Submissions: This journal is for longer essays and fiction (not poetry)—at least 3000 to 10,000 words. Submissions for the tenth issue will be open June 1st to June 30th—any received outside of submission times will be deleted. Please send the submission as an attachment to: socratesonthebeach (at) gmail.com Contributors will be paid. Please note: I tend not to respond until the submissions period closes.

“The best books give you the feeling that no one else on earth could possibly have written them.” Someone recently wrote this to me and it has stuck. I’m looking for prose like this, exemplified by the writers all the issues.

A couple of things I would like to add:

Ezra Pound’s poem “Portrait d’une femme” was “rejected by the North American Review in January 1912, according to Pound, on the grounds that ‘I had used the letter ‘r’ three times in the first line, and that it was very difficult to pronounce.'”

Line: “Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,”

I don’t edit this way and frown upon those who do; in fact, the more difficult to pronounce, the better.

James Salter: “The secret of making [art] is simple. Discard everything that is good enough.”