upstreet number four, which is now on sale, features a 24-page interview with Michael Martone, the Indiana-born author of Michael Martone, Racing in Place, and many other works of experimental fiction and nonfiction.This year’s issue, at 232 pages, is the longest one to date, and received the largest number of submitted works in its four-year history. It contains eight short stories, selected from 584 submitted; nine creative nonfiction pieces, chosen from 153 submitted; and 23 of the 1,174 submitted poems.
Its contributors hail from all areas of the U.S., and even from Shanghai, China. The 36 authors whose work appears in upstreet number four include finalists for the 2007 National Book Award (David Kirby) and the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award (Michael O’Brien), a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow (Bill Zavatsky), and the winner of the 2003 Governor General’s Award for English Fiction, Canada’s highest literary prize (Douglas Glover). Their work has appeared in such journals and anthologies as The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories, and the Norton anthologies.
Besides these accomplished authors, upstreet number four includes many whose publication careers are just beginning. We hope this will always be true, since upstreet was founded with the vision that it would ultimately be a mixture of established and emerging writers. In the end, the truly rewarding part of publishing a literary journal is discovering new talent--and there is plenty of that in upstreet number four.
