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We are un-dead

Contrary to what HTML Giant says, we are not dead - in fact, we are decidedly un-dead...

Spam, and submissions

We have been having a lot of problem with spam coming to the email account we use to receive submissions. Therefore, effective immediately, you must put the word "Submission" in your email's subject line. If you do not, your email will be automatically deleted by our spam filter, and you will not receive a response. Our spam filter is inflexible and unforgiving - there are no exceptions to this rule. Sorry if this creates any hassle.

Feelin' Randy?

In alum news, artist Randall Stoltzfus (Issue 21 and Issue 32) recently had an opening at Blank Space in NYC...

Celebrity Greenman

Q: [When picking celebrities to integrate into your reworkings of Chekhov stories, in Celebrity Chekhov,] did you find yourself matching the star to the story or the other way around?

Congrats to fb Alum, Terrance Hayes

Special congrats go out to failbetter alum, Terrance Hayes, who was named one of five finalists in poetry by the National Book Foundation.

Lou Mathews, our Tenth Anniversary Novella Contest winner

Lou Mathews, whose novella The Irish Sextet* won our Tenth Anniversary Novella Contest, and is now live on our site, is a fourth-generation Angeleno. Married at 19, he worked his way through U.C. Santa Cruz as a gas station attendant and mechanic and continued to work as a mechanic until he was 39.

Matthew Olzmann, "The Skull of a Mastodon"

Wasn't it a milodon skull that got Bruce Chatwin so jazzed? We're not sure, and In Patagonia isn't handy, but that sounds right. Anyway, if so, then Matthew Olzmann's new poem, live now on our site, makes two data points suggesting that bones of extinct giant creatures are inspiring and then some:

Matthew McBrearty, "A Tenuous Train Ride"

McCarry and Camus boarded the train and sat on either side of a pensive looking man with a froggy pallor.

"Are you alright?" McCarry asked the man who shuddered as if he had been roused him from a squalid nap.

"Hardly," he answered in a dubitable British accent.

"Educated in England?" McCarry asked.

"Top of my class," the man replied with a heavy heart, "through Oxford."

The man dropped his face into his hands.

Maggie Glover, "In West Virginia"

Almost heaven? Almost.

Each morning was a fresh, blue breakdown.
I perfected my skills of isolation among those hills,
the splash back of creeks and muddied snow drifts.
I had enough money, but not enough money...

Do read the rest, from San Francisco-late-of-Appalachia poet Maggie Glover.

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