cover image Novel & Short Story Writer's Market: 1,900+ Places to Get Your Fiction Into Print

Novel & Short Story Writer's Market: 1,900+ Places to Get Your Fiction Into Print

. Writer's Digest Books, $24.99 (682pp) ISBN 978-1-58297-147-6

So you've sequestered yourself in your garret, banged out what you humbly regard as the best short story since Hemingway's""Hills Like White Elephants,"" only to arrive at that perplexing and unnerving juncture: Now what? Anyone who's ever been daunted by the prospect of publishing their work will benefit from this updated edition (the 22nd) of the grand poobah of reference texts for the emerging writer. Thick as a phone book, this well-organized guide offers a series of friendly indexes and practical symbols to help users navigate its wealth of listings: agents, book publishers, online and print literary magazines, contests, conferences and resources for the genre writer. Peppered with tips (how to avoid the ignoble stamp of amateur, the do's and don'ts of query letters), interviews with authors such as Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Chabon (on his""process of discovery"") and advice from veteran editors like The Kenyon Review's Nancy Zafris, this trusty volume links up writers with their appropriate markets while preparing them for the long and often rejection-riddled road ahead. The section on graduate writing programs is an appropriate addition considering the discipline they provide, not to mention their astronomical rise in popularity, but prospective students should not be misled: the letters MFA do not grant automatic flight over the murky, purgatorial slush pile or have an open-sesame effect on the publishing industry. Neither does this book, of course, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper.