Good news! Tim Horvath’s “Chop,” Hillary Leftwich’s “Past Hertz,” Robert Lopez’s “However Many Sayings to Live and Die By,” and Dawn Raffel’s “Three Cities” were selected for inclusion in The Best Small Fictions 2021!

Delighted to have published these marvelous fictions in Big Other last year. Can’t tell you how happy I am to see these writers and these fictions receive this honor.

From Tim Horvath’s Cortázaresque hopscotching among forms, genres, and styles to Hillary Leftwich’s exacting prismatic, liminal limning of time, pain, and suffering to Robert Lopez’s Kafkan, Beckettian, Lopezian bleak phlegmatic comedies to Dawn Raffel’s feminist, fabulist, interpolative conversation with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, these fictions are exemplars of what I’ve always endeavored to publish: Art for Life’s Sake, what Franco “Bifo” Berardi calls “the language of nonexchangeability, the return of infinite hermeneutics, and the return of the sensuous body of language,” that is, “poetry as an excess of language, a hidden resource that enables us to shift from one paradigm to another.”  

Congratulations, Dawn, Hillary, Robert, and Tim! And thanks to editors Nathan Leslie and Rion Amilcar Scott and the rest of the team at Sonder Press for selecting/publishing these fictions! Looking forward to seeing them published in the anthology.

(Photomicrograph: Groundsel seed head)