Vheissu

I just discovered Joyland , a short fiction magazine with an interesting partition: they’ve splintered the magazine into cities, and each city has its own editor and manages its own submissions (submissions must come from people who’ve lived in the city, but the stories don’t need to be set in the city). It’s an interesting concept. Well, on my first promenade through Joyland , I chanced upon two authors I’ve commented on before: I had liked Pasha Malla’s story “Monsters,” on Zoetrope Summer 2009, and I had enjoyed Joe Meno’s One Story piece, “Children are the Only Ones who Blush .” On Joyland , I first read the story by Pasha Malla called “ The Other Internet .” I didn’t like this one nearly as much as “Monsters.” It’s an interesting thought about a free and communal Internet, spread thin through 16 paragraphs, without any characters or actions. (I wouldn’t go as far as saying it’s not a story because it lacks such things .) It reminded me of Vonnegut’s brilliant descript...

Self-proclaimed short story month , post number 10. I got my first couple of short stories from One Story today. They didn’t include the latest one in the series, called “ Rocky Point, Mexico .” It was the one prior to that: Joe Meno’s “Children are the Only Ones who Blush.” I can’t offer a link to the story because One Story sends you a paper version. I’m new to the One Story universe, so bear with me. The story comes printed in a crisp, stapled booklet, 16 pages long and pressed between thin, cardboard-yellow covers. (The color changes from one edition to the next, and the length also varies, of course.) The font is quite comfortable, and there is some pleasure to be derived from reading this nugget of fiction cover to cover in a few minutes, giving your eyes a rest from the computer screen. Now, the story was quite enjoyable. A nineteen-year-old kid called Jack has an obnoxiously smart and intense twin sister (Jane), who accuses him of being gay and not having come...