Annoucing our Second Quarterly Novel Contest Winner!
We're just getting started
We’re excited to announce the winner of our second quarterly Serial Novel Contest: Vincenzo Barney’s Still Soft With Sleep. It’s going to be quite a ride. We were also deeply impressed by the quality of our finalists this quarter: from Martin Van Cooper’s ironic, Franzenesque social scope in Don't Disappoint, to Colin Dodds’ bracing Biblical satire in Vice Nimrod. Alas, even at the Athenian Dionysia, sometimes you had to choose between Euripides and Sophocles. We strongly encourage you to follow our finalists’ future efforts on Substack at Don't Read the Dust Jacket and No Homework.
Starting Sunday, March 22nd, we’ll serialize the remaining chapters of Still Soft With Sleep here on the Substack, at the pace of one chapter a week. Do catch up with the opening chapters in the meantime:
Mallarmé said that a poem was “chance defeated word by word.” So, too, is reading. Every choice to engage with art and literature instead of culture war slop is a brick in the edifice of human personality we all are constructing minute by minute. We’re glad to have you as part of this ongoing experiment. (And if you simply cannot or will not read fiction in the Substack ecosystem, check out friend-of-the-Substack Anthony Marigold’s Chrome extension for creating a weekly Substack digest for your e-reader or printing it out.)
As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, please subscribe, please share, and spread the word.
Excelsior,
Tom Watters
Editor-in-Chief
Dear Pilcrow and Tom Watters,
When is the next open submissions/reading period?
What a cool thing you are doing? Can't wait to see how it turns out.