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“How
one is revealed or undone by the perfect word”
- Philip Roth, The Human Stain
THE VIRTUE OF finishing a story in a thousand words or less
is in the way attention becomes microscopic: pointing toward
a gesture, a facial expression, or an action, that in the
hubbub of a longer work might be a mere background detail,
remarked on but not really noticed. In selecting one hundred
quite short stories for each issue of Decameron, the editors look
for writing that wrangles the expressive features of both
prose and verse. A good quite short story may deploy the recognizable
point-of-view and informational detail of fiction, with a
poem’s ephemerality and forceful diction and rhythm.
DECAMERON PUBLISHES SHORT prose stories of up to 1,000 words. We accept multiple and simultaneous submissions. In addition, we are also looking for submissions of original translations from any language, accompanied by a copy of the source text and that text’s date of original publication.
Submissions are considered on a rolling basis, for the next immediate or for future issues. Please email your story submissions as .RTF or .DOC attachments, or mail them to Decameron, c/o The Pen and Anvil Press, 57 Longwood Drive, Lunenburg, MA 01462.
The magazine is published by The Pen & Anvil Press, a
publishing imprint of the Boston Poetry Union. Copyright for
materials appearing in the print edition and on this website
is reserved by the respective creators.
Volume I of the inaugural issue will be released in Fall 2011. The second volume will be available before the end of the year, at which time the winner of the first Decameron Fiction Prize will be announced. |
