Short Fiction Roundup: The Year’s Best
Over at The Wall Street Journal, Martin Wooster has reviewed this year’s annual of Gardner Dozois picks so I don’t have to. What’s particularly interesting about this review is the contention that while most short fiction today is the output of navel gazing MFA candidates (and could not be possibly of interest to normal folks, like those who read The Wall Street Journal), genre magazines still publish quality traditional plot-driven stories once characteristic of mass circulation magazines that have long ago succumbed to short-attention reader spans and market vicissitudes.
As it happens, I stopped reading Asimov’s, which Dozois formerly edited, because I was coming across too many traditional plot-driven hard SF tales that are okay once in awhile, but, for my tastes, make for a kind of bland diet. For largely the same reason, as well as for lack of time, I’ve become less obsessed with studying every iteration of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, though Wooster’s review may make me reconsider (even the ones he doesn’t like sound intriguing too me). But as for whether genre magazines are the only home of short fiction that isn’t willfully obtuse in focusing on obsessions that matter only to a self-conscious elite (a charge frequently made of genre’s pulp forebears, funnily enough), I don’t know.
It’s been awhile since I’ve read much from the so-called literary magazines, and I probably haven’t read enough of them to know if this is more canard than truism. I did use to get Glimmer Magazine, which, if I recall correctly, was the first place where I read anything by Junot Diaz, who wrote The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Depending on what you thought of that book may either prove or disprove Wooster’s point.
Great stories never get old.
At the center of this seething world-organism lies BEDLAM: “That proud city, whose taut towers have bountifully reared and nurtured the parasitic multitudes through scuttling millennia of zealous growth.” Bedlam is a grotesquely beautiful mass of bone-carved towers inhabited by a race of male beings called Gess.
All right movie fans, its here! We’ve been telling you about it for months and today is finally the day when 
Fantasy author Shira Lipkin, last seen here as the poster child for our 
Here at the Black Gate offices we’ve sent the entire gaggle of lazy summer interns to the local 
Steve Fahnestalk is a little overwhelemed with his first issue of Black Gate:
The Dead Matter
I don’t keep track of what cable network Nickelodeon does these days (I don’t have children), but even with the new logo I can’t imagine that the channel has altered much from the manic “no adults in the room” style that it started to specialize in during the mid-‘80s. That was the point when Double Dare and its profusion of goo heralded a rethinking of the channel’s former “education-and-imports” format it had used since its launch in 1979.