NEW POETRY we wore our best hunter-green waited patiently as men took a different kind of field we craved sustenance a resurrection a flight a waiting by window in the purple light under wrong tin roof what we tossed into sky we threw away our wing-missiles pigskins of self talons landing burrowing deep out of view what craft drunk disturbance in the flapping…

AN ANALYSIS (engraving by Willy Stower) THE MOST TELLING aspect of today's literary scene is even the most loyal servants to the status quo system are barely making it. Having to edit, and struggle to promote, their generic Substacks while paying outrageous rents in the Imperial City of New York. Yet they refuse to leave the ship's bridge! Rigidly adhering to their obsolete "high modern" standards though the ship of Literature lists at an ever sharper angle, waiting to slide beneath the waves, into the depths.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."-William Faulkner Meaning: Life consists of ongoing narrative threads, like musical motifs in a vast symphony. ONE of our themes as a literary project is the relationship of American writing to American history. That nothing exists in a vacuum. That art is an expression of time and place, that it springs from the roots of a culture and represents the authentic voice of a people.

by J.B. Stevens Robert Forsyth’s heart longed for Scotland. The American Colonials spoke with an odd accent, their manners were disgusting, and the food was ghastly. Despite the challenges, they’d become his people. Their love of freedom and indomitable spirit was overwhelming. The United States was his true home. This new nation gave him everything. He was proud to serve her.

NEW FICTION (c/o hiltondotcom) My career as a Seattle restaurateur has really taken off. A food magazine recently referred to me as “the grande dame of the Northwest dining scene.” On a dark gray day, in the pouring rain, you pull up outside my flagship restaurant in a brand-new black Corvette. When you roll down the window, my employees recognize your distinguished profile and say, “It’s him!

BIG LITERARY NEWS IN THE BIG PUSH back to humanity and reality, Wred Fright's new zine Frighty is at the forefront. IN THE AFTERMATH of the Halloween season, with smashed pumpkins and out-of-control squirrels everyplace, it's appropriate that another issue of Frighty-- #3-- appears on the scene. Does the pumpkin on the cover foretell the fate of the established literary realm?

NEW FICTION (EDITOR'S NOTE: Yes, I know, editors aren't supposed to run their own work on their litmags, but I do it anyway. You might say I'm the Donald Trump of this modest little literary site.) He dreamt of a ballroom. A big ballroom. BIG. In capitals. An actual dream. He'd first had the dream at age twelve. Or maybe seventeen, when he was a cadet at a military academy, sleeping in a dorm.

by Jeff Nazzaro (image c/o ktla) It’s Veteran’s Day, 2019, and the Metrolink commuter train into LA is all but empty. The private university I teach at instead gives us something called Autumn Day …

What's happening out in the world? As opposed to, say, in stray literary areas of gentrified New York, where what's happening among a self-absorbed media elite seems to be an article in Harper's magazine about, er, self-absorption. We say, enough! Time for writers to not be as insular as an AI chatbot, but to become interested in other people. To plunge into real-world human experience-- the one edge we have over our new programmed, computer-generated competitors-- then write about it.

NEW FICTION Crowded. I move across the car and stand in the doorway. It’s the rear of the front end of a double car. Just before the train leaves the station, a tall, thin man hurries on and thumps down into the empty aisle seat by the door across from me. He looks up at me. Then he looks again. He keeps doing it.

AN ONGOING BATTLE (cover to the French version of a Robert McAlmon memoir about the 1920’s Lost Generation) TWO THINGS recently caught my attention. FIRST was a quote from Susan Sontag giving…

NEW POETRY (publicdomainpicturesdotnet) Hello, my name is Hello.Yes, it rhymes with yellow, mellow, Jell-O. You know.I don't talk much, I just drink. Put me in a taxi, call me Buddy,take me anywhere. I don't care. Home is the bottom of a bottle,the last drop a farewell kiss before I blast into space,my veins full of rocket fuel.

A PYNCHON AUTHORSHIP CONTROVERSY That's the problem with a reclusive novelist like Thomas Pynchon. He might be non-existent. The writings m...

Don't kid yourself. We're not living in a golden age of literary criticism, as a few scribbling souls clinging desperately to their crumbling status would have you believe. Criticism exists in a symbiotic relationship with the art form it addresses. You can't have a golden age of criticism without a golden age of the art. There was once a golden age of rock/pop criticism, centered on magazines like…

A RANT EVERY TIME I begin to read a standard 7,000-word essay of literary criticism, I recall something Bret Easton Ellis once said at a bookstore appearance in Philadelphia: "Now I'm going to bore you for twenty minutes." (Then he did, by reading from his work.) Boredom, among the established literary set, is a given. For instance, however well, or mildly provocative, the standard…

NEW POETRY you won’t seea passage ofmy writingfeatured inthe SAT.you won’treada paragraphand think:the fuckdid ijust read?some writerstryto confuseyouwith theirpretenseandderanged syntax,but i aimto be clearand simple.so if youreadthe new yorkerand thinkthis writersounds like…

RECENTLY I read an article about famed film director Stanley Kubrick's "cool precision." Not long after, I read about the conflicts Kubrick had with actor Marlon Brando during the filming of the 1961 Western, "One-Eyed Jacks," which resulted in Stanley Kubrick leaving and Brando taking over as director of the project. Which started me thinking about approaches to writing, and to art in general.

by Lyn Michele Stevens On the east side of Manhattan, Esther had been sitting on the couch for the past two hours stroking Sparkles when the envelope with the handicapped parking pass slid under the door. She knew it had been delivered by courier from Jack. She looked down at the snow-white Persian cat in her lap. Underneath the long silky fur, she was skin and bones.

NEW FICTION The evening before, Jack had called eager to take her to see Shakespeare in the Park. Though Esther had always lived in a studio on York Avenue, she’d never been to Shakespeare in the Park (or the Empire State Building, or the Statue of Liberty). She was flattered Jack wanted to take her. It was only their second date.

THIS YEAR’S NOMINATIONS THE HARDEST PART of selecting nominees for compilations like Best of the Net is choosing between many excellent works all of which we love or we wouldn’t have ac…

OUR NOMINATIONS FOR 2026 BEST OF THE NET AT THE MOMENT we're strictly an on-line project, at least until we get our art printer fixed and begin cranking out print publications again. Which means the best location for nominating writing we've published is Best of the Net. SO: we nominated some of the work we've run, by some of the…