With the publication of this issue, we’re pleased to announce that Narrative now accepts unsolicited submissions of book-length works of fiction and nonfiction to be considered for serialization. Today, all forms of written material are moving into the digital realm, with libraries and publishers shifting from hard-copy books and periodicals toward various electronic means of storing and distributing literature. The new media will inevitably inspire new literary styles and works, and we’re optimistic about the future and eager to see how the human imagination uses revolutionary means to transform life into art. That said, hypertext, Internet indexing, and quick browsing tend to erode the continuity and authority of traditional narrative forms, and one of our continuing goals is to help sustain a readership for worthwhile, long creative prose pieces. To that end we are expanding our publishing program to include previously unpublished, completed book-length works. If you have a manuscript you’d like us to consider, we’d love to see it, and we invite you to visit our Submission Guidelines to learn what sorts of works we’re seeking, how to submit, how long it takes for us to respond, how much we pay, and generally how we go about serializing a book. If you send us your work, we will approach it with optimism and desire, and if we select it for publication, we will give it our full support.
Concurrent with our call for long works, we’re issuing a call for short short stories. At the suggestion of Robert Shapard and James Thomas, who edit the popular anthologies Sudden Fiction and Flash Fiction, we’re planning a feature in Narrative to coincide with the publication of New Sudden Fiction, which will be forthcoming from Norton in January 2007. Our feature will present a collection of short short stories by both well-known and newer writers, and we’re inviting submissions of stories that run between seven hundred and fifty and two thousand words, or no less than three and no more than five pages in manuscript length. If you’re interested in submitting a short short story for Narrative’s Sudden Fiction feature, we encourage you to read the rich offerings in previous Sudden Fiction anthologies, as well as Gina Berriault’s marvelous three-page story, “The Woman in the Rose-Colored Dress,” which is in our Library, and Richard Brautigan’s comic paean to misguided literary aspiration, “1/3, 1/3, 1/3,” which is collected in American Short Story Masterpieces. We hope you will be inspired to send us your own sudden fictions. For more information on how to send us your work, please see our Submission Guidelines.
