Among The Jumbled Heap

Rejection

The past year, I have been diligently sending out my short stories to various journals.  This is a major psychological step for me.  My stories have always been just that, mine, and I have not wanted to share them with a larger audience.  A feeling, I'm sure, that is partially rooted in my own fear of rejection.  So far rejection is all my stories have found in the wider world. This past week I received yet another letter saying "no thanks."  This one came from Cezanne's Carrot, a journal who...

Herta Muller and the Book of Revelation

The Literature of Oppression The current wave of obsession with the Christian notion of the Rapture and the Apocalypse, on the surface, has little to do with literature and certainly even less to do with the writing of Herta Muller, the Nobel Prize winner of 2009. Rapture literature is low-brow fiction, for sure. The Left Behind series written by Christian hacks Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye in no way participates in what the Nobel committee calls the “great conversation of world literature.” ...