Good evening, writers,
The goblin men in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” didn’t sell short stories, but they were pretty short. I had thought that literary journals publishing short fiction had vanished as thoroughly as the goblin men vanish after the first time you taste their forbidden fruit. But as I began to research this diary, I discovered that they are still hanging on, including some that I used to read.
Although I’ve heard of Granta and The Paris Review, I tend more toward genre fiction. I was a subscriber for years to Asimov’s Science Fiction and to Amazing Stories. For stories of a different bent, I subscribed to the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. I’ve long since stopped (but maybe I’ll start up again) and I honestly thought they had bit the dust. Well, they haven’t, and what’s more, there are others, like Interzone or Clark’s World. There’s one I just found out about while writing this diary, called Strange Horizons. Fantasy & Science Fiction, or F&SF, is still going, too.
And of course, there are magazines that aren’t devoted to Fiction, like The New Yorker and others, that occasionally publish some of it.
It seems like a long time ago these were fecund breeding grounds where many authors got their start, but nowadays it seems like most novelists jump straight to, well, novels, either finding a way to get an agent and a big-name publisher, or going the self-published route. But I’m sure that in the heyday of the short story, many writers honed their craft and cut their teeth on short fiction.
So, does short fiction still have a place in the modern era, or are these journals merely the vermiform appendix of a literary world that has moved on? Do you have any journals that you subscribe to currently? Any you’ve read in the past? Any to recommend?
Let us know in the comments.
Meanwhile, since this topic doesn’t really suit itself to a writing prompt, how about…
Tonight’s Challenge
Write a scene in which your characters discover that someone or something they thought was long gone is very much alive and kicking. Do they react with joy? Surprise? Shock? Try to keep it under a couple hundred words and engage at least two or three different senses.
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