Dear Reader,
Hello, and welcome to the eleventh issue of The Collagist!
As we announced on our blog a couple weeks ago, our 2010 Non-Fiction contest has come to a close, with the winning essay published in this issue. Selected by Unsaid editor David McLendon, our winner is Evelyn Hampton, for her essay "Nowhere Hill." I'm very happy to have such a fine essay win the contest, especially out of a very competitive group of entries, and I hope you'll enjoy it as much as we have. Not only were we excited to be publishing Evelyn's essay, but we also we enjoyed the other finalists so much that we'll be publishing them too, in our upcoming August and September issues. For those readers who missed the original announcement, here is the complete list of finalists:
Winner: “Nowhere Hill” by Evelyn Hampton
Finalists (in no particular order):
“No Soap” by Joseph Harrington
“Light” by Michael Palmer
“Coal Hollow Ekphrasis” by Floyd Cheung
“Breaking Point” by David Legault
Congratulations to all of these finalists, and thanks so much to everyone who entered the contest. Thanks also to David McLendon for being an excellent judge. If you're not already familiar with David's Unsaid, you owe it to yourself to check it out immediately. It's without doubt my favorite literary magazine, and most of the work from the first four issues is kindly available in full online for your persual. Get over there and get reading, just as soon as you're done reading the new Collagist. I guarantee you'll find a lot to love.
Speaking of having a lot to love: In addition to Evelyn's prize-winning essay, our June 2010 issue contains new fiction by Matthew Kirkpatrick, Brian Kubarcyz, Kate Wyer, and Monica Zarazua, as well as three novel excerpts, from Julia Holmes' Meeks (Small Beer Press), Patrik Ouředník's Case Closed (Dalkey Archive), and Davis Schneiderman's Drain (Northwestern University Press). This month's poetry comes from Rickey Laurentiis, Angela Narciso Torres, R.A. Villanueva, and Jaime Warburton.
In book reviews we've got coverage of The Breakwater House by Pascale Quiviger, The Infinities by John Banville, Inconceivable Wilson by J.A. Tyler, Something in the Potato Room by Heather Cousins, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender.
As always, thanks to all of our contributors for letting us publish their fine work. Thanks also to everyone who reads the magazine, everyone who sends us submissions, and of course everyone who takes the time to post about the issue to their blogs, Facebook, or anywhere else. We really appreciate your time and talents, and can't thank you enough for sharing them with us.
Sincerely,
Matt Bell
Editor
The Collagist