ESPN game day crew looks like they're about to get their annual family pictures taken on the beach in the outer banks.

Physical objects!

Congratulations to Roy Kesey (@roykesey.bsky.social) whose collection LORE was selected by Ed Park as the 2025 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction winner and is scheduled for publication in May 2027!! Learn more here: www.sarabandebooks.org/all-titles/p...

Totally agree! Something I have in my "what are literary magazines and why you should care" thing I do sometimes for students. Gives you a very clear view of what stands out and how subjective the process is. My thick rejection skin is from those early days reading for @barrelhouse.bsky.social.

Turns out, if you loved Reservation Dogs and are a fan of The Long Goodbye, the Before Trilogy, Elmore Leonard, Jim Thompson, Run the Jewels, Coen Brothers movies, and more... THE LOWDOWN is basically porn/drugs.

Have no choice but to agree, Ethan Hawke on The Lowdown.

Saw Pulp Fiction last week & remembered a thing I wrote on my lil blog when Dalkey posted a ridiculous call for an intern (miss u early lit internet ❤️💾), and was surprised to find Vice had reprinted it: The Gimp From Pulp Fiction Applies for Dalkey Archive Internship. www.vice.com/en/article/t...

Applications are OPEN! Split Lip Magazine is looking for volunteer Flash & Fiction readers. Apply right here before October 1! buff.ly/X3932x5

"The regime is disappearing people" has traditionally been a pretty strong rallying cry when it's happened in other places.

Out of all the Pennsylvania/Philly specific details on Task I'm always most impressed when a character says "P.A." instead of "Pennsylvania," a thing I had no idea I did until a few years ago.

This is tomorrow in Philadelphia and the more of you show up the more of a public spectacle Hannah and I will make of ourselves

Cat zoom.

I agree with James, this is a good one.

Life in a college town: polite young bro approaches clerk at liquor store. " Do you have any larger carts? I have to purchase a lot of items?" Clerk says okay, what do you need? Polite young bro pulls out list. "17 handles of Jeager, 10 of Fireball..."

I'm not saying it was ALIENS ATTACK! but it was ALIENS ATTACK! Here's the cover of my new book, coming in April 2026 from @masonjarpress.bsky.social! If you've been to @barrelhouse.bsky.social Writer Camp you'll recognize that barn. I love it, excited to share, hope you'll check it out in April!

make a little art today. read a story, enjoy a painting, appreciate and escape into a little art today. look back at something you've made and let yourself feel proud of it today. reach out and tell a few people how much you love something they made today...

Fuck you, RFK Junior.

Before we had the phrase "literary community" we were lucky to have Dan as an example of how to be generous and kind and pull for everybody in this weird little world.

Adding my voice to the chorus of those mourning the passing of Dan Wickett. Dzanc was my first publisher and Dan was its heart and soul: tireless on behalf of writers and their work, generous with his time and emotional energy, kind and encouraging to everyone he met. Rest well, old friend.

Guys, I could NOT be more excited to have a story published at Short Story, Long, and I honestly really love this story in a way that I think you love just a few stories you’ve written. Maybe it’s the encroaching nostalgia, maybe it’s just the fun I had with the form, but I hope you’ll read it!

I'm so sorry to hear about the passing of Dan Wickett, founder of the Emerging Writers Network and Dzanc Books. Dan was so kind and such a connector. He was one of the first people to take me seriously as a writer and take @barrelhouse.bsky.social seriously as a literary magazine.

I'm so sorry to hear of Dan Wickett's passing. We worked together for years at Dzanc Books, and I'm so grateful for all he did for me there and elsewhere. He was a great friend, a brilliant reader, a true advocate for writers. He loved books like no one else. I miss him already, and always will.

General submission $26. Contest submission $27. Predatory and scammy, no thanks @authorsguild.org.

Everything is terrible but you could hang out with me and a bunch of like-minded goths making spooky fiction in October!

Always love this stage of publication, when your book starts looking like a book! Coming in April 2026 from @masonjarpress.bsky.social!

It does feel like our traditional conception of the political spectrum is not useful in analyzing people whose politics are basically meme-fried brainrot 4chan nihilism lolz

Second day of Blurb Week for GRAPHIC RAGE by @aubreyhirsch.bsky.social, who'll be in conversation with the provider of these kind words, @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social TONIGHT: 7:30pm at @stjoesny.bsky.social! (details on Maggie's page—she + Saeed Jones are touring for their book THE PEOPLE'S PROJECT)

Got real nerdy and specific with Danielle Evans about her story "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain." I LOVE how it turned out! "I want to feel like at any given moment in a story I’m asking what’s going to happen next, though hopefully those answers turn out to be unexpected or complicated."

I just found out that REFUSE TO BE DONE is going into its 8th printing! I've heard so many stories from writers whose projects have been helped along by this little yellow book over the past three years. Nothing makes me happier!

"I wanted to explore HOW we got to this particular historical moment, rather than just make it into some sort of potboiler." Contributor @housleydave.bsky.social interviewed @austinross.bsky.social for @barrelhouse.bsky.social! Read it all right here: buff.ly/AnnRNbb

Giving myself the smart edits to figure out later.

hello! we @ hex hope you are well & hope you will consider us for your speculative flash fictions and prose poems! It's such a treat that I get to do this with two people I love and look up to very much, and get to read all of your wonderful submissions. I can't wait to see what you have for us!

Honesty and transparency about publishing a book—but also important reflection on gatekeepers, who are sometimes just making business decisions, as much as it sucks for writers to hear.

Great essay by @tmcallister.bsky.social at The Metropolitan Review about his experience with large and small presses, with a clear-eyed, experienced idea of the pluses and minuses. Also a nice confirmation that querying agents is awful for nearly everybody. www.metropolitanreview.org/p/to-go-big-...

Wrote for The Metropolitan Review about the pros & cons of working w/ small indie presses vs. big presses, the journey from almost being a big fancy author to being a medium unfancy author, and mid-career re-evaluation of what I want out of the writing life www.metropolitanreview.org/p/to-go-big-...

Outlook Springs Issue 9: The Unauthorized Coloring Book has arrived! Fantastic fiction, heart-cartographic essays, poemy poems, and uncolored images await you inside! Support small presses and writers. Order yours today!

Aw, cute. My car still thinks these are two different places.

We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.

Over at @barrelhouse.bsky.social I interviewed @austinross.bsky.social about his truly awesome paranoid thriller of a novel, GLORIA PATRI, the process of writing the book over many years, how much querying agents sucks, January 6, and Patrick Swayze movies. www.barrelhousemag.com/blog/an-inte...

received an email from someone telling me they use AI tools to help them revise their memoirs on substack, specifically so that they can be more easily digested by AI readers, creating a perfect feedback loop of nothingness, the ultimate ouroboros of slop

SUBS are OPEN for the @fiyahlitmag.bsky.social special *reprints only* issue, SINNERS, SAINTS, & HAINTS! Shakeema Smalls and me, eds. If your spec fic prose/poetry features the Black American South, send it to us! Closes August 30. Details here: fiyahlitmag.com/submissions/Writers #Blackbooksky

I don't think AI will either become a totally revolutionary tech or be a nothing tulip/NFT bubble. I think it will be like social media: something that everyone knows is mostly bad and stupid but gets addicted to as it degrades our quality of life, politics, and culture in a million small ways.

Still taking book pitches for @barrelhouse.bsky.social, through Aug. 9. Looking for short books (25K-30K words) that combine criticism and memoir, exploring some pop-cultural artifact that's played an outsized role in your life, or that connects in some unique/interesting way to your own story.

Big news for authors with out-of-print prose books looking for a new home: We're opening up submissions to our Lost/Found imprint on 9/3! We were so happy to rehome Brooke Shaffner's COUNTRY OF UNDER last year + now we're ready to rehome more. Full details forthcoming, but the pertinent ones are:

I understand the feeling of hopelessness, but the book is not a product. It’s art, and the making of art is meaningful and human and an act of subversion in an inhumane world. We need books more than ever.

It's time to quote this again. We need (your) (anticorporate) literature now. Listen to Dan.

"If your books were uploaded to LibGen/fed into the LLMs, add your name to the potential class action lawsuit by tomorrow." Details: LibDem database: www.theatlantic.com/technology/a... Attorney form: www.lieffcabraser.com/anthropic-au... (This information comes via a reliable Discord source.)

In music news from yer dad, it turns out that if late 70s Little Feat had covered a bunch of late 70s Billy Joel songs, it would have been pretty good. Which is to say, the new Goose album is pretty good.

A teenage 4channer was beat up by two 15 year olds in DC, which was spotted and quickly stopped by nearby police. He told his friends, the richest man in the world and the Vice President of the United States, that he was pummeled by a dozen adult Romanians. A week later, Trump federalized DC police.