Introducing Kugelmass!

Hi everyone,
I wanted to sound the whistle about my latest project, which I am embarking on with the venerable Brian Clements: editing a lit journal. Real quick, it's called Kugelmass. It's stories and essays. It's funny. Print. Twice a year. Our impressive group of contributing editors (and some familiar faces): Steve Almond, Daniel Nester, Dan Pope and Daniel Asa Rose. We're now accepting submissions and want to get the word out in a big way.

See below for our call for submissions and be sure to check out the website: http://firewheel-editions.org/kugelmass/

So what is Kugelmass? Quite simply it is a bi-annual print journal founded to publish ambitiously humorous stories and essays. The first issue is planned for early 2011 and we are now wide open for submissions.

What do we want? First, we want funny. We want stories and essays between 1,000 words and 4,000 words. But funny words.

Don't stop with mere funniness, though. We believe that funny can be smart and sad, poignant and gritty and whimsical. We like when funny gets dark or ambiguously inappropriate. We like ugly truths and to be taken somewhere we've never been, somewhere we didn’t know existed and for that place to speak to something larger about who we are and why we are. We like our funny to jerk us from a daze and dangle something extraordinary in our faces, something that was there all along, but we couldn’t see. But if your piece won't make a hilarious percentage of readers laugh, then we shan't have it.

Check out firewheel-editions.org/kugelmass/guidelines for further submission info.

Kugelmass is proud to have on its mast and to feature the original work of some of the freshest and funniest writers around: Steve Almond is author of My Life in Heavy Metal, The Evil B.B. Chow, Candyfreak and (Not That You Asked), among others. For his most recent book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (available April 13), Publisher's Weekly says Almond's "snarky, swoony counterpoint makes for a hilarious riff on the power of music." Daniel Nester, whose latest book How to Be Inappropriate is called by Time Out New York “[A] deeply funny new collection of booger-flecked nonfiction”; Dan Pope, author of In the Cherry Tree and of essays in the Harvard Review, McSweeneys, Iowa Review and elsewhere. And Daniel Asa Rose, whose latest book Larry’s Kidney was named one of the “Top Books of 2009” by Publisher’s Weekly.

Thanks for listening – we hope for your support of Kugelmass and look forward to reading your hilariousness.

David Holub

http://firewheel-editions.org/kugelmass/