As Fictionaut grows, we thought it would be helpful to ask some of our veteran members to share their tips about getting the most out of the site. Here is the take of writer, teacher, and Fictionaut advisor John Minichillo. We welcome your comments and your own advice on how to best use Fictionaut below or in the forums.

If you are new to Fictionaut, there may be confusion about what this place is. Facebook meets Zoetrope? A Wikipedia for the literary underground? Classmates for MFAs? What should be immediately apparent is that there are a lot of very talented writers here that you’ve never heard of. While Fictionaut could have easily become the tallest of slushy slush piles, the quality of the work — from back when the community was merely large, to now that the roster is enormous — has remained consistently good, thanks to the invite system and our unique place in literary history.

For about one hundred years there has been an ongoing writer’s renaissance. We are the beneficiaries of relative affluence, widespread higher education, cheaper books, branching public libraries, and an increasingly rich tradition of short stories, novels, and lyric poetry. This is our moment. Add word processors, the Internet, and writing programs. What we see at Fictionaut, for anyone paying attention, should be obvious: there has always been more talent than room on the bookshelf. Except that now, as the publishing industry finds itself in crisis, the number of publishable authors writing in English has attained critical mass, and the value of literary writing depends on an exchange where making a living rarely enters into it. Most of us are willing to devote our free time and our lives to writing for the privilege of being read.

Fictionauts are posting previously published works they want to make freely available, just completed work they can’t wait to show the world, and work they are uncertain about and want to get feedback on. Each writer decides what to post, and if they so choose, what to take down.

I’ve seen my own work go into print magazines you can’t buy anywhere, and since many editors don’t consider previously published works, like the elephants’ graveyard, literary magazines are where stories go to die. With the rise of online literary magazines, we were told the Internet was forever and far-reaching. But I saw my work published at online magazines that disappeared overnight. And so, if online writing is slightly more ephemeral, our collective presence here lends weight.

It’s a given you’ll find work at Fictionaut you won’t like. As you play imaginary editor you’ll nix submission after submission, but you will also come across work that glows, and, as a member, you’ll be able to let that person know that you loved what they did. You will make a difference in the outlook of another writer.

It’s also a given that you will post work that will get lost in the mix. But when you get a favorite, or two, or ten, you’ll know you’ve really accomplished something, because the readers who have commented are also writers.

Browse around and read something every day. Post something long, much too long for what we’ve been told about the reading habits of Web surfers, or post something as short as a sentence. Send your invites to your writing friends, and your nonwriting friends, and the writers you’ve never met but you would love to see join. Figure out a new way to use the groups. Or stay away a long long time and come back to a slightly changed community. Fictionaut is a batch of writers with open-ended tools in the same way a university is a collection of people and buildings. We are as large as a small university now, and growing. We are just getting started and there’s no telling where this all might lead. Fictionaut is what we make it.

Rick Rofihe is a Scorpio. Rick Rofihe is sort of like an owl, though nicer. He is not concerned with, “Who, Who?” But rather, “What What?” Rick Rofihe sat down with me for an interview in his office for two hours. Rick Rofihe sent me home with a bag of sweets and an armful of books. In this bag of sweets, Rick Rofihe inadvertently reminded me that there is nowhere is the world where a person can get a pastry like New York.

Rick Rofihe has had more stories in the New Yorker than just about anybody, nine. The New Yorker has a 1 to 20,000 publish to submission rate. This means Rick Rofihe has a 1 to 180,000 publishing rate. Rick Rofihe once crashed on his friend’s couch in Boston. Rick Rofihe was a publisher at twenty years old. Rick Rofihe says, “If a publisher commits to a book, everybody in the publishing house should be behind the book. My sympathies are with the people in publishing houses, by the way. Those people have to pay the rent.”

I came to ask Rick Rofihe for advice on publishing and how to keep journals afloat, I came to ask Rick Rofihe for advice on writing. “If you want your literary journal to succeed, you have to do it on the cheap,” Rick Rofihe told me. He told me the Anderbo legend. “A student came to me to start it up. I said, ‘I can’t do it because I can’t type,’ he said, ‘We’ll do it on my computer.’ I said, ‘I can’t do it because I don’t have any money.’ So I got two of my students and one learned to build HTML. We’re still on our first issue in our 4th year. 80 poets, 40 story-writers.”

Rick Rofihe published Susan Breen’s story on anderbo.com and it is in Best Non-Required Reading 2009. Rick Rofihe and Anderbo.com have an average 24-36 hour reading/response turn-around rate. On the internet, Rick Rofihe: “It’s all right. The possibilities. I’ve gone from being a Luddite to a spammer. 4,000 people are on the mailing list. Not everyone asked to be on our list, but we provide them free entertainment.” When Rick Rofihe had more time he was reading 6-7 newspapers a day. Now he reads 2-3, which is still 6-7 dollars day. Rick Rofihe “came from a town which had no bookstore, no library, not even in school.” Rick Rofihe has work published on slushpilemag.com and says, “I’m so happy with it because it’s available at anyone’s computer.”

Anderbo.com is worth more than the Boston Globe is now, technically speaking; you can look into the figures published from when the Times bought it out and what it’s worth/not worth now. Rick Rofihe champions free work on the internet. “Now, some people are mad at me for giving it away for free, but the print book is not long for this world. “Three Point Back” was a story that I published on epiphanyzine.com and I had more feedback on that story than the nine stories I had in the New Yorker. It was also in print, it was a good-looking journal and they gave me six copies and that was nice but I was like, ‘What am I going to do with these? Send them to people? Why not just email them a link?’ You can read anderbo.com on your iphone, by the way.”

Rick Rofihe let me ask him about writing. “I advise anybody who wants to be a writer to live a very narrow life. Stop going to movies, stop reading books, and be a writer.” Rick Rofihe was patient when I asked him to spell 19th-Century novelist’s George Gissing’s name because he quoted him. “Gissing says writing is a mug’s game. I say, If it is a fool’s game, publishing is worse.” On writing: “I’m more concerned personally with the integrity of the story than anything. If a person accepts that a story, like a joke in western civilization, must be structured a certain way for it to be funny. A story must be structured a certain way. A story is not like life. There must be form. Fiction is completely unlike any other medium. In movies, you can’t tell what is going on inside a character, only in fiction do you get a chance to have any omniscience. To find what the character, another person, is thinking. Also, as a writer, it doesn’t matter what the world thinks of you, it’s what you end up thinking of yourself.”

Nicolle Elizabeth will check in with a group again next Friday. Matt Briggs recently discussed Rick Rofihe’s Father Must on the Fictionaut blog.

At the Huffington Post, Jürgen Fauth considers Fictionaut’s disruptive potential and whether “it may be more productive to consider the changes roiling the publishing industry evolutionary rather than revolutionary.”

The wonderful thing about running a site as open as Fictionaut is that when you give up control, good things happen. When we gave users a way to form subcommunities, forward-thinking magazine editors and small publishers like Keyhole, Praire Schooner, Barrelhouse, Mississippi Review, Flatmancrooked, Electric Literature, Everyday Genius, Word Riot, Gigantic, Wigleaf, Dogzplot, Featherproof, and Matchbook started their own groups on the site.

Read “Transcend and Include: Fictionaut and the Future of the Literary Magazine.”

Melville’s “Bartleby,” one of my favorite short fictions, is a story of walls, of being pressed against them. At the end, the narrator finds Bartleby “strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, and lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones.” That is sometimes the position you can find me, behind the locked door of my writing office. Of course, there’s that famous refrain of Bartleby’s, too–his “I’d prefer not to”–a stance that feels oddly courageous in the world of Wall Street. That’s part of the allure of the writing space, a place to hide away when the world offers choices I’d prefer not to partake of. (That is the first time I’ve ever used “partake of”).

I like to condense the writing space to something (very) tiny, walled-in. I know, in truth, I’m just sitting in a room typing and nothing really is at stake. It’s as undangerous a place as could be, unless one fears paper cuts and too-hot coffee and carpal tunnels. But that’s not the right state of mind for writing, at least for me, thinking that my writing space is where I have it easy. So I press myself up against this wall and imagine I’m doing something so terrifying that anyone in the world would prefer not to. Thus, in doing so, in writing as if up against unfathomable terror, I’ve convinced myself I’m doing something mightily heroic and important, that this tiny thing I’m up to has colossal implications. I’m thinking, now and for the first time, how the clutter of this space is really a metaphor of a certain state of mind. It’s kind of a mess, isn’t it? And there’s always that wall, like someone asking for brilliance, or maybe it’s more like a brain fresh out of ideas.

Randall Brown is the author of the award-winning (very) short fiction collection Mad to Live (Flume Press 2008). He teaches at and directs Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Literature programs. Writing Spaces is a series dedicated to the desks, cafes, libraries and retreats where Fictionaut writers work, providing a window to the physical places where some of the stories on the site originated.

Matt Baker‘s work is forthcoming or has appeared in the Cimarron Review, Texas Review, Tampa Review, Saint Ann’s Review, Santa Clara Review, FRiGG, Big Muddy, Saint Ann’s Review, Main Street Rag, and elsewhere. He’s the author of the novel Drag the Darkness Down (No Record, 2009.) You can read Matt’s story “Playing Dead” on Fictionaut.

What influences you? What writers, comedians, film, etc. do you admire, that may have influence on your work as a writer, and just generally make you happy?

Funny people influence me. I’ve always liked comedians. There’s this acceptance that most comedians possess, this idea that life is largely absurd when you take our actions out of our own selfishly narrated context; and so the point is to sit back and laugh at ourselves and at least enjoy the show. I like that idea. So naturally people like Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks, et al, had a great influence on me.

Repo Man is a movie that makes me happy every time I watch it, as do most horror movies.

I couldn’t name all of the writers that have influenced me.

How did you start writing your novel? Where did the idea evolve?

This is where the original idea came from: There’s an exit I used to take on my way to work every morning that passed by Odom Manufactured Homes and Shiloh something or other, two businesses – I don’t recall the exact names. One day I saw, Odom Shiloh, and I thought, what a great name for a character. From there, I started to write it and then I added another character, Birdshit, then Blakey Flake, and it just spun from there.

There was no initial idea behind the story. The Dog of the South is one of my all-time favorite books, so once I had the characters in mind, I modeled it a bit on that story – taking off in search of someone, and encountering memorable characters along the way. However, Drag the Darkness Down detours into darker territory than the understated comic genius of Charles Portis. But there’s no doubt his work is a huge influence.

Is there anything you used to do that you don’t do anymore?

I used to smoke cigarettes, not follow directions, drive too fast, go to the mall, collect baseball cards, not pay attention, blow up mailboxes with dry ice bombs, write poetry, do prank phone calls, go into the mosh pit, and play miniature golf.

Describe your childhood in 100 words or less.

My childhood was fantastic. I have great parents, a nice older sibling. When I was a kid my best friend, Kevin and I, used to do all kinds of creative and fun things. We went to the movies constantly. We staged movies (live action plays, really) for the neighborhood, started a magazine, a newspaper; had a short-lived office supply business and put on a break dancing showcase; and we started a bug extermination business called BugBusters.

You once told me that sometimes you listen to a song, over and over, and that several stories can come about from that. Can you talk more about this?

I said that? Well, when I’m writing (not editing or revising) I’m usually listening to music. So oftentimes a song – whether it’s a lyric or melody – will strike me in a way that sends me off into a new direction and I’ll sometimes have to listen to the song over and over in order to extract the juice from the original jolt of inspiration I’d received. That’s basically what I meant.

How do you stay creative? What are your tricks to get “unstuck?”

I don’t think I’m ever not creative, whether it’s writing or just goofing around. I think the trick, if there is one, is twofold: discipline and diligence. If there are any tricks, those are the only two that will probably work.

I write my way through story problems or creative dips. I just type, type, type, and eventually I’ll work my way out of it. I don’t do well thinking too much or pondering, I have to be in the act itself – writing – for the resolution to arise.

What story or book do you feel closest to?

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I don’t remember very many opening lines but I always remember this one. “In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.”

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday, Meg Pokrass asks a writer five (or more) questions. Meg is an editor at Smokelong Quarterly, and her stories and poems have been published widely. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

From the second part of our Luna Park interview with Laura van den Berg—the part of the interview about lit mags (see the first of the interview part here):

LP: If you had an unlimited budget to make your dream magazine with, what would it look like?

Van den Berg: I would want to make it more like a book or a chapbook rather than a journal. I love the idea of issues that highlight a single work, too, a la One Story. Maybe a really fancy chapbook, some kind of One Story/McSweeney’s hybrid.

LP: Are you working on anything now you wouldn’t mind talking about? Are there monsters involved? (I hope so.)

Van den Berg: I’m working on a novel and there is monster, although it’s somewhat removed from the narrator, appearing as something she keeps seeing on TV. I was determined to do something monster-less after finishing What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, for fear of repeating myself too much, but I don’t seem to be able to help myself.

Who says the editing life isn’t dramatic? (Maybe no one ever said it.) Two novels out this year with protagonist lit mag editors: Sam Savage’s The Cry of the Sloth and Paul Auster’s Invisible.

Significant Objects teams up with SMITH Magazine: Six Words of Significance (or something like that).

It has been a long time, but poetry mag 1913: A Journal of Forms is finally back with issue 3.

Blake Butler’s new polemic on lit mags, this time on reasons for being interesting. For example:

There are certainly journals that challenge and delight with a great % of work they include. But more often, it feels like, many journals are just a junior version of the bigger dogs. Less funded, more controlled, but still interested in pushing forward the same values as the ones they claim to be proud to be separate from. And so, when someone comes to this ‘market’ in the idea that they are escaping the above, and finds more of it, with worse design, what does that feel like? Where is the exit? What kind of ship?

New Gigantic mag mini-monster issue with, well, monster contents. Such as: “Brian Evenson on the Imperatives of the Modern Horror Film by Adrian Van Young.”

The Iowa Review gets a makeover.

I missed this originally: Shya Scanlon—author of the novel Forecast currently being serialized in 42 online lit mags—has some interesting things to say on The Faster Times about the future of web werialization. And he has even more to say in part II of the same piece, such as:

If writers are shedding conventions in this way, could it only be a matter of time before they start serializing their efforts? Or, to put it another way, might the results of their new forms lend themselves well to serialization?

The publisher’s nephew, hip-quirky Wes Anderson film star Jason Schwartzman, will be designing the next issue of Zoetrope: All-Story, with new fiction from Elizabeth McCracken, Stuart Dybek, and others. Here’s a review of the mag’s last issue (designed by Rex Ray) from the similarly wealthy magazine Dossier.

New magic from inside The Cupboard: “The Cupboard is pleased to announce A Brief Encyclopedia of Modern Magic by Michael Stewart which will immediately become the most important compendium of magical knowledge you own.” Well, awesome.

In case you somehow missed it, Electric Literature in NYTimes (and I promise to stop writing about them—that is, unless they keep doing such great stuff):

The brains behind Electric Literature are Andy Hunter, 38, and Scott Lindenbaum, 26, writers who met in 2006 at Brooklyn College’s M.F.A. program in fiction writing. From an office of roughly 300 square feet in an industrial building between the Dumbo and Fort Greene neighborhoods, they added an iPhone application in July, a month after their first issue.

I found out about Electric Literature through some Canteen Magazine related email list. I was glad to have found out about them for a few reasons. First of all, they pay contributors 1,000 usa-grade-a-smackers per story. Secondly, they publish beautiful work. Michael Cunningham, who was the MFA Director over at the Brooklyn College MFA and handed the Directorship over to Amy Hempel, is a contributor and supporter and I think he is nice, he sort of glows. I started to like Electric Literature more when I sent a submission over. The email I got back was honestly one of the nicest, “we’re getting to it” emails I’ve ever seen. Particularly in a time when journals are receiving submissions by the thousands, the fact that they took the time to stop and think, “we should send back a nice note” just seemed like good things from good minds to me. Like writers, readers and editors who get it. You know what I mean? Like they’re trying to do something but staying in a mindset with the rest of us. Like we’re all trying to “do something.” I liked them best when they sent me a rejection letter. It was a really long email and one of the most heartfelt, “keep it up, kiddo” in a non-patronizing way letters I’ve ever received. Plus they hold some bar events in NYC which include heavy drinking, and I’m a sucker for a gin and tonic. Perhaps you saw their write-up in the New York Times this week, and perhaps it gave you hope, that if you are seeking support in your writing, your craft, in your journal, in whatever your endeavor, that in these trying times there is hope out there. I think hope can come in the way of smiles and this crew seems to have an endless supply of them. They’ve started a Fictionaut group and I thought asking Ms. Anna Pru to explain herself would be fun, and it was.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth for Fictionaut): What is Electric Literature?

A (Anna Pru for Electric Literature): Electric Literature is a bimonthly anthology of short fiction. Each issue, we strive to publish five short stories that are emotionally charged and gripping – and we try to deliver our content in every viable medium (for example, print on demand, kindle, iphone app). We started Electric Literature to help literary fiction adapt to the changing publishing landscape. We want to demonstrate that a journal can pay well and still be self-supporting, and we want to expand the readership of the short story using new media and new forms of distribution.

Q: I have it on good authority a bunch of you founders of EL went to the MFA at Brooklyn College, (which by my counts seems to be, as one might say, “kicking ass” lately. Poets & Writers ranked it up in the single digits on the best MFAs to attend in the country list this issue) Now, don’t ask how i know this, it’s why they pay me the big bucks and I’d be put in front of the firing squad like Mata Hari if I leaked my sources. Did you know that according to a report Henry Wales gave the National News Service in 1917 (he was one of the members of the firing squad) that Mata Hari refused a blindfold and insisted on staring at the executioners while they shot her? Anywho, I was wondering how the MFA experience may have helped inspire starting a journal if at all?

A: The MFA experience is one way to find a community of motivated, creative types who are interested in creating a vital literary community – and now we want to keep looking for more and more of these types. However, the MFA was also a place where the harsh realities of publishing literary fiction were explained to us. Time and again, we were told that selling short story collections had become a near-impossible task, and that many literary journals were in danger, suffering from little or no official distribution. Instead of acquiescing to these ideas, we decided to take a more active role. With EL, we are now working to create the type of outlet for short fiction that we wish existed.

Q: Don’t you think Michael Cunningham is just dreamy?

A: Yes. Michael is a true charismatic. We’ve been very fortunate that he also believes deeply in our project. Writers like Michael have their choice of places to publish, so it means a lot to us that they trust us with their work.

Q: Why is it called Electric Literature and in 1550 when Gilberd discovered electricity, do you think he had a premonition you would exist?

A: I bet no one could have imagined that the same thing that makes little zaps if you pet a cat and then touch metal, would one day become a major way of transmitting stories. Electric Literature has a dual meaning: 1) our publishing model involves taking advantage of new media and other electronic means, and 2) we look for stories that are electric, immediately engaging and exciting, with a sense of movement, or, if you will, a charge.

Q: How is the Fictionaut group going? You guys are new around here, welcome, i like you. Hows it going?

A: Good so far, we’re still in the early exploration stage. We’ve poked around the boards, checked out some of the features, and have tried to get the feel of the community. We’re excited to see the creativity happening in the groups and forums. We like the way Fictionaut fosters community between writers, readers, and publishers.

Q: What groups have you noticed if any and do you like how they’re doing their proverbial “thing?”

A: We’ve joined a couple – thematic ones and groups of specific journals. The journal-specific ones have a slightly different feel, but we like being exposed to new journals and communities.

Q: What are you planning to do with the group if anything at all?

A: So far, I like the soapbox/sounding board aspect of the group – I’d like to involve the community in the stuff we’re really interested in: the short story today, how do we make a literary journal with new media methods popping up everyday, what’s a really gripping short story, etc, etc. I also think the groups have a lot of other possibilities as well, and I’m open to exploring.

Q: Tell me anything else here, plug the shit out of yourselves. get it? Plug? Electricity? Oh, nevermind

A: Our new issue is here! We just released a new Short Story Trailer on YouTube! Follow us on twitter (@ElectricLit). Issue two is now officially out. It’s exciting!

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

Mediabistro‘s Jason Boog and Matt Van Hoven talked to Fictionaut co-founder Jürgen Fauth about “building a socially-networked model for 21st Century writers.”  You can listen at Galleycat.

Barb Johnson worked as a carpenter in New Orleans for more than twenty years before receiving her MFA from the University of New Orleans in 2008. She won Glimmer Train’s Best New Voice in 2007, and her work has appeared in such magazines as Glimmer Train, Washington Square, The Greensboro Review, Guernica and Oxford American. In 2009, she received a grant from A Room of Her Own Foundation, which will support the writing of her first novel.

A collection of her short stories entitled, More of This World or Maybe Another, was recently released by Harper Perennial. She lives and writes in New Orleans.

Autumn is high tide for literary magazines. Luna Park assistant editor Marcelle Heath has picked out some of the highlights:

> kill author‘s Dorothy Parker issue features work by Audri Sousa, Jason Jordan, Mel Bosworth, Michelle Reale and others. Ajay Vishwanathan’s “A Serial Killer’s First Day in Medical School” and Amanda Marbais’ “Horns” channel Parker’s devious humor. Mississippi Review‘s Nonfiction Nonpoetry Issue includes works by David Shields, Gary Percesepe, Nicole Walker, Megan Mayhew Bergman, and our own Nick Ripatrzaone. “Friendship, A Semiotics” by Kristen Iskandrain’s captures the inherent ambivalence in social interaction. The Collagist offers excellent work by Matthew Derby, Kelley Evans, Roxane Gay, Catherine Ziedler, Ross White, and two novel excerpts: Hesh Kestin’s The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, and Shadowplay by Norman Lock. Scott Garson’s interactive story “About Me and My Cousin” is featured at matchbook. Finally, the current issue of The Northville Review includes work by Gillian Grimm, Gary Moshimer, Michelle Reale, and Lydia Copeland, plus Tara Laskowski’s “Dendrochronology” and an encyclopedic assemblage of Inside Jokes around the world wide web.

Laura van den Berg’s first collection of fiction, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, is out this month from Dzanc and has been receiving some great reviews, such as in The Believer and The Rumpus. In the first part of our interview with van den Berg, she discusses plausibility in fiction:

I haven’t been to a lot of the locales in the collection, though I used to live in Boston and have been to Paris a few times. This seems to disappoint people sometimes, probably because “autobiography” and “authenticity” are so often conflated—“But then how do you know X detail was real?” I’ve been asked. Fair enough, I suppose, but what does it mean for something to be “real” in a story? My feeling is that the only reality that matters is that story’s reality, so as long as the details, whether factual or invented, are things the reader can believe in, I have no qualms about making things up.

Blake Butler writes on HTMLGIANT: “It’s become a pretty popular complaint here and elsewhere: writers getting upset because there’s a literary magazine or journal who isn’t being up front about who they are and how they work.” I didn’t know it was such a complaint—though I suppose Butler is talking about the New Pages post a while back, probably some other stuff, too. Maybe some interesting things to think about though: the ease of publishing, the temperaments of writers and editors, etc.

Seems Rosalind Porter is just another in the long line of editors leaving Granta.

Guernica turns 5.

Ascent has moved online.

A new magazine I haven’t said enough about yet, though I have received both issues in the mail: Birkensnake. (Any reviewers out there?) Each issue is handmade. The latest one (pictured at right)—well, I can only say it smelled like spray paint when it arrived and I had to set it across the office until the odor subsided. In some ways, the most monstrous magazine I’ve pulled out of the mailbox. I show it to everyone, and some are afraid to touch it. This latest issue has work from Blake Butler, Matt Briggs, Joyelle McSweeney, Matthew Pendleton, etc. Here’s from Pendleton’s “Someday on Planar Surface”:

From 144D all the way to 336G, past the 321, 322, 323, 324 all-aisle enclave whispering to a forebear each from behind, Julian kept straight and on the task at hand. His tray out before him steady as could be, with an open-topped coffee-juice and a canned warming milk and a tube of bananas. The walk took a long time. He couldn’t remember how long since he had last made it, whether the lights had been up or down, or the outside sheathed away so tightly.

Utne Reader noticed an interesting essay by Curtis White from the latest Tin House issue—an essay Utne sums up as “Sustainability as Status Quo.” The entire essay “Without Light” by White is available online at Tin House, and an interview with the author is up on their blog.

Electric Literature has a new issue out—and another great new video, this time a trailer for “The Comedian,” a new story by Colson Whitehead.

A riveting new issue from PEN America came out today, the Make Believe Issue. New fiction from Evenson and Nunez, poetry from Ponsot and Xiabo. Richard Ford talks with Nam Le. Evenson, Mobilio, Kjaerstad, Anastas, and Aslam all talk together. Below are images from the disturbing comic “Alan’s War” by Emmanuel Guibert.