Sarah Wrote That | Open City

Favorite covers from Open City [buy back issues]

Authors from these issues and others include: Sam Lipsyte, Mary Gaitskill, Vestal McIntyre, Sigrid Nunez, Walter Kirn, Kate Christensen, Abigail Thomas, Robert Walser, Terese Svoboda, Antonya Nelson, Dara Weir, Edmund White, Harold Brodkey, Tomaz Salamun, Charles Bukowski, Nick Flynn, Deborah Garrison, Anne Sexton, Rebecca Wolff, Leni Zumas, Phillip Lopate, Rachel Sherman, Maxine Swann, Bryan Charles, Sarah Gorham, Carolyn Forché, Lara Vapnyar

Open City, Closed: Acclaimed Literary Journal Says Goodbye →

This makes me really sad. Open City published the first of my stories to appear in print. Mine was chosen from the ‘slush’ and, with two other fiction debuts, appeared alongside a story by Christopher Sorrentino and excerpts from Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask and Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges.

Six pieces, three debuts.

Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas, Open City’s editors, artfully balanced the new and the known to create issues with heft and promise. And beauty. I was as delighted to see my work in there as by anything I’ve done, and it remains one of the best things that’s happened to me.

Open City Books continues:

For now, Ms. Yas is at work on an anthology of stories from the magazine. [Open City Books’] next title is The Smell of Pine, a novel by Lara Vapnyar.

I’m really enjoying Rachel Sherman’s The Living Room, and her use of third-person to juggle three women’s perspectives. The teenage and elderly voices come through particularly distinctively, and Sherman’s pacing is like listening to good improv; you know a lot of skill goes into hitting notes that fall so right, but it never feels arduous.

Faster Times interview with Sherman
“Two Stories; Single Family; Scenic View” from Sherman’s story collection The First Hurt

I’m In The New Yorker…

…events listings:

25 Jan 2010 23:15

A Week From Tonight

I’ll be reading at KGB Bar in New York, and I’d love to see you there:

Wednesday, January 27, 7pm
85 E. 4th Street (between Bowery & 2nd Ave)
FREE

Also reading:

Ben Nachumi (poetry)
Christopher Sorrentino (fiction - National Book Award finalist)

Part of the Open City KGB reading series.

My Print Debut

I have a story in Open City #28 (Winter 2010), available December 15 (or place an advance order here). I really can’t overstate how happy this makes me.

The issue contains fiction by Jonathan Dee, Sam Lipsyte, Leslie Maslow, Michael McGrath, Gary Lippman, and Christopher Sorrentino; poetry by Sophie Cabot Black, Ben Nachumi, Kevin Oberlin, Adam Peterson, James Schuyler, and Dan Sofaer; and nonfiction by Louis B. Jones and Laurie Stone.

7 Dec 2009 20:06