Hi folks. I hope the week has gone well where you are. I'm writing from the Netherlands where, if I've pre-scheduled it correctly, I will be spending my day off at the Rotterdam bluegrass festival when you receive this. I'm excited to hear how some familiar music has been received and made local in an unfamiliar context. Hopefully it happens more smoothly than my newsletter writing did, when I accidentally included the wrong link for our editors' summer reading list. This is the correct link.

Our review this week was Emily Hall writing about The Glass Garden by Jessica Lévai, published by Lanternfish Press. Emily previously reviewed Boxcutters by John Chrostek.

And the next story in our summer flash fiction series was "Pair-A-Dice" by Will Musgrove, who we're excited to have in our pages for the first time.

Congratulations to Oscar Mancinas whose "Entrance Exam" is included in The Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2025, and to Elissa Cahn ("The Human Heart: A Topographic Map and Guidebook"), Corey Farrenkopf ("Wolf Skulls, Four Dollars (Harwich, 1713)"), Patti Jazanoski ("The Departure from Malaga Spain"), and J.D. Strunk ("Dawn Chorus") whose stories are all included on the longlist.

Congratulations as well to Alan Michael Parker, whose latest book Bingo Bango Boingo  was published earlier this year by Dzanc Books.

And submissions remain open until July 20 to be considered by guest editor Nicholas Claro.

Finally, thanks to Abigail Oswald for sharing some summer reading of her own. She writes,

I just finished Paul Fleischman's Alphamaniacs, which explores the lives of 26 writers who expanded the possibilities of language -- super fun read. And Mason Currey's Daily Rituals: Women at Work was a fascinating deep-dive into a bunch of different women's creative routines; I listened to the audiobook for that one. Highly recommend both!

Thanks for reading,

Steve Himmer