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Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Redux on Hiatus; Open Reading Period Announced

Redux will be on hiatus until January 9, celebrating the holidays and the new year. Thank you for your support, and don’t worry…there is much more to come in 2012!

Perhaps some of that new work will be yours!  We will be holding an open reading period that begins on January 15, 2012, and goes through February 15, 2012.  Please check the Submission Guidelines page for more details, but, basically, Redux is looking for your best stories, poems, and creative nonfiction that have been previously published in a print literary journal but that are not available elsewhere online.  The piece should not be part of a book at present, though it may be in the future. 

We're committed to finding new audiences for great writing, and we look forward to reading your work!

Monday, December 19, 2011

#14: Two Poems by Christina Pacosz

~This poem first appeared in The Bellingham Review (1981)


                Angry Lament on ‘Opening Day’, Draft Registration, July 21, 1980


                                                            “Don’t worry about it.  Kill them.
                                                             God will recognize his own.”

                                                                       Reportedly the response of a general
                                                                       in the Christian crusades when asked
                                                                       how to tell who was the enemy.


       God will recognize his own.
       The souls of the faithful are
       imprinted on his retina
       and their names lodged in his third eye
       on celestial microfilm. 
       Be assured, judgment does not rest
       with you. 

       Continue to use your sword
       crossbow   cannon
       rifle  M-16   nuclear warhead.
       Don’t worry. Continue to use
       your body. God will recognize
       his own. Remember, death
       is impartial. Slaughter neutral.

       Only God knows
       those he will enfold
       in the bright light of his reward.
       By many accounts heaven will not
       be crowded.  Only the pure
       of heart may see him.
       God will descend on the souls

       like a buzzard.  The bodies?
       Bullet-torn, decapitated,
       entrails spilling,
       spinal cords severed -
       mere flesh is not his concern.
       Or yours.  Don’t worry. 
       If you die in battle be assured.
   
       Your death will be a casualty
       for our side where
       by all accounts, God
       in his flak-jacket
       crouches beneath the only surviving tree.
       We have it on good authority
       God will recognize his own.

Monday, December 12, 2011

#13: "The Rose Garden" by Paula Whyman

~This piece previously appeared in North Dakota Quarterly (2004)



The travel agent assured her the room would have a view of the garden on the quiet side of the house.  She envisioned a flowery bower outside and, inside, a Victorian oasis (the house was built in that era) crammed full of faux-period clutter:  lamps with tasseled shades, pressed flowers labeled with their Latin names, portraits of hunting parties dressed in pinks.  In her room, a four-poster bed and a claw foot tub; in the morning, the earthy odor of frying bacon would draw her out of the bed’s feathery embrace to dine among Currier and Ives, rangy ferns, cut roses. 
Elizabeth rode through the patter of rain, safely dry in the back seat of the cab, and imagined her hosts.  “Tim”—the only name the travel agent had provided—would be a tall yet small-boned man in his early sixties with a reddish-gray beard.  Nearsighted, he would wear those magnifying half-glasses you could buy in the drug store, because he just didn’t care about fashion.  His wife (Mrs. Tim?) would be a heavy-set woman as tall as her husband who spoke only to ask pointed questions.  She would dislike women who wore perfume to breakfast.  The wife had an eye for artful clutter, but Tim was the better cook. 
The parlor would smell like cinnamon, which Elizabeth liked, or apple spice tea, which she did not.  There would be two cats who kept out of sight, except to appear out of nowhere and rub suddenly across the ankles, and she would have to stop herself from shoving them gently away with her instep, instead smiling at her host, commiserating about the foibles of cats.
The saddest words, what might have been.  Who wrote that?  She and Cleve had always preferred to sit at their own table for breakfast.  But this time was different because she was alone.  This time, she hoped for the strained camaraderie of strangers at one common breakfast table, the predictable remarks about the rich food and richer coffee, the name of which would sound like an ice cream flavor, “vanilla-raspberry sumatra.”  She would savor banalities like the guests’ capsule autobiographies; she’d even welcome the tentative, ill-advised stab at politics and the uncomfortable silence that followed.  Faced with strangers at eight in the morning, the only common thread that they’d slept in the same house the night before—Who would choose such an arrangement?   

Monday, December 5, 2011

#12: "Hot Coffee, Summer" by Christine Grillo


~This piece previously appeared in The Southern Review (2005).


Saturday, and Franco woke up all vinegar. He didn’t want the kids climbing into our bed. He didn’t want the kids getting lippy. He wanted only the paper and some hot coffee, so he made the coffee, but the percolator’s dying, so the coffee was bad, like tea. It was so light, he couldn’t even put milk in it.
Already, this early, the kitchen was summer hot. I made eggs and dealt with the children. Franco drank his disappointing coffee and read the papers, the Sun and yesterday’s Il Giornale, and he huffed at their pages. He grumbled in English, and he cursed in Italian.
Joseph, my little Joseph, our little Joseph, padded over and asked him, “What’s the bad news, Daddy?”
Franco told him there were bad people doing bad things. Joseph stayed where he was, but his eyes were wider than before. Franco let out more puffs of hot air.
“Can I see the bad news?”
Franco showed him a photo from one of the front pages. I don’t remember who it was. It doesn’t matter. The bad ones are all the same.
“Is that a bad guy?” said Joseph.
Franco said yes, absolutely, yes that’s a bad guy.
Joseph smiled but he tried not to let me see it. He’s terrified, terrified, of bad guys, and so he loves them, at a distance.
With the meal on the table, we all tried to eat with nobody crying or whining or yelling. But I had to put on the air conditioners, and they were so noisy we had to talk loud, and the kids finished in three minutes and chased each other over the couch with yolk and butter and crumbs on their hands, so there was some yelling and there was some whining. And the toaster’s dying along with the perker, so the house smelled like burnt toast, and that smell sticks around for hours.
After breakfast, Franco helped me clear the table. He was heavily silent, except for when one of the kids wailed, and he said, “Madonn’.”
“You’re fun this morning,” I said, which was probably a mistake.
His words were like acid. “Thanks, Rose. That helps. Very useful comment. A thousand thanks.” He speaks in Italian when he thinks we’re fighting, because he thinks the kids won’t understand. I don’t understand everything myself, but I get the tone—he needed to be left alone.

Monday, November 28, 2011

#11: "Nomen oblitum / Forgotten Name" by Jessica Handler

~This piece previously appeared in New South, 2011

My habit is to watch for small things. In gentle green grass I spy a single earth-caught feather, arced and crenellated, its knife-edge up. On inspection I see it’s a contour feather, and three inches longer than my hand. The leading edge is rippled and split from use.
A tool, lost, discarded, this single feather, ex-crow. One puzzle-piece of a carapace, densely black. Collectively: a murder of crows. Raven made the world says the Haida legend, but I am no northwest Indian, I have no claim to what some people self-consciously call “first nation.” I am southeastern, urban, and white, third-generation American. My taxonomy is built of flights not my own, but the ground on which I have been placed. In my hand now, this single feather from a crow’s right wing. My own non-hollow, flightless bones are right-dominant; do I feel the sympathetic pluck and plummet here on my own right wing?
This feather, pick it up – lice, vermin silenced by flight, return. This feather pocketed, earth-placed by a window, my own closest place to flight.  
###

 

Monday, November 21, 2011

#10: Three Poems by Tony Barnstone

~This poem previously appeared in The Northridge Review (1997).

Express Train Boogie-oogie
(Read left to right, and also verticality down indentations)

As the station recedes its lights blister
Into raindrop halfglobes
Wet tracks shuttle the eye
From path to path
Now the whole city is revealed gleaming
Fishnet of light pulling in lives
Along the avenue painted numbers
And panting engines flash into mind
Little balls of light the wind pulls
Across the glass like taffy
And now the train slides out of town
Into a flowering darkness
Here's the warehouse district and Club 333
A dark industrial geometry
Dragging trails of signs and coinage
Across billboards
Yellow fireflies packed in a jar
Burst their bulbs
Black trees and leaves in a black sea shivering
Before they drown
People make random gestures
A ragged man pasted on a bench
Where money mates with anatomy
Through the panting interiors
The windowsquares of well‑lit lives
Peer through orchids and seaweed
Greenlit pines lining an empty block
Of grey concrete parking lot
The thousand faces of a movie crowd
Burst through the borders of my body
Of triple‑X theaters
And out the red velvet EXIT
Here are plunging lovers behind half‑drawn curtains
And a woman's silent O as her mouth yawns open
A rainwet warehouse redslicked with rust
Long streets climb a hill and spill
Where metal streamlines clash and overlap
Against a canvas sky painted black
Someone looking up from his written pad
Windows like the slow frames of a film
Through my reflected body
Shining like the tines of a fork
As carload after carload of light
Flickers and is eaten whole



Monday, November 14, 2011

#9: "Driving in Snow" by Joseph M. Schuster

~This piece previously appeared in New Virginia Review (1993)

        When Byrne's brother arrives, Byrne doesn't recognize him. At first, watching the passengers emerge from the gate, he wonders if Thomas missed the bus, or decided not to get on board.  But not even Thomas is that irresponsible.  Byrne must have overlooked him.  Thomas is, after all, not a large man, and the station is in turmoil.  An early spring blizzard has moved in, making buses late.  Byrne has been waiting for an hour and a half in the midst of the lines of angry passengers, the masses of people planted on upturned luggage because there aren't enough benches.
        He is shoving toward the ticket counter to ask if a second bus is due from St. Louis when he spots Thomas, standing a few feet inside the gate.  He was one of the first passengers off the bus, Byrne realizes, but it's no wonder he didn't recognize him.  In his uniform, Thomas looks like a different person, with the starched creases in his trousers and the black necktie just visible at the collar of his coat.  Byrne is amazed at the transformation.  His brother seems innocent and young, like someone playing soldier.  It's the short hair, he realizes.  The long hair Thomas had before he enlisted hid his face, as did the blond wisps of the beard he tried to grow.  Now that face seems exposed, naked.  Byrne is reminded of the schoolboy in the pictures his mother had on her bureau at the nursing home.  Thomas in the second and third grades; Thomas before he turned bad.
        Byrne raises his hand to wave but sees that his brother isn't alone.  A woman cradling an infant is talking to him, her mouth close to Thomas's ear.  Byrne lets his hand fall.  Thomas hasn't said anything about a woman, and the circumstance of the visit -- their mother's funeral -- is hardly social.

Monday, November 7, 2011

#8: "Autumn Harvest" by Jane Delury

~This piece previously appeared in StoryQuarterly (2001)

     Jacques crouches in his father’s garden, coaxing leeks from the hard November ground.  Six rows of cabbages away, the old man is digging up bouquets of mâche with a grit-encrusted knife.  Jacques grabs a shoot of leaves and pulls out a stem, slick with saliva-like bubbles.  The leek slaps into the basket and his father looks over, his glasses steamed by plant breath into two opaque circles.
     “Getting them all?  And the roots?”
     “Fine, Father,” Jacques says, “I’m doing just fine.”
     He waits for the slice of the knife to resume, and then clutches another cold jumble of leaves.  The earth buckles and splits, belching a sweet, rotten smell.  With the leek in one hand, he uses the other to pull up the socks that have bunched around his ankles, exposing his heels to the bite of the air.  A hollow eye stares up at him from the plank where his loafers balance, precious and inappropriate against the warped wood.  “For your city shoes,” his father said when he handed him the plank at the gate.  Jacques wonders again what is really being protected his shoes from the soil or the soil from his shoes.
     The old man has finished the last row of mâche.  His gray gardening coat ripples over the emptied soil as he heads toward the main path.  Reaching down for the last two leeks, Jacques notices his father’s misbuttoned collar, which rises high on one side and lies flat on the other.  The collar is like the napkin the old man could not find the previous morningsitting under his forkor the letter he set out to mail twice or the reading glasses he misplaced on the top of his head.  Jacques’s mistake was to point out the glasses.  At the time, his father said nothing, simply lowering them to his eyes and flattening the newspaper against the table.  But that afternoon, he called Alexis and Emmanuel to the garden and they came running by Jacques, who was on his knees, mending a hole in the chicken wire.
     “Don’t yank, son.  Pull.”

Monday, October 31, 2011

#7: A Poem by Brandel France de Bravo

~~This poem previously appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review (2011)

 
Grammar School

America the Beautiful was our soundtrack, each of the twenty-four
frames per second as bottomless, open as the holes in our desks
where the ink bottles weren’t,  like the cloakroom without cloaks—just
parkas and yellow raincoats.  Hands perpetually raised, the smell
of mimeographs redolent as our mothers’ perfume, violet fingers
quivering in the air. God shed your grace on me, which would be
the lavatory key,  shackled to a wood brick bigger than a 7 year-old’s
hand, thighs, buttocks clenched against shame.  And naps
at our amber waving desks on pillows of crossed arms, my soul
 to keep, as the radiators, skeletal beneath the windows,  sang
their hiss and clang lullaby. Waking, we tied on our thinking caps,
index fingers ready to march once more across the Weekly Reader,
 to bushwhack through the dense green words,
fearful of ambush.

America the Beautiful was our soundtrack, each of us a majestic
 purple note, and each of the twenty-four frames a forspacious story,
until the projector, its young eaten, stutters to white, until Mrs. Boston,
roaming the aisles, would single out the one not seated
to teach us proper speech. “Where’s Antony?” she’d ask, or “Where’s
Jerome?” and Denise, Deborah and “T,” falling like straight men,
hang men every time would point to the student clapping erasers
or standing startled at the pencil sharpener, and shout, proud
to know the answer to something, “There he go!” And Mrs. Boston,
hands on hips, would turn to us, smirking slightly and using
the double negative I found so thrilling—my white mother would have
slapped me for it—to correct: “I don’t see him going nowhere.
There he is,” she scolded. I knew the difference between the two verbs
but the lesson came too late for me, going always  a substitute
for being in a life spent leaving: this classroom, this brotherhood,
this sea to shining, and Antony still
not nowhere.

 *****

 

Monday, October 24, 2011

#6: "Black Hole" by Walter Cummins

 ~~This piece previously appeared in Outerbridge (1993)
                                      
            The cloud cover thickened just as the cable car began its ascent, lifting off from the wooden boarding shed and skimming the tall spruces on the mountainside. Paul knew they had lost the sun for the day; only a small circle of blue sky remained far in the distance.  When they reached the peak, even the nearby ranges would be swallowed in grey.
            "We won't see a goddamn thing."  Paul kicked a boot at the side of the car.
            "Stop pouting," Leslie told him. 
            "I came here for mountains."
            Their eyes locked, and Paul quivered with resentment.  An hour before, maids clattering outside their hotel room, they had thrashed in lovemaking, not caring that their cries could be heard in the hallway.  Now he found her lips thin and mean as she clenched her jaw.  We're only good in the dark, he wanted to tell her but instead turned away from her face.
            Below the dangling car, the village and its lake shrank into postcard perspective.  But the plastic windows of the car were yellowed and scratched, blurring his view.
            Perhaps most people had known clouds would ruin the midday brightness.  Only a few others were in the car with them, pressed against the sides and peering outward: a very old man in hiking breeches with a gnarled walking stick; a mother and young daughter with the same plump sullen face, side by side but saying nothing to each other; a middle‑aged couple in shorts and thick boots over heavy woolen socks, their legs tanned and muscled.
            When the car reached the first of the towering pylons that braced the cable, it rumbled over the metal base and pitched sideways.  Paul panicked: the wires were snapping, they would plummet.  He gripped a handrail and then‑‑an instant later‑‑felt foolish, wondering if Leslie had noticed.  She stared out at the treetops.
            "The top of the world," he scoffed.      
            Leslie turned to meet his gaze.  "I'm as disappointed as you are." 

Monday, October 17, 2011

#5: "Tourist Season at Auschwitz" by Mark Lewandowski


~~This piece previously appeared in The Gettysburg Review (1999)

On the morning of the October day that England qualified for Italia ’90 (the World Cup soccer tournament), a small group of Englishmen were seen by some of the sports press at Auschwitz, laughing and posing as they took pictures of each other—doing the Nazi salute.
Pete Davies, “All Played Out”
           
At Birkenau stands a mound unlike those dotting the countryside that Poles have built in remembrance of past generals and statesmen.  You will not see picknickers lay out blankets on it or watch their children roll down the slopes.  The Birkenau mound is a mass grave for Soviet soldiers killed by the Nazis.  The bodies were packed so tightly together that they are still decomposing, and when it rains now, almost fifty years later, human grease rises to the surface and fans out through the grass in a brilliant rainbow of color.
            Not far from the mound lies what looks like an ordinary pond.  Bend over and peer into its depths and you might be surprised not to see a minnow or two, at least, in the water.  Take a stick.  Dip it into the water and movie it in circles.  Soon, a whirlpool of gray ash will funnel to the surface.  This pond is only one repository for the remains of the Jews.
            A Polish actor told me that these were just a couple of the sights in the Auschwitz complex most tourists miss.  I was with two American women I had met in a youth hostel in Kraków.  This was the summer of 1990.  The Berlin Wall had been down for only seven months.  American tourists were still a novelty to most Poles.  The actor, who spoke English fluently, spied us three on the rickety commuter train from Kraców to Oświęcim, site of Auschwitz and Birkenau.  He was going to visit his mother, who was a librarian at the Auschwitz museum.
            “By all means,” the actor said, “do not spend the entire afternoon in Auschwitz.  After you have watched the movie and seen the major displays, go to Birkenau.  The barracks still stand unmolested by museum directors.  Wander the buildings and you will read messages written in coal by the inmates.  You will find fragments of clothing, steel cans, rotted straw, heating stoves.  Leave the barracks and follow the tracks to the gas chambers.  They have not been reconstructed.  They have been left the way they were found, a much more profound statement to the horrors of the Holocaust than the glitz you will find in Auschwitz.  Why would the retreating soldiers bother to destroy the evidence if they were not aware of the incredible crimes they had committed against humanity?  Do not believe that they felt justified or that Hitler brainwashed them.  They knew their sin.  You will not experience their guilt among the glassed-in cases of human hair and suitcases at Auschwitz.  Only in Birkenau, the much larger of the camps, will you find what you are seeking.”

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

#4: "Little Sinners" by Thomas E. Kennedy


~~This piece previously appeared in American Fiction 1 (1990)

My ninth summer, in 1952, I ran with a kid named Billy Reichert, a classmate from The Christian Brothers Boys School. We were thieves. We used foul language. We smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes purchased with stolen quarters. We pored over the dirty pictures on a pack of Tijuana playing cards Billy had secreted in his basement. It was a lovely summer.
I loved stealing. You had to be quick and brave. I loved that feeling in my stomach just before I made my move. I glanced at whatever it was--a Milky Way bar, a cap pistol, a comic book--walked past, scanned the shop in front of me, turned, scanned behind, and if the coast was clear, zip!  I moved, shoved it in my pocket, under my shirt, down my pants. Then I hung around a while as a precaution, but also as part of the fun: that incredible sense of power it gave me to stay there, moving slowly amongst the enemy, the loot on my person, ­the danger, the triumph, the sheer belly-tingling risk! I asked the shop clerk, the guy with the pencil moustache and under-slung jaw at Gerstie's, say, the price of some impossibly expensive item, HO gauge electric trains or a glittering package of imported hand-painted lead soldiers in red coats, looked wistful, wandered out with my head down. I understood from overhearing my father, who was a legal counselor for the State of New York, that the law said you could not be arrested for shoplifting until you were actually out the door, so I was prepared to put the booty back on the shelf again at the least suspicious glance. But none ever came. I was too quick. Me and Billy could lift just about anything – coins out of the cigar box on the brick and plank newspaper stand in front of the Roosevelt Avenue cigar shop, comic books out of Gerstenhar­ber's, cupcakes and Mission sodas from the A&P or Frisch's Market, toys from the glass shelves of Kresge's or Woolworth's, and assorted junk, mostly mysterious small automotive gadgets, out of Sears & Roebuck's which, for some reason, we called Searsie's. If there wasn't anything in particular we desired, we would lift any old thing, just for the joy of it.
Billy was a nice-looking good-natured boy, blond and tan and blue-eyed with a big white smile and easy laugh. My feeling for him was a little like love. We were together all the time that summer, morning to night. We rose early in the mornings to go out prowling in the mild air, breathing the aroma of honeysuckle and cut grass. Usually I was up first and called for him because of his sister.

Monday, October 3, 2011

#3: Four Poems by Hailey Leithauser

Vexillology

~~this poem previously appeared in West Branch (2009)

Overnight, someone has discovered suffering.
Someone has putt-putted over an ocean of misery,
and planted a flag.                             
You can hear the cloth snapping in the morning
air that philanders the hyacinth
that sits by the door. You can almost see it
from the balcony where you recline,
tasting a glass of very cold
tomato juice, or a minted tea.                        
Listen...snap, snap, snap...
and then a lull, and then a moment,
and ... snap, snap...
the decorum of a hand
brushing crumbs from clean linen.
If asked, you would guess stripes
or a Scandinavian Cross,
a field of quince yellow
and aquamarine,
an eagle in the center, or a falcon
circled in stars,
clutching an emblem of laughable knives.


Monday, September 26, 2011

#2: "Clockwise" by Dana Cann

~This piece previously appeared in The Florida Review (2006)

            On the night they died, the Wynn family, each in his or her bed on the second floor of their house on Maiden Lane, dreamed of the children—of Tina Wynn, the girl, and Brandon Wynn, the boy—flying, clockwise, through the rooms and hallways that formed a loop on the first floor. It was the same loop the children had run when they were small, chasing one another or being chased by their father or their mother or, on occasion, both. But tonight they did so in their dreams, and they did so in the air, without touching the ground. And all the while the gas from the cracked furnace seeped up the stairwells and through the floorboards and vents, which brought the heat from the furnace’s flame to the rest of the house.
            C-O, the father, Gordon Wynn, would have thought, had he been awake rather than asleep, had CO been the sort of gas one could smell or taste. But he knew, of course, that CO was not that sort of gas. He knew, in fact, if he had been conscious, that he would have become sleepy—so sleepy that he would have become unconscious, and that would have been his only clue something was wrong. And who didn’t get sleepy in the middle of the night, when all was dark and quiet?
            CO. Such an innocent formula. Drop an O off a substance as harmless as carbon dioxide, and it’s suddenly poison? But, sure enough, one by one, each member of the Wynn family ceased to breathe.
            But before they did, they dreamed.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Looking Good!

Thanks to Bill Skillern for our new masthead!

Monday, September 19, 2011

Subscription Information & Open Submissions in October

We will post a new piece next week.  Please bear with us as we get acclimated to running a journal; we’ll be posting weekly very soon.  So much great work out there…!

Some news:

~ Redux will hold an open submission period in late October.  Please check back for more details.

~ You may receive a free email subscription to Redux by entering your information in the box in the right column

~ You may subscribe to Redux on Kindle for a small fee.  The link for more information about that option is here.

Monday, September 12, 2011

#1: "Ostriches" by Susan Tekulve

~~this piece previously appeared in New Letters (2006)


The dark hours.  Dreaming, Sadie stands on her front porch in a hurricane, her bra flying out of her hands, rising into the dark arms of hemlock that shred its lace and batting.  She wakes, reaches into her cotton night gown, touches the cyst curled above the jagged scar across her chest. In the mirror at the foot of her bed, her face is haloed by fine, white hair, her skin clear as lilies from all the radiation treatments.  Outside the window, telephone wires twist into the hemlock, and the blue mountain ridge hulks against the red-streaked November sky.  She glances back to the telephone on the bed stand, thinking, I cannot tell this over the phone.
Down in the kitchen, her husband, Dean, sleeps on the picnic bench beside the table, one frost bitten hand resting across his chest.  The stove’s eyes are covered with dirty pots and pans, the counters lined with jars of apple butter, squares of brown sugar fudge, a whole chess pie he made for her yesterday.  Above the china-filled hutch, his rifle rests. His long, silver hair unwashed, his square chin unshaved, he looks like one of the old-time mountain men who sometimes wander through the cemetery beside the house, cursing at the cats napping on the tombstones.  When Dean wakes, he’ll take the gun into the wooded ridges above their house to hunt wild boar, elk, ram, stock the freezer full of wild game. After months spent in still hospital waiting rooms, he needs this walking.  He’ll wander for hours on his land, up leaf-covered ridges that kettle their red brick house, his flintlock rifle on his back. 
Sadie pulls Dean’s red and black flannel hunting jacket over her nightgown, slips his boots over two pairs of wool socks.   When the screen door creaks, Dean startles, grabs the edge of the table, pulls himself up. 
“Sis?
 “I’ve got to go tell her,” she says. 

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Redux: Work Worth a Second Run

Hello—

Welcome to Redux, the online literary journal devoted to finding lost gems of print age contemporary literature and bringing them to the internet.  “There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, but that was before the internet came along.  Surely in the vast expanse of whatever-it-is (a cloud?) that is the internet, Redux can claim a tiny corner to feature previously published literary work, stories and poems that are too fabulous to be locked away in the dungeon of page 64 in a lovely—but now forgotten—issue of a literary journal tucked away in the dark stacks of a university library.

Each week, we’ll feature one story or a selection of poems or an essay that has been previously published in print only, work that is not contained in a book or anthology.  The author will offer a few thoughts about why he/she has selected this work to share with the world.  And you, dear reader, are asked only to enjoy.

You may sign up for a free subscription above, in the upper right hand corner of the screen.  Be assured that your name and email address will not be used for anything other than notification that Redux has been updated.  We’ll be up and running with a great story next week, and as we work through our growing pains, we’ll be posting something every other week, with an eye to moving the journal to weekly publications soon.

You can learn more about the Editorial Board here.

If you’re a writer who would like us to consider your work for inclusion on Redux, please carefully consult the submission guidelines found here.  We will be open for submissions in the near future. 

Thank you, and we’re looking forward to doing our small part to help great work reach new readers!

~~Leslie Pietrzyk, Editor