Issue 193

Love seeing old friends... Hi Willie, Hi Carl. Adam Moorad's Bikini Sex is a jewel. Love the poems by Nathan Graziano. Read all of Issue 193 if you haven't already checked it out.

Issue 192

Never thought I'd see this happen... went away for a week's vacation, come home to a new issue of Thieves Jargon. Glad to see Scannell keeping some of the regulars around and bringing in some new people as well. Totally weird to read a new issue without knowing any of the work that's being published in there. Totally love Hello, Oblivion so far. Looking forward to the rest of Issue 192.

Frequency

Thieves Jargon now publishes on a monthly basis. Eight or so stories and poems every thirty days. Read. Digest. Read. Email the writers. Think about that thing you've got on the back-burner. Blast open the back of my skull. We exist in or amongst a glut. Thieves Jargon is melting the fat. Recall Beckett: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”

Tighter and stranger.

Dan Scannell
--Ed., Thieves Jargon

Thieves Jargon 191

We're back, and now under Dan Scannell's watch. Wish the fellow luck.

Dan Scannell's Best of 2008

Funambulism by D. Harlan Wilson
Wilson uses bizarro well, keeping it close enough to the familiar to hook the reader. You have the elements of excessive safety and the shallow expectations of audiences, but he avoids the danger of obvious allegory. What really drives the story home, though, is the concentration on things.

The Boy Who Ate the World by J.A. Tyler
This story speaks for itself. A statement about the modern world. A focused, purposeful use of magical realism.

The End of Algebra by Jimmy Chen
A look at the narrowness of modern human obsessions. Chen's prose always satisfies.

Opacities by Casey Anderson
An explication of boredom.

Enter your new co-editors

If you check out our Manifesto page, you'll see we have two new co-editors, replacing Kenneth Mulvey and Justin Hyde, who moved on over the summer. I chose Dan Scannell and Steve Young because they've both been published in Thieves Jargon, and they both were active on the previous message board. By active I mean neither one was afraid of being critical of work published in Thieves Jargon.

Scannell's comics have been featured aplenty in Zygote in My Coffee, and I just stumbled across a terrific Steve Young story today that was published in a 2007 issue of the Evergreen Review.

Speaking of the Evergreen Review, has anybody heard of them? They were mentioned in the New York Times over the weekend, I guess the publisher made a name for himself publshing Henry Miller and Burroughs and Bukowski and all those counterculture guys in the 60s and 70s, but he also made some good money off of French spanking videos. He lost all his money, and now all that's left is the online version of Evergreen Review and this documentary about the guy that's just opening in NYC.

Just thought I'd throw it out there.