Writer’s Market Listing
The Cathode Ray Review
English Department, P.O. Box 10102, Literature University, New York NY 10102-0000. Email: theliteraturereview@junkmail.com Contact: Greg Arious, editor. (deceased) Magazine: 13X2; 4-1180 pages; coated with polyurethane cover paper; 120lb. “The Cathode Ray Review publishes 10,000+ word stories that steer clear of character, and plot, unless they resemble recent movies. We also accept translations, if they resemble recent movies. We don’t enjoy reading flat prose, so right click every couple words and use the synonym function, picking out a word with more letters. We want a writer who’s not afraid to dust off the first 10 chapters of their failed novel and send it off without bothering to edit out the chapter breaks.” Semiannual/septuagenarian. Estab. 1882.
• Stories for The Cathode Ray Review have been included in The Best Armenian Short Stories, and have won the Puelit Surprise.
Needs: literary, environmental/erotica, hybrid forms of recipes, and short short short shorts. Receives 100,000,000 unsolicited mss/month. We process art like poultry. Accepts 6 mss/decade; 0/year. Publishes 6-12 months after author’s death. This month is our theme issue, Writing about writing, especially if you’ve never published anything. Recently published work by Greg Arious, Randolph McQueef, and Raymond Carver’s (Obituary)
How to Contact: Please DO NOT submit nonfiction. It is not a real genre. Seriously, nonfiction writers are basically poets with Down’s syndrome. We are actively seeking new writers if your name is Ha Jin, and Alice Munro, or you are a representative of the Norman Mailer, or John Cheever estate. Otherwise, we will hold your submission of six months before “tea-bagging” it and sending it back. Note: We pay close attention to expensive stationary. Make sure to pick out colorful stamps that symbolically represent your story and/or personality. It will catch our eye. Your submission will not be read unless it is composed on an obscure downloaded font that looks like handwriting on resume paper that is both stapled and has a paperclip. Your piece should also be left and right justified, with 1.5 spacing, and small cap the first clause after each page break so that your piece visually resembles publishable material. All cover letters should include a lengthy biography that is preferably told in the third person, and a list of inane details that have nothing to do with your writing credentials. Begin with, “I was born,” and go from there. Headshots are a plus. Feel free to make up publications. Everyone else does.
Payment/Terms:
Advice: “Just rip off Joyce’s story ‘The Dead.’ Anybody can write modern fiction. Just do these four things. Take a stock character full of angst, but don’t show it. Don’t have anything happen. Raise a question. Don’t answer the central question, (unless it involves sex (especially environmental/erotica), tits, drugs, or alcohol) but instead, have the angst ridden character look out a window, or at a bank of fog rolling in, etc. Make sure to include ‘The End,’ otherwise we wont know to stop reading.”
A blog’s quality is directly in proportion to the number of pictures of pensive men smoking on the homepage. I’m glad the Advice makes the distinction between sex and tits, because the one story I sent them confused the two and was rejected.
I had this picture picked out last week, and when I saw yours, it made me happy. Sex and tits are two completely separate subjects. Isn’t that what you fiction people talk about 95% of the time in workshop? In nonfiction, we have to be honest, so in my case sex and tits never really enter the equation. My subject is almost always self-debasement.
“Seriously, nonfiction writers are basically poets with Down’s syndrome.”
Or, as we learned at tonight’s Voice Over, maybe they’re poetic souls that really know how to cook, or really need to pee.
I didn’t mean what I said about nonfiction. I write nonfiction. It’s my first love. I was really just making fun of how the other genres discount us as naval-gazers, or some kind of subset of their own genre.
I know you really love all your fellow nonfictioners, but I couldn’t resist teasing you. :-)
[...] Send Your Work (Not) In Events, blogs we like on February 13, 2010 at 9:31 am A truly funny mock Writer’s Market listing from the literary blog bark: [...]
right on!
Hey, Scott’s famous!
but do you accept simultaneous submissions?
[...] I would love to take credit for the following, but I cannot. I can tell you that this lovely piece of snark came from the literary blog, bark. [...]
[...] I would love to take credit for the following, but I cannot. I can tell you that this lovely piece of snark came from the literary blog, bark. [...]
Hey, Scott’s even more famous! Congrats Buddy!
[...] saying anything new here. Hell, this very site (which is closely linked to a lit mag) has even lampooned the standard lit mag submission call. For better or for worse, a lit mag is a lit mag is a lit [...]