Online Short Fiction Review: Flatmancrooked

I recently found myself buzzing around the web trying to find a good short story. Needless to say, I was at work. Although I wouldn’t want to read a full novel on a desktop computer, a short story is the perfect length for a quick break. I bounced around a handful of big-name literary magazine (Paris Review, Antioch, Harvard Review, etc) looking for a good short story to read, and quickly became discouraged. Discouraged with the websites and their offered fiction.

Most of the venerable, old-school literary magazines are still struggling with the idea of online publication. Until recently, publication meant having a story or poem printed in the physical world, so publishing online seems like an oxymoron. As a result, their websites are often only after-thoughts. I found website after website offering only one or two stories from the current issue and maybe a handful from back issues. This isn’t particularly helpful to a reader, and it’s even worse for the authors. However respectable these grand old dames of literature may be, the meager circulations of even giant names like AGNI and New England Review (estimated at 2,500 – 5,000 and 1,000 – 2,500, respectively) are pitiful compared to the monthly, weekly, and even daily hits of new literary websites like Narrative, Glimmer Train, and Zoetrope.

So, in keeping with C4′s mission to stay on the edge of digital reading, I will be using this space to highlight online literary magazines that are reader and writer friendly. This space will also be used to feature a great story currently available for free online that you may have overlooked. Ideally, these works will not be appearing in print.

Flatmancrooked is brand-new in the scheme of things. They started out in 2008. Here it is, only 2009, and they are offering a fiction contest judged by literary heavy-weight Aimee Bender with a thousand dollar prize (larger than most small presses offer for winning their full-length book contests). The fiction on their site is consistently good and their list of authors already boasts an accomplished lineup. So how did they do what so many folks with a website and love for fiction want to do, and go from nothing to successful so quickly? We can compare them, briefly, to the New England Review (rapidly going the way of the dinosaur) and the other embattled-yet-respectable literary magazines to find out.

At the NER’s website you will find:

• An ugly, “Our real magazine is published in paper and this is just up to have something, anything, online,” website design.
• Two stories from the current issue are available online and only one from each archived issue (if and when the links work) can be found in their archives.
• No email submissions are accepted. They do not even use the online submissions manager many of their contemporaries have adopted.

The NER’s website is not friendly to readers or writers. It looks like crap. They offer a minuscule amount of fiction. There is no option to pay more for immediately access: you’re expected to order an old issue and hope one of the stories strikes your fancy (this can’t be helping the eighteen out of twenty-four writers whose work is not chosen to be available online each year). And writers still need to send in their work through snail-mail. This used to be standard practice, but with so many of their contemporaries offering email and online submissions (and really, why wouldn’t you?) it is just as easy for the unagented writer to click to another website.

At Flatmancrooked’s site you will find:

• A real website instead of just the text contents of a paper-and-staples literary magazine cut and pasted online. Flatmancrooked’s website comes complete with blogs, videos, current news, all of their content, and, in general, all the features real websites provide.
• ALL of their previous stories are available, in full, to any reader completely free of charge (great for readers and authors).
• Email submissions are actually encouraged.

I’m not trying to pick on the NER or tout flatmancrooked as a perfect online magazine, they just happen to represent the two schools of thought about literary magazines and short fiction these days. On one hand you have the old magazines of yesterday, the ones with the ugly, 1996-era sites. Obviously their REAL work is the printed material and not the website. These include magazines that regularly place authors in the Best of American Fiction collections. On the other hand you have new sites that understand the internet is a friend that can be used to reach a much wider audience than physical magazines ever could. You can be published online. And, seeing how folks at flatmancrooked have a plan in place to publish a best-of anthology every fall, the writer who chooses online publications can have both.

So what does this mean for writers, readers, and the short story? It means that the curmudgeons refusing to join the 21st century by offering limited fiction on boring sites and turning up their noses at electronic submissions are going to be less and less appealing when compared to the wide readership and author-friendly practices found at the newer online literary magazines. Short fiction in general has a lot to gain from this: other than stories appearing in huge markets like the New Yorker, Granta, or Narrative, there is not much of an audience for uncollected short stories. With easily-linked content and the potential to reach thousands of readers, authors of short fiction will have a better chance of fighting obscurity and finding their audience when publishing online. It’s a shame that the magazines that led the way for new authors in the past have decided not to do so again, but fortunately there are many websites, ejournals, and epresses stepping up to take their place.