"Congratulations from The Literary Review!"

Below is an excerpt from an e-mail I sent to a good friend not too long.

I guess I’m used to the stop and go nature of this film. A couple of months of intense preparation and shooting, then a lull. Then a few weeks looking at and logging footage and transcribing and thinking about editing, then a lull. Then editing for a month, then a lull. Not how I like to work, but I have no choice on this. And I write during the lulls. Have to keep the fires burning.

I am very pleased and proud to announce that a short story I wrote during those lulls, “There Is Joy Before the Angels of God,” will be published in The Literary Review in spring 2010. In case you’re not familiar with TLR, here’s a quote from their web site:

The Literary Review: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing has been published quarterly by Fairleigh Dickinson University since 1957. Its many special issues have introduced new fiction, poetry, and essays from many nations, regions, or languages to English readers. Issues focus on such topics as contemporary fiction in Portugese, Iranian exiles, new Irish writing, North African authors, and Philippine fiction and poetry. Many works written in English and first published in our pages have won awards and been reprinted in collections.

Work from 22 winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature has appeared in TLR: Günther Grass, José Saramago, Wislawa Szymborska, Seamus Heaney, Camilo José Cela, Joseph Brodsky, Wole Soyinka, Elias Canetti, Odysseus Elytis, Eugenio Montale, Harry Martinson, Heinrich Böll, Pablo Neruda, Shmuel Agnon, Giorgos Seferis, Salvatore Quasimodo, Boris Pasternak, Pär Lagerkvist, Gabriela Mistral, Johannes V. Jensen, Ivan Bunin. and Rabindranath Tagore. TLR has published many other important American and world writers, often early in their careers.

I like those names.

“There Is Joy Before the Angels of God” will appear in print and, I believe, on their website. “There Is Joy…” is part of a collection of connected stories I’ve been working on for a while now. I realize spring 2010 is a ways away, but I thought I’d plant the seed now. You can be sure I’ll remind you again as the publication date nears.