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Richard Ellett Mullin's avatar

The news this time makes me long for a return of the great short fiction editor Shannon Ravenel. Her anthology "New Stories from the South" ran from 1986-2010. No doubt those years constituted the Golden Age and we will never see anything in short fiction to match those years. I consider myself fortunate to have accumulated a number of these annual short-story treasure troves over the last several years since I got interested in fiction writing. I recommend them to anyone who wants to see how things used to be when short story writing was still a meritocracy presided over by the best American editors we will ever see. If you happen upon one of these anthologies in a thrift shop or used book store, don't even think about leaving the store without buying it. Editors today will know I am speaking the truth. Their visible frustration and the stream of acrimony surrounding literary journal publishing is a hard to dismiss feature of what used to be a great artistic endeavor. Long live the oeuvre of Shannon Ravenel...and Michael Curtis...in our collective memory.

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X. P. Callahan's avatar

AI/ChatGPT will never approach Becky’s sign-offs to these newsletters. They are glorious. ❤️👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

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