Welcome from Anne de Marcken, fiction editor

You might be like me.  

I cherish a bias for the printed page. I will never surrender.  

But here we are, you and I—online—and I, for one, confess I am very excited about it. Can’t you just sense the potential for invention? There is so much space just waiting to be filled up with words…imagine the accretion of images and ideas! I have a mental picture of us all reading together: scrolling down each at our own pace, pausing here or there, laughing, wincing, clicking through to more and more and more.  

The stories featured here thrilled me when they first crossed my desk and they still excite me now. You’ll find an ever-expanding spectrum of traditional and experimental forms, familiar and new voices, playful and deadly serious themes.  

I invite you to feast on the current Featured Fiction and to peruse the Fiction Archive. Visit Experiments in Fiction for innovative and energetic projects such as an evolving, collaborative Exquisite Corpse-style story and Skot Spencer’s wacky weekly novel-in-blogs. With all this cyberspace to stretch out in, we’ll be adding features and switching things up now and then. So check back often, become a “follower” of our blogs, and sign up to receive periodic email reports on what’s new. Be sure to spend time investigating the other rich regions of Hunger Mountain’s website where new things are constantly happening. And please, for love of the printed page, don’t fail to pick up a copy of Hunger Mountain’s 2009 print edition; it is overflowing with beautiful work and it’s fresh from the press!

If you’d like us to consider your work for print or web publication, visit our online submission manager. Tip: I currently have my eyes peeled for short, smart stories that surprise me, for our new Bon Mots section, but mostly I just want to see your strongest work.