials to:

Devil's Kitchen Reading Awards/GRASSROOTS
Dept. of English, Mail Code 4503
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
1000 Faner Drive
Carbondale, IL 62901

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Entry form.

Chautauqua Institution, the pre-eminent expression of lifelong learning in the United States, is pleased to invite 2014 submissions for The Chautauqua Prize, a distinguished national literary prize for a work of fiction or literary/narrative nonfiction.

Awarded annually since 2012, The Chautauqua Prize draws upon Chautauqua's considerable literary legacy to celebrate a book that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and honor the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts. The author receives $7,500 and all travel and expenses for a one-week summer residency at Chautauqua Institution in western New York.

Eligible books for the 2014 prize will have been published in English in the United States during 2013. Nominations will be accepted beginning Sept. 9, 2013, from publishers, agents, authors, and readers. The deadline for nomination is December 31, 2013. Longlist finalists will be notified in February 2014, at which time authors will be asked to select their summer visit time to Chautauqua should they be awarded the prize. Shortlist finalists and the winner will be notified in April and May 2014. Chautauqua Institution will celebrate the winner in the summer of 2014, at a time selected by the winner and Chautauqua Institution.

Chautauqua’s commitment to the literary arts is immersed in its rich history. In addition to the 135-year-old Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, Chautauqua’s literary arts programming includes summer-long interaction of published and aspiring writers at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center, the intensive workshops of the nationally recognized Chautauqua Writers’ Festival, and lectures by prominent authors on the craft and art of writing.

The Chautauqua Prize is awarded through a two-tiered judging process that includes Chautauquans who are writers, publishers, critics, editors, librarians, booksellers, and literature and creative writing educators. Each nominated book is evaluated by three reviewers, with the final selection made by a three-member, independent, anonymous jury.

- See more at our website.

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Online submission deadline: December 31, 2013

Infinite Acacia is seeking submissions for a variety of projects. We always pay our contributors, sometimes not as much as we'd like to, but always. We value diversity. If you're a white, straight, able male—your stories are welcome. But if you're not, we would love to see your stories as well. We encourage you to submit.

To see a listing of open projects and their guidelines, visit our website.

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