Issue 29 is Here!

The Fall 2009 issue of Third Coast is hot off the presses and flying straight into your mailboxes.

The issue features beautiful cover art by Sally Grizzell Larson and many literary goodies inside.

Copies are available for $9 starting immediately. See the subscription page for information on how to get one.

There are only a few copies of Issue 28, Spring 2009 still left.

National Book Award Finalist

Congratulations to Bonnie Jo Campbell, who has just been named a National Book Award Finalist for American Salvage. We published a new story by Campbell, "Somewhere Warm," in the Spring 2009 issue of Third Coast.

You can check out our review of American Salvage in our soon-to-be-mailed Fall 2009 issue.

What the Editors Are Reading

We read all the time. When it comes to submissions to the magazine, we only read certain months of the year (see website), but on a day to day basis, the editors are constantly reading published work. Some of it's new, some of it's classic, some fiction, some theory, some poetry and some of it blogs.

Here's what we're currently reading:

• Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky
• White Noise, Don DeLillo
• Save the Last Dance, Gerald Stern
• I Served the King of England and Too Loud A Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal
• Patricia Smith's poetry collection Blood Dazzler
• Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn, (essays, etc., about the work of Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson)
• Dobby Gibson's poetry collection Skirmish
• Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World, Bonnie Costello
• Burn This Book, edited by Toni Morrison
• For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book, Alicia Ostriker
• In a World of Ideas, I Feel No Particular Loyalty (chapbook), Adam Clay
• City Poems (chapbook), Cindy St. John
• The Liar's Club (memoir), Mary Karr
• "One Reader's Digest: Toward a Gastronomic Theory of Literature," Brad Kessler
• the poetry of Wallace Stevens
  
• Harley Erdman's Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860-1920
• Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen, Henry Bial
• Clifford Odets' play Awake and Sing!
  
• Elmer Rice's play Counsellor-at-Law.
• Paradise Lost, Milton
  
• The Kite Runner
• Til We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis
  

In addition to that list are assorted short stories by Rick Bass, Flannery O'Connor, and T.C. Boyle. And (for those of us who also teach) a flurry of student papers as it's just about that time of year when composition students finish up their first project.

Rybicki in Best American Poetry

John Rybicki's poem, "This Tape Measure Made of Light," which originally appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Third Coast, was selected by David Wagoner for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2009. We couldn't be happier for him. Congratulations, too, to our past poetry editors Elizabeth Knapp and Kim Kolbe on a job well done.

The "Vanity" Search

Do you Google yourself? We do.

I'm happy to say that when I type in "Third Coast" to that ubiquitous search engine Third Coast Literary Magazine was the first entry to appear.

The journal comes in ahead of Third Coast International Audio Festival, Third Coast Guitar Repair, Third Coast Rubber Stamps, and even the Wikipedia article that takes a stab at defining just what a third coast is:

an American colloquialism used to describe several (usually coastal) regions distinct from the West Coast and the East Coast of the United States ... most often used to refer to the Great Lakes region.

We're pretty darn proud of our search placement even if it is only a matter of algorithms. But you don't have to Google us to find our information; Third Coast is listed with all of the major directories of literary journals.

But when all is said and done, the one thing that surprised me in my search was the Third Coast Surf Shop in New Buffalo, Michigan. I've been a Michigander most of my life, and up until now I never thought you could "surf" the Great Lakes. Guess you learn something new every day.