New World Writing Quarterly

We’re work­ing hard to fin­ish up the sum­mer issue of NWW. Starting now we have sev­er­al new pieces online, with more to come.

Delighted to report that we’ve added a ter­rif­ic new Jennifer Pashley sto­ry “Hearts” to the Spring issue, along with four won­der­ful pieces by Diane Kirsten Martin. And last but not least, an intrigu­ing short non­fic­tion work by Tiff Holland.  Click –more

We’ve pub­lished the Spring 2013 issue tonight, clev­er­ly avoid­ing pub­lish­ing it on April 1. The issue includes work by Baron Wormser, Peter Shippy, Sidney Rifkin, Paul Lisicky, Robert Lopez, Lydia Copeland Gwyn and more. All of the work is won­der­ful –more

Gypsy Cante

Inside my mother’s clos­et it was cool and dim. Everything fell away: the sound of raised voic­es, clos­ing doors. I’d breathe in the musky scent of a pash­mi­na embroi­dered with vines and lilies, run my fin­gers over a bead­ed clutch the azure of the Himalayan sky—things my moth­er brought from India when she board­ed the plane that long ago day in the 50s and flew to America. 

Four Shorts

Now I Am Doubled Over

Allow me to say a few words, he says, and then he says, peo­ple think back­wards. I say to the per­son next to me, I can’t believe we’ve allowed this to go on and the per­son next to me says, I don’t know what you mean. At this point I’m livid, I am beside myself. I think about start­ing a fire or set­ting off an explo­sive but I don’t because that’s not a nice thing to do on a Sunday morn­ing and I don’t have match­es on me or kin­dling or any­thing that even resem­bles dyna­mite so I remain seat­ed beside myself. And it feels espe­cial­ly true because at this point it’s as if I’m both the one who said, I can’t believe we’ve allowed this to go on and the one who said, I don’t know what you mean. 

We’ve got­ten an ear­ly start with our Winter 2013 issue which you can find at the top of the col­umn to the right. We want to thank par­tic­u­lar­ly Denise Duhamel, Cathryn Hankla, Bruce Smith, Nin Andrews, Teresa Svoboda and Randall Mann for their –more

BlipMagazine has changed its name to New World Writing after the greatlit­er­ary mag­a­zine of the 1950’s. They were, of course, think­ing of world writ­ing, where­as we are think­ing more of the (per­pet­u­al­ly) new –more

I Won’t Get Lost

On the bus, the guy wants to know where he should go tonight. He’s in from San Diego, sleep­ing on a stranger’s couch. The strangers are at work and he’s wan­der­ing the city by himself.

I explain the dif­fer­ence between East and West 6th—hipster ver­sus drunk­en col­lege stu­dent, old­er ver­sus maybe underage.

I hear the East Side’s dan­ger­ous, he says.

To make last cook­ies, you first must make not-last cookies—Chocolate-Almond Biscotti, packed in a large tea tin. These you must give to your father to give to his sis­ter at Christmastime, his sis­ter hav­ing stayed home in New York City, as she was too ill to vis­it Boston for the holiday.

Of course, you can’t go so far as to call this a batch of “every­day” cook­ies, because your aunt is so sick, but they are at least vague­ly feel-good cook­ies because while she’s lost her appetite for almost every­thing else, your aunt (whom you have always resem­bled) eats them one right after the oth­er while lying on the couch in the apart­ment she shares with your father, attached to an oxy­gen tank and watch­ing Dr. Phil with her nurse’s aide.

Recently some folks have object­ed to hav­ing their work turned down via form let­ter. We regret that this is a nec­es­sary expe­di­ent, but there it is. We want to alert all authors who may be sub­mit­ting work to BLIP that it is our stan­dard prac­tice to noti­fy –more

Lots of crap pho­ny reg­is­tra­tions have befall­en us & so we have erased all reg­is­tra­tions and stopped reg­is­ter­ing folk. Taking the ball by the horns.  Please for­give if you were a gen­uine reg­is­trant and were erased. Means noth­ing. Personal.

The new issue is online now, com­prised most­ly of pieces we’ve pub­lished since the Summer 2012 issue. We’re fea­tur­ing Robert Pawlowski, Bob Hicok, George Saunders, Bobbie Ann Mason, –more

At Litquake 2012, San Francisco’s lit­er­ary fes­ti­val, dis­cov­er flash fic­tion with a sam­pler of read­ings from sev­en beloved authors and teach­ers of the short-short form. Blending poet­ry and prose, these tiny, truf­fle-like sto­ries are filled with a rare, –more

We are read­ing fic­tion, non­fic­tion and poet­ry. If you’d like to sub­mit, please fol­low the link below, leave a short bio note and any­thing else we might need to know. We are hap­py to read work of any kind, any length. Many thanks for your interest.

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Our friends at Mississippi Review have pub­lished, under the fine edi­to­r­i­al hand of Julia Mae Johnson, an anthol­o­gy of thir­ty years of sto­ries, poems, essays and inter­views pub­lished in MR when Frederick Barthelme was its edi­tor. –more

Sitting beside a suf­fer­ing, hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing zebra (real­ly a horse with stripes) was not new to the women in my fam­i­ly. My moth­er had expe­ri­enced it, as had my grand­moth­er and my grand­moth­er’s grand­moth­er. Now it was my turn

“For every pot there is a lid,” my moth­er said before she died. Nobody knew why she said it or why only females cried.

Here it was again, a life and death moment in the ani­mal king­dom call­ing for human com­pas­sion. In many ways this expe­ri­ence would be no dif­fer­ent than fish­ing for com­pli­ments from a bored hus­band on weekends.