American Short Fiction blog

ASF joins the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) in an innovative program: Lit Mag Adoption Program for Creative Writing Courses. This program offers half-price literary magazine subscriptions to writing classes adopting them for course use (with free desk-copy subscriptions to the professors).

Classes that adopt ASF—in addition to receiving affordable subscriptions—will also receive a meeting with editorial staff.  (This is where we’ll spill all the good stuff.) The goal of the program is to expose students to the variety of magazines and promote an active, engaged reading culture among a new generation of writers.

We’re thrilled to be a part of this.

For more info about the program, visit the CLMP Lit Mag Adoption website.

Those clever people in Tin Houses.

According to GalleyCat, between August 1 and November 30, 2010, Tin House Books will accept unsolicited manuscripts if the submission includes a receipt that proves the author has purchased a book at a bookstore.

The same rule applies for unsolicited work submitted to its magazine between September 1 and December 30, 2010.

Remember: Tin House Books does not permit electronic submissions. Tin House magazine does. Read the rules.

A fun final note, as reported by GalleyCat: “Writers who cannot afford to buy a book or cannot get to an actual bookstore are encouraged to explain why in haiku or one sentence (100 words or fewer).”

Responses to this new submission policy here and here.

The new issue of PEN America looks incredible. PEN America 12: Correspondences presents email exchanges, letters, telegrams, epistolary fiction, and more. Sam Lipsyte writes to Barry Hannah (more on this after the jump), Siri Hustvedt writes to Scheherazade, and Paul LaFarge writes to Marcel Proust. Anne Carson searches letters from a lost brother, and Robert Walser writes behind the walls of a sanitarium. Plus comics from Iran and Lebanon; fiction by Alain Mabanckou and Donald Ray Pollock; poetry by Billy Collins; and much, much more.

PEN is also hosting an online forum dedicated to the same kind of correspondence. Sam Lipsyte and others contribute. Contributors are invited to “write the first paragraph of a letter [they'd] like to send either to another writer, living or dead, or to a fictional character,” or to “describe [their] experience with the new technology of correspondence: Twitter, email, Facebook, etc.”

Check out Lipsyte’s letter to Barry Hannah below.

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