A Long, Strange Week In Which The Best American Short Stories Came Out, Among Other Things

This will be a week long remembered. It has seen the deadline come and go for the Barry Hannah and Yellowwood Poetry contests, and it will soon see the end of many sleepless nights spent combing through manuscripts for those finalists to send on to the judges.

Also, the latest edition of The Best American Short Stories rolled out on October 8th, which seemed strange to me, as I remember seeing it in bookstores a month ago. Perhaps somebody cheated, or perhaps the space-time continuum experienced a brief tear. That might explain why everybody's acting of late like the world's about to end. Contributors this year include T.C. Boyle, Karen Russell, and Kevin Brockmeier, among others. A few reviews have already popped up. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch writes of "how good Rushdie was at assembling this anthology: a variety of writers, famous to first-timers, sifted from major magazines and little reviews, grand and little worlds." Kirkus called it "bleak but brilliant." Also, check out Adventures in Reading and their on-going series of blog posts in which they look at each story in turn.

Others things happened this week, I'm sure. Continuing collapses of one kind or another. A debate or two. And then there was the big fundraiser for The Yalobusha Review thrown on the Oxford square at Southside Gallery. Pictures and gratuitous self-congratulation forthcoming.