Your Summer Reading

Welcome back, readers. We hope you enjoyed our serialization of contest winner Vincenzo Barney’s Still Soft With Sleep. We were proud to have it appear in our digital pages, and we suspect it won’t be the last you hear about it from us.

For our next cycle - and for your summer reading pleasure - we’d like to try something different. After the conclusion of our last voting round, we received several emails from subscribers asking where they could read the remainder of runner-up Martin van Cooper’s Don't Disappoint. Having read the rest of the manuscript, we shared their enthusiasm for the novel’s subtleties of style, its Franzenesque ironies and fidelity to the cult of the sentence. Our mission here at PILCROW is to be a vector and a platform for novels to reach a broader audience of discriminating readers, as well as publishing professionals who can shepherd a manuscript into the physical realm (a growing number of such cases).

Starting tomorrow we will be moving forward by serializing the entirety of that novel, for approximately the next eight to ten weeks. Then we will return to our normal quarterly contest format (and will be posting about those guidelines soon). We appreciate our readers and submitters indulging this bit of editorial prerogative. We think you’ll like what’s in store.

Excelsior,

Tom Watters

Editor-in-Chief

As ever, if you support what we’re doing here at PILCROW, subscribe, spread the word, and consider offering a paid subscription.