the zodiac review literary magazine

Best of Zodiac – Announced February 1, 2023

Top 20 works of short fiction

published in The Zodiac Review 2011-2023

Welcome to the Best of Zodiac. Here we announce the winners of

the first vote held among all Zodiac staff, the all-volunteer group that has  

worked diligently for 12 years to keep the literary magazine flourishing.

All honored pieces were selected collaboratively

by Zodiac publisher Dan  VanTassel and editorial staff. 

These winning works represent the top 1% of the approximately 2,000 submissions received, and the top 8% of the 242 stories published. 

(The magazine is currently on hiatus, re-opening date TBD, during which time

 it will continue to be published and available for everyone's reading pleasure.)

1st Place:  What I Live For , by Robert Boucheron  (Fall '12; mainstream lit.)

2nd Place:   How Mac Got Promoted , by Gale Turner  (Winter '12; satire)

3rd Place:  Shooting at Diamonds , by Rebecca Clay Haynes  (Winter '12; main. lit.)

4th Place:   Dead Folks , by William Alton (Winter '21; mainstream literary)

5th Place:   A lien s , by James Bates (Fall '20; satire)

Honorable Mention

 (All mainstream literary fiction except as noted)

(Click on each title to link)

Flash Ficti on (listed in reverse chron order )

     >  On The Move , by Anita Haas (Summer/Fall '22)

     >  Wise Man , by Charles Rammelkamp (Summer/ Fall '22)

     >  Waiting Room , by Anita Haas (Summer '20)

     >  Crane Collapses, No Fatalities , by Gabriel Schenk (Fall '17; fantasy)

     >  Coal Tippl e, by Charles Hayes (Summer '17)

     >  Locker Room Banter , by Charles Rammelkamp (Summer '17)

     >  Poverty , by Charles Hayes (Winter/Spring '16)

     >  God's Dog , by Gale Turner (Winter '14; satire)

     >  A Snifter of Absynthe , by Stephen V. Ram ey (Spring '13)

     >  In From the Rain , by Kevin Hall (Spring '13)

     >  Conv ersations With Zip , by Will Dixon (Summer '12; satire)

     >  The End of Spring , by Michael Shrimper (Spring '12)

     >  Aunt Gwen Sneaks , by Kenneth Pobo (Winter '12)

Prose Poetry

     >  Stars, Crossing , by Phiip Kobylarz (Winter, ' 22-'23)

     >  The Street Sweeper , by Charles Hayes (Summer/Fall '15)

The Zodiac Review (hiatus)

Closed for submissions

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" The Zodiac Review was launched to provide a quality magazine for writers of “literary/genre" fiction, the merger of literary fiction and any genre that cares to join it. You may know this blend of writing as "slipstream," "hybrid," or "genre-bending" fiction. "

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No specific limitations

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Max words: 1000

Only Prose Poetry of one to two "pages."

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Total submissions tracked

Average response time, average acceptance rate, fastest response time, slowest response time, how to submit, cover letters.

Coming soon! Advice from editors on what your cover letter and bio should look like!

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Coming soon! All the Times New Romans and double spaces!

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Additional info

The Zodiac Review welcomes unpublished stories from a whole panoply of genres, including psychological, light or dark humor, biting satire, philosophical, astrological, mythos, fictionalized memoir, light sci-fi and light fantasy...if they include decidedly strong elements of literary fiction. We are especially eager to publish pieces that include some of the following elements of literary fiction: Character-driven as much as or more than plot-driven writing Distinctive or idiosyncratic prose style; creative word usage Literary devices including metaphor, analogy, allegory, imagery, irony Subtle, subliminal or multiple meanings and sub-themes An indeterminate or unresolved ending

About the Magazine

Founded in 2011 | United States

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Daniel VanTassel

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20 Fast Response Literary Magazines (2023)

• Post author By Onyemechi Nwakonam
• Post date November 7, 2022
• No Comments on 20 Fast Response Literary Magazines (2023)
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Fast. Quick. Flash.

Whatever you use to describe a quick response to a writer’s submission.

As writers, we are looking for magazines that will respond fast.

Preferably one that will respond to your submission within a month. 

For some, it is a literary magazine that responds in days or less than a week.

Not necessarily does it has to be an acceptance. Well, acceptance depends on the quality of your writing and the taste of the magazines.

You don’t want to wait for six months with the hope of an acceptance only to get a rejection.

If we are going to get a rejection we might as well get it now and move on with our writing.

While most journals would allow you to do simultaneous submissions ( submitting the same piece to multiple literary magazines). Most writers do not do simultaneous submission because when you get an acceptance from one magazine and you submitted that same piece to ten other magazines you would have to withdraw your writing from nine other magazines. 

This is assuming you have an efficient means of tracking these submissions.

So the question is what is fast?

For this writing fast is any magazine that accepts writing within a month ( four weeks).

The response time for each magazine is given.

How did I get the data?

The data is from the submission grinder. From other writers noting the duration of their submission.

Before we proceed, these response rates might change due to different reasons.

• No submission period. If the magazine is not accepting submissions at the time you submit you might not get a response. Ensure you check their reading period.
• Take note that the time is average and the time may vary depending on the number of submissions the magazines get.

Why Submit to Fast Response Literary magazines

• Fast feedback loop

As a growing writer, you want to be told if your writing was accepted and not held in suspense for a very long time.

• Small audience

Most of these magazines have a small audience when compared to the big names out there

• Less competition

With a small audience, it means your work has less competition as not many people are submitting to these magazines.

• High chance of acceptance

When your work is read and not just skimming the first line.

You have a greater chance of being accepted.

Let’s dive into the 20 best literary magazines with a quick response time.

1. Bright Flash Literary Magazine

Bright flash literary magazine is a magazine for flash fiction and short fiction

Response Time: Within 30 days

2. Stone Poetry Quarterly

This is a literary magazine for poetry. The magazine publishes a variety of well-crafted poetry.

Response Time: Within 7 days.

3. Mobiu: The Journal of Social Change.

Mobiu magazine is looking for fiction, art, and poetry with a social theme.

4. Redeft Review

Redeft Review is a literary magazine that is looking for poetry. 

When I submitted my work to this magazine I got a response within 24 hours.

It was a rejection.

 But I quickly moved past the rejection. Instead of spending days waiting with uncertainty.

Response Time: 1 to 7 days.

5. The Dark Fiction

The Dark Fiction magazine publishes monthly. They are looking for fiction in the Horror and Dark Fantasy genres.

Stories should be within 2000-6000 words.

Response Time: 1 – 48 hours.

6. The Penn Review

The Penn Review was founded in 1951 ( University of Pennsylvania). It is one of the premium literary magazines. 

Poetry, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Visual Artwork.

Response Time: 1 to 2 days.

7. Riggwelter Press

Riggwelter Press is a creative online literary journal founded by Jonathan Kinsman in 2017.

The magazine has been nominated for the pushcart prize and best of the net.

8. Smokelong Literary Magazine

Smokelong is a literary journal that publishes flash fiction, fiction, nonfiction

They pay $50 if your story is accepted.

Response Time: within 14 days (two weeks)

9. Thrush Poetry Magazine

Thrush Poetry Magazine is an award-winning literary magazine dedicated to poetry.

They are looking for “electric poems that move them”.

Some of the works from this magazine have won Pushcart and Best of the Net.

Response Time: within 5 days.

10. Moon Park Review

Moon Park Review is an online literary Magazine.

Some of the works published in the magazine are winners, finalists, or long list of the Best Small Fiction, Best of The Net, etc.

They publish flash fiction, prose, poems, and hybrid forms.

Response Time: within 7 days.

11. Metaphorosis

Metaphorosis is a speculative literary magazine

They Publish Science fiction and Fantasy Prose.

Stories within 2000-6000

Response Time: 24 hours to 2 weeks.

12. Radar Poetry

Radar Poetry is a poetry literary magazine.

The magazine has been nominated for and won the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best of New Poets.

The magazine has a dedicated submission period.

Response Time: within 60  days.

13. The Jelly Fish Review

The JellyFish Review is a flash fiction magazine which means they are dedicated to publishing flash fiction only.

Stories 1000 words or less.

14. Eunoia Literary Magazine

Eunoia is a Singapore-based online literary journal committed to sharing.

They publish Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction.

Response Time: within 7 days 

15. McSweeney’s  

McSweeney’s is a nonprofit company in San Francisco.

It has a daily (literary) humor website. 

16. Ghost Parachute 

Ghost Parachute is a literary magazine looking for stories within 1000 words. 

They do nominate their published works for Best of Small Fiction.

Response Time: within a week

17. The New Verse News 

The New Verse News “presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.

Response Time: Within a month

18. Bending Genres 

Bending Genres is a creative online literary journal with some of its writing winning the Pushcart Prize, Best of Microfiction, and Best of Small Fiction.

They Publish unusual fanciful Fiction, Poetry, and Creative Nonfiction.

Response time: within a week

19. Daily Drunk

Daily Drunk publishes daily pop culture writing.

Response Time -;1-15 days.

20. The Zodiac Review 

Zodiac Review is a literary magazine that was launched in 2011 by Brian Wright and Daniel VanTassel to help new, emerging, and established writers of literary/genre fiction.

They also have an average acceptance rate of 7%.

They promise a response time of five days.

Genre:Flash Fiction ( 300 to 1000 words), Prose poetry,

Fiction- hybrid, slipstream,genre-bending fiction

It is great when your work quickly finds a home.

With these twenty fast response literary magazines you should be getting a quick response when you submit your works( poetry and prose).

Feel free to let me know of any magazines you know have a fast response time but are not on this list.

We have looked at 20 quick-response literary magazines. 

Which of these magazines are you going to submit to first?

Let me know in the comments section.

I would love to hear from you.

By Onyemechi Nwakonam

Hi ,I write poetry and short prose. I am excited to help you organise your writing journey.

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Hi I am Mechi. Every Friday I will send you an article on writing. With writing tips, experiments  I am working on, Writing Prompts and 3 quotes to inspire you.

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• Book Reviews
• Clarion Reviews
• True Crime / History

The Zodiac Revisited, Volume 1

The facts of the case.

Michael F. Cole Twin Prime Publishing ( 213pp ) 978-0-9963943-0-7

Clarion Rating: 5 out of 5

The Zodiac Revisited is a complete, unbiased, and riveting true crime book that chronicles the story of the Zodiac Killer.

Michael F. Cole’s true crime compendium The Zodiac Revisited takes a comprehensive look at the details of California’s biggest murder mystery: that of the Zodiac Killer.

In the late 1960s, the California Bay Area saw a series of shocking unsolved murders. Many of the victims were young couples; one was a taxi driver; others appeared to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The weapon and method was similar in most of the murders, and the killer even contacted the police by phone, and newspapers by mail, to admit to some of the crimes, providing information only the killer would know. Still, he evaded capture. He taunted the police and newspapers with his letters, often demanding that his notes be mentioned on the front page, or he’ll kill again. The letters were written in code, with some ciphers solved by civilians; others remain unsolved. The Zodiac Killer often wrote about how he liked to watch the police looking for him; at the end of most letters, he kept a tally of his murders, claiming to have taken thirty-seven lives by his final communication in 1974.

The Zodiac Revisited , the first in a planned three-volume set about the killer, deals with the facts of the case; later volumes are slated to handle analysis and theories. This no-nonsense book tells the story of the Zodiac Killer’s murders in chronological order, complete with photographs of the victims; scans of the letters, postcards, and handmade greeting cards that the killer sent to local newspapers; and transcripts of a handful of his other communications. It also covers later investigations into murders throughout the 1960s and 1970s in Southern California that could be tied to the Zodiac Killer. The information is presented in the order in which the public learned it, meaning that the timelines jump around, but that works to the book’s advantage. There are no new revelations in the book, however.

The narrative includes abundant cultural contextualization—about the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the movie The Exorcist —revealing the time period in which the serial killer was active well. This helps to make it more than just a rehashing of hard facts: Cole reveals a tangible moment in history. His writing is smart and objective; its only assumptions and analyses come from law enforcement officers and detectives. Sans sensationalism and speculation, this is an academic, accessible text.

Reviewed by Ashley Holstrom August 4, 2021

Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

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Writers of the Zodiac: Bold Aries, from Kathy Acker to Tristan Tzara

Introducing your monthly tour of literary astrology.

As anyone who has ever met an Aries can attest, Aries is always number one: it’s the very first sign of the zodiac, a newborn signaling the dawn of spring. In Aries season, flowers begin belligerently shooting pollen everywhere, much like an Aries writing at their desk—or an Aries doing anything, really. They are seminal, self-starting, and, stereotypically, self-centered, enthusiastically spreading their seed, regardless of the allergies of the weak. They’re not all temper, force, and head injuries, though. Although action typically precedes thought, Aries knows how to take a calculated risk. This can make them come across as ignorant or impulsive, but there is a fire inside of every Aries that moves them towards their goals, which they are loyally dedicated to. The sign’s Greek mythological symbol is the golden ram, which sums up how Aries perceive themselves: divine, unique, and legendary.

It’s appropriate for Aries season to begin on World Poetry Day on March 21. Poetry distills complex imagery, emotion, and mystery into a pure textual unit, materializing the abstract, much like the sun moving from nebulous, fantastical Pisces into this active, driven sign. If Aries were a literary device, it would be the direct address: focusing on someone in the crowd, singling them out, making them special. Poet Dorothea Lasky (b. March 27), the Aries half of the famed astrology Twitter account Astro Poets, understands the importance of making such appeals to the individual. She elaborated on this theory in an essay about Drake’s poetic greatness , comparing him to the autobiographical poet Frank O’Hara (who shares a birthday with Lasky—an Aries nod to her astrologically knowledgeable self). She explains that Drake, like O’Hara, “uses the direct address so effortlessly.” Aries are obsessed with individuality, be it their own or that of their audience.

Aries are natural leaders, setting trends for generations to follow. Tristan Tzara (b. April 16), the early 20th-century avant-garde poet and founding father of Dadaism, invented a method of writing poetry called “cut-up,” originating in “ How to Make A Dadaist Poem .” Tzara was such an Aries for this one. Centering the primary foundation, the word, the basic unit that forms entire texts, is straight to the point in a literal cut-and-dry Aries way. It’s also redolent of Aries’ egotism; Tzara insists that “the poem will resemble you” and doesn’t need permission to take ownership over someone else’s words. After conquest and a little vapid curation, the appropriated text belongs to Aries. They’re so self-important that they believe their original voice can lay claim to a text simply through the act of repeating it.

Kathy Acker (b. April 18), Aries queen of the abject, famously used the cut-up technique to write entire novels. Her pastiche was political, crafting work by collaging together what she proudly called “plagiarized” texts. How punk! Acker created new, feminist texts from canonical classics—for instance, Don Quixote appropriates passages from The Prince , the script of Godzilla , and the original Don Quixote , among innumerable other seemingly random choices. The graphic violent and sexual imagery in Kathy Acker’s books was incredibly controversial and remains the subject of arguments between different schools of feminist thought. A true rowdy Aries, Acker wedged her literary cleaver right into the sex-positive/sex-negative argument that’s been happening since Andrea Dworkin.

Aries aren’t afraid to ruffle feathers, because they see their unique perspective as an unchallengeable, a priori truth. Ruled by the planet symbolizing the Roman god of war, Mars, they’re quick to stand up for themselves (and their friends). Count on an Aries to break an awkward silence with a risky wise crack, because they’re confident that everyone’s probably thinking the same thing, and if everyone isn’t on board, they really should be. Their revelations can be shocking, funny, or outrageous. Aries love to lead the way, ramming their head through obstacles and opponents.

Aries warrior Valerie Solanas (b. April 9) is best known for her overly-zealous call to arms, the SCUM Manifesto (1967). She spoke her truth, no matter how absurd it seemed to her peers, because it was her lesbian, sex-working, man-hating life. She wanted to be a leader, a hero, the golden ram carrying a misandrist cult following on her back. But nobody wanted to pay attention to Solanas. So, like a strong-willed, independent Aries woman who doesn’t need a man (whose life work was about how she doesn’t need a man, how nobody needs men, how society would be better off without men), she did everything herself, self-publishing her own work. Her singular, obsessive vision eventually alienated other feminists and, infamously, led to her shooting Andy Warhol—when something is in the way of a ram, they plow heedlessly through it.

Aries are comfortable with controversy, because their truth is powerful. Maya Angelou (b. April 4) bravely recounted graphic stories from her childhood and early life to convey her lived experiences with racism, sexism, violence, and poverty in the Jim Crow South. This has earned I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings a top-ranking place on the most commonly banned books since its publication in 1969—as well as on the list of those considered the best ever written. She challenged the conventions of narrative by using her own method of storytelling, expanding the genre of autobiography. Aries breaks ground like a flower emerging from the soil in the spring.

Aries artists stand out because of their unique, sometimes overpowering voices, truly of their own cultivation. Their energetic dedication to their craft creates prolific bodies of work. Aries is an incredibly confident sign for a writer to have; they aren’t afraid to take leaps, drawing unbreakable power and endless inspiration from self-righteousness. Writers born under this sign are blessed with a dynamic style and singular voice, giving them the potential to change the game for everyone else to follow, even if it alienates them in the moment. Greatness rarely goes unrecognized, and Aries will see to it that they get the attention and accolades they deserve.

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The Tyranny of Stuff

The letters of Seamus Heaney reveal that he was bedeviled by the same problem that overwhelms all of us.

What is the opposite of poetry? What slows the spark and puts sludge in the veins? What deadens the language? What rears up before you with livid and stupefying power—in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day—to make you feel like you’ll never write a good line again?

Not physical stuff, but mental stuff. You know: things you should have taken care of. The unanswered email. The unpaid bill. The unvisited dentist. The undischarged obligation. The unfinished job. The terrible ballast of adulthood.

“In the last two days I have written thirty-two letters … The trouble is, I have about thirty-two more to write: I could ignore them but if I do the sense of worthlessness and hauntedness grows in me, inertia grows and, fuck it, I’m going to get rid of them before I board the plane on Thursday.” This is Seamus Heaney in 1985, writing to his friend Barrie Cooke. Heaney, at this point in his career, in his life, is a poet of established greatness, a professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard, and his situation vis-à-vis stuff has clearly become acute.

The 700-plus pages of The Letters of Seamus Heaney , beautifully edited by Christopher Reid, contain numerous fascinating themes and subplots. We see the poet, for example, first getting his hands on a copy of P. V. Glob’s The Bog People , the book whose account of exhumed Iron Age bodies in Denmark would trigger “The Tollund Man” and, in time, half of the poems in North . We see him dealing—infuriated, shocked into vulnerability—with a snooping biographer. (“This text which you propose … it actually interferes with the way I possess my own generative ground and memories; is therefore potentially disabling to me in what I could still write.”) And we see him ruing the difficulty of his commission to translate Beowulf , a daily wrangle with “ingots of Anglo-Saxon, peremptorily dumped clang-lumps of language.”

Mostly, however, we see him assaulted by stuff . I might be projecting here—I have my own problems with stuff, as you can possibly tell—but this is a constantly renewed theme in the Letters . What he identifies in an early missive as “the bog of unfulfilled intentions” is always sucking at the Heaney ankles.

“I’ve farted about from broadcast to broadcast to occasional reviews,” he complains in May 1975, “and spent days this year in a torpor of aspiration without action.” January 1978 finds him “unwriting, doomed to lectures that I have not written and broadcasts that I have no stomach for.” To his Polish translator, in 1982, he laments his own “lethargy and inefficiency.” To Ted Hughes, more bardically, he refers to himself as a “torpid swamp-creature.” To Roger Garfitt— slightly less bardically —“a procrastinating fucker.”

When you’re a famous poet, stuff comes in the mail: People send you stuff, in the form of poems and, worse, books to read and comment upon. “The book and my not having written about it to you,” Heaney explains painfully to John Wilson Foster, who had sent him his Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival: A Changeling Art , “became a neurotic locus in my life … Opening new books begins to build up a resistance factor, especially when they represent all the procrastination and self-sourness that afflicts one.”

Leave Seamus alone! is the reader’s thought at many points in the Letters . Stop poking around, importuning him, making requests he is too nice to ignore, sending him your book about the Irish literary revival, heaping stuff upon him. Heaney himself, a cradle Catholic, had a fatal touch of scrupulosity in this area: He seems to have really felt bad, guilty, if he wasn’t making headway with the stuff pile.

Read: Seamus Heaney’s journey into darkness

The obvious comparison here is with 2007’s Letters of Ted Hughes , also edited by Christopher Reid. Hughes was Heaney’s friend, peer, collaborator (on the anthologies The Rattle Bag and The School Bag ), and fellow Faber poet. His correspondence was similarly massive, similarly global, and he had his moments of stuff affliction: “I’m up to my neck in deferred things and pressing things, and always the real thing gets shelved.” But Hughes was not, to use a line of Reid’s about Heaney, “heroically put-upon.” The thousand nibblings of obligation did not seem to do him in to quite the same extent. He was too busy negotiating the crosscurrents of his unconscious, placating or irritating the White Goddess, and keeping an eye on the zodiac. (One letter even finds him sending a privately prepared horoscope to that noted astrologer Philip Larkin.)

No doubt Heaney was engaged in his own version of this battle for poetic resources. And clearly, for all the encroachments and the trespasses upon his time, he was not to be distracted or deterred from his real work: The work itself, my God, testifies powerfully enough to that. Stuff or no stuff, he did what he was here to do.

But just once, along the broad and dutiful road of his letters, I would have liked to find him telling somebody to take their manuscript, invitation, complaint, blurb request, and shove it.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Read Reviews

Stories and Places I Remember: A Collection of Short Stories

“From the innocence of youth to the adventures of adulthood, from the streets of New York to the heat of Texas and beyond our borders, Joe Giordano’s Stories and Places I Remember is more than just a collection of short stories defining different times, places and some pretty quirky events.” – Five Stars, Dianne Beth Bylo, Tome Tender blog

“Joe Giordano is a powerhouse talent whose writing skills span genres and continents. Fresh off publishing three excellent novels and a ton of short fiction, he has now treated us in his anthology, Stories and Places I Remember – shimmering glimpses of the world as he has seen it, from the Middle East to Mediterranean countries to Brooklyn to Texas. He shifts easily from mystery to straightforward observational memoir to the surreal to 20th century immigrant cultures to Texas barroom. His voice moves without missing a beat among all those settings, and his characters stay with us long after the last story.” – Five Stars, Dan VanTassel, publisher The Zodiac Review

Read Chapter 1

Drone Strike

An anthony provati thriller.

Karim’s family is killed by a U.S. drone strike in Iraq, collateral damage. The Islamic State in the Levant exploits his rage, recruiting him for a terrorist attack on the U.S., and only Anthony Provati can stop him. Drone Strike takes you on a fast-paced adventure across the Mediterranean, into Mexico, finally arriving in the States. Drone Strike explores the psychological realities that seduce Karim to commit an act of terror, includes a love story between Moslem Karim and Miriam, a Christian woman he defends in Turkey, and highlights the plight of Middle Eastern and Central American refugees.

“Joe Giordano’s latest book, Drone Strike, is his best to date as measured on a scale of importance. It’s also a darn good thriller. Couldn’t put it down.” —Daniel VanTassel, Publisher, The Zodiac Review literary magazine

Appointment with ISIL

Appointment with ISIL, an Anthony Provati Thriller. This time, Anthony’s libido threatens his life. He flirts with Russian mob boss, Gorgon Malakhov’s mistress. The Russian deals in death. ISIL, the Islamic State in the Levant, wants the product. Russian Intelligence supplies the means, and an art theft funds the scheme. ISIL’s targets are chilling. The chase across the Mediterranean is on. Can Anthony thwart ISIL? Will he survive?

“A roller-coaster ride to the finish, this book confirms Giordano as a writer to eagerly watch.” —Kirkus Reviews Featured Review

“Appointment with ISIL is a home run by Giordano. PRIMO highly recommends.” —Five Stars. Truby Chiaviello, Editor, PRIMO magazine

Birds of Passage

An italian immigrant coming of age story.

What turns the gentle mean and the mean brutal? The thirst for wealth? The demand for respect? Vying for a woman?  Birds of Passage  recalls the Italian immigration experience at the turn of the twentieth-century when New York’s streets were paved with violence and disappointment.

Leonardo Robustelli leaves Naples in 1905 to seek his fortune. Carlo Mazzi committed murder and escaped. Azzura Medina is an American of Italian parents. She’s ambitious but strictly controlled by her mother. Leonardo and Carlo vie for her affection.

Azzura, Leonardo, and Carlo confront con men, Tammany Hall politicians, the longshoreman’s union, Camorra clans, Black Hand extortion, and the Tombs prison.

"With Birds of Passage, Joe Giordano delivers a rollicking, wholly entertaining take on the Italian immigrant story. His rich cast of characters arrives seeking the usual: Money, honor, love, respect, a decent shot at the pursuit of happiness. But things get complicated fast as they plunge into the rough-and-tumble world of rackets, scams, and politics of early 20th-century New York City. Giordano serves up a thick, satisfying slice of the entire era in all its raw and brutal glory."

Ben fountain, author of billy lynn’s long halftime walk , soon to be a major motion picture directed by ang lee.

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The Wall Street Journal

‘The Vulnerables’ Review: Birds of a Literary Feather

Posted: November 24, 2023 | Last updated: November 24, 2023

In Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel, “The Friend,” a woman mourns the suicide of a close friend and fellow writer whose bereft dog, a slobbering, arthritic Great Dane, she reluctantly agrees to adopt. The book, which won a National Book Award, is a moving and witty meditation on loss, consolation, the art of fiction and the many shapes that love and friendship can assume.

Ms. Nunez followed “The Friend” in 2020 with “What Are You Going Through,” another exploration of how empathy and a newfound, unexpectedly deep attachment to another living being—this time a dying friend whom the narrator agrees to assist in her final days—can bring joy but also leave you open to loss and grief.

“The Vulnerables,” Ms. Nunez’s ninth novel, is a fresh variation on these themes, set during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Once again, a solitary writer-narrator—she remains largely anonymous, but a hint late in the story reveals that she shares a name with the author—finds solace in unlikely companionship. She also finds food for thought about what she wants out of literature and life.

The dark days of the Covid-19 lockdown form an apt backdrop for Ms. Nunez’s melancholy alter-ego’s struggle to understand an insistent sense of loss. A story she reads about a man discovering he has a twin brother happens to “strike a chord” in her because the sense of something missing is “at the heart of why I write.” She adds: “I want to know why I feel as though I have been mourning all my life.”

Unable to concentrate, the narrator takes long city walks through “lifeless streets,” past shuttered shops and locked playgrounds. A younger friend chastises her for risking exposure to infection, reminding the restless, blocked writer that because of her age she is “a vulnerable.” It’s a word that reappears repeatedly in this short novel, applied mainly as an adjective—to tropical birds not yet on endangered lists, to a troubled college student, to the octopus in the 2020 documentary film “My Octopus Teacher.” The narrator finds herself obsessed with the problem of “how vulnerable all lives are”—including her own.

One doesn’t read Ms. Nunez for plot; she gradually inches into her stories, such as they are. The narrator, through a circuitous connection, ends up moving into a lavish Upper East Side Manhattan apartment with a macaw named Eureka. The bird’s pregnant owner, stranded in California, had arranged for a friend’s son, a college student, to take care of it, but he had flown the coop without warning to join his parents in Vermont.

The narrator loves animals and is happy for the distraction. She and her “feathered charge” are soon playing fetch and hide-and-seek. The bird-sitting gig enables her to offer her own apartment to a retired pulmonologist who has flown in from Oregon to volunteer in New York’s overwhelmed hospitals.

But the narrator’s comfortable arrangement is disrupted when the young man returns unexpectedly after a blowup with his parents. The ill-suited flatmates, at first somewhat hostile one another, gradually develop a quirky relationship in which shared routines for quelling their anxieties lead to sensitive conversations. Their unexpected connection is so compelling that the abrupt end to this storyline when the student leaves comes as a letdown. Ms. Nunez is perhaps again making a point about the dangers of getting too attached—whether to a plotline or a new acquaintance.

In fact, the story of the apartment and Eureka turns out to be only a sidelight to Ms. Nunez’s major concern, which, as always, is how to capture life’s elusive shape on the page. She is driven by questions about what kind of literary work best suits our times, which leads to reflections on the conflicting views of a multitude of her favorite writers. She reports: “What comes in late life to many writers, according to J.M. Coetzee: ‘an ideal of a simple, subdued, unornamented language and a concentration on questions of real import, even questions of life and death.’ ”

But it’s Virginia Woolf whom the narrator finds most inspiring, particularly with her aspiration to create a new literary genre, “the essay-novel”—to be stuffed with, as Woolf had it, “millions of ideas but no preaching—history, politics, feminism, art, literature.” Woolf’s “wildly ambitious literary project” was not a success and had to be split into two separate books, of which the better-known is the 1937 novel “The Years.”

In a 2022 interview with the Paris Review, Ms. Nunez discussed her affinity for this hybrid form, a mix of invented stories and her own personal “reflections, opinions, [and] judgments.” It’s a mode of writing that has become increasingly popular in the decades since she started her career. Other practitioners of this breed of wry, essayistic, quasi autobiographical fiction include Lydia Davis, Sheila Heti and Jenny Offill.

Ms. Nunez gracefully leaps from big emotions, including grief, to erudite literary digressions or biting wit. Her narrator admires a memoir by a friend, who finds “elegy plus comedy . . . the only way to express how we live now.” The author’s comic sensibility regularly pokes through. “Just because something isn’t funny in real life doesn’t mean it can’t be written about as if it were,” she insists. “Funny might even be the best way to write about it.”

Ms. Nunez’s narrator, who disguises her friends’ identities by naming them after flowers—Rose, Violet, Lily, Jasmine—also toys with using a pen name (her computer’s spell-checker suggests “Sugared Nouns”). “Some writers use pen names so that they can be more truthful,” she muses, while others do it “so that they can tell more lies.”

“The Vulnerables” manages to be both playful and dead serious about forging an effective variant of Woolf’s proposed essay-novel. Ms. Nunez concludes: “Perhaps what is wanted in our own dark anti-truth times, with all our blatant hypocrisy and the growing use of story as a means to distort and obscure reality, is a literature of personal history and reflection: direct, authentic, scrupulous about fact.” This inventive novel adds tongue-in-cheek humor into the mix.

Ms. McAlpin reviews books regularly for the Journal, NPR and the Christian Science Monitor.

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Anxiety Disorders : A Review

• 1 Department of Psychiatry, New York University Grossman School of Medicine, New York
• Comment & Response A Review of Anxiety Disorders—Reply Kristin L. Szuhany, PhD; Naomi M. Simon, MD, MSc JAMA
• Comment & Response A Review of Anxiety Disorders Falk Leichsenring, DSc; Nikolas Heim, MSc, MA; Christiane Steinert, PhD JAMA

Importance   Anxiety disorders have a lifetime prevalence of approximately 34% in the US, are often chronic, and significantly impair quality of life and functioning.

Observations   Anxiety disorders are characterized by symptoms that include worry, social and performance fears, unexpected and/or triggered panic attacks, anticipatory anxiety, and avoidance behaviors. Generalized anxiety disorder (6.2% lifetime prevalence), social anxiety disorder (13% lifetime prevalence), and panic disorder (5.2% lifetime prevalence) with or without agoraphobia are common anxiety disorders seen in primary care. Anxiety disorders are associated with physical symptoms, such as palpitations, shortness of breath, and dizziness. Brief screening measures applied in primary care, such as the Generalized Anxiety Disorder–7, can aid in diagnosis of anxiety disorders (sensitivity, 57.6% to 93.9%; specificity, 61% to 97%). Providing information about symptoms, diagnosis, and evidence-based treatments is a first step in helping patients with anxiety. First-line treatments include pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs, eg, sertraline) and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs, eg, venlafaxine extended release) remain first-line pharmacotherapy for generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and panic disorder. Meta-analyses suggest that SSRIs and SNRIs are associated with small to medium effect sizes compared with placebo (eg, generalized anxiety disorder: standardized mean difference [SMD], −0.55 [95% CI, −0.64 to −0.46]; social anxiety disorder: SMD, −0.67 [95% CI, −0.76 to −0.58]; panic disorder: SMD, −0.30 [95% CI, −0.37 to −0.23]). Cognitive behavioral therapy is the psychotherapy with the most evidence of efficacy for anxiety disorders compared with psychological or pill placebo (eg, generalized anxiety disorder: Hedges g = 1.01 [large effect size] [95% CI, 0.44 to 1.57]; social anxiety disorder: Hedges g = 0.41 [small to medium effect] [95% CI, 0.25 to 0.57]; panic disorder: Hedges g = 0.39 [small to medium effect[ [95% CI, 0.12 to 0.65]), including in primary care. When selecting treatment, clinicians should consider patient preference, current and prior treatments, medical and psychiatric comorbid illnesses, age, sex, and reproductive planning, as well as cost and access to care.

Conclusions and Relevance   Anxiety disorders affect approximately 34% of adults during their lifetime in the US and are associated with significant distress and impairment. First-line treatments for anxiety disorders include cognitive behavioral therapy, SSRIs such as sertraline, and SNRIs such as venlafaxine extended release.

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Szuhany KL , Simon NM. Anxiety Disorders : A Review . JAMA. 2022;328(24):2431–2445. doi:10.1001/jama.2022.22744

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Check your sun sign and your Mercury sign.

Astrology seems to have an answer for everything, from our unique traits to our hidden strengths, including being a wordsmith. While every zodiac sign has the potential to be a great writer, storytelling comes naturally to a select few star babes. Whether they have dreams of being a New York Times- bestselling author or an intrepid journalist, these literary geniuses can piece together perfect prose. Are you one of the zodiac signs who make the best writers? Here’s how to tell.

A few different elements of your birth chart can play a role here. In addition to checking your sun sign, consider your Mercury sign , since that planet rules all forms of communication, including the written word. It’s especially helpful if Mercury is in a sign that it feels extra comfortable in, like Gemini, Virgo, or Aquarius,” says Ryan Marquardt , an astrologer.

Likewise, your third house ruler can indicate a natural gift for writing. This house rules the mind, thought processes, and how you express those ideas. You might have a knack for communication if one of the Mercurial signs , Virgo and Gemini, is in the third house in your chart. “Professional writers usually have a concentration of energy in the third house, and it's even better if Mercury is making a beneficial aspect to the third house,” he says.

Are you a gifted storyteller? Read on to find out which zodiac signs are the best writers.

Gemini Zodiac Signs (May 21 - June 20)

The zodiac’s chatty superstar has literary skills on another level. Not only is the intellectual air sign ruled by Mercury, but it’s also associated with the third house of written communication. They have a million things on their mind and use the power of writing to conceptualize them, whether it’s through a stream of consciousness in their private journal or broadcasted to the world.

“They're quick on their feet when needed, but that doesn't mean they're always well-prepared,” Marquardt says. “That's why writing is where Gemini shines. They have the gift of time to sort out their thoughts and formulate their words in a way that makes the most sense.”

Virgo Zodiac Signs (Aug. 23 - Sept. 22)

Virgos’ attention to detail and unique perspective make them shine in this arena. They dot every “I” and cross every “T.” “They can break down complex topics in ways that anyone can understand,” Marquardt says, which makes them excellent technical writers. This earth sign is extra practical and objective, making them savvy journalists, too. Regardless of what they’re writing, as long as a Virgo has creative control of a project, it’ll come out beautifully.

Libra Zodiac Signs (Sept. 23 - Oct. 22)

Creativity comes naturally to Venus-ruled Libra. As an air sign, they gravitate toward the power of the written word. Their ability to relate to others makes them great essayists, screenwriters, and content creators, and they’re especially skilled when it comes to ghostwriting for others. “They can write from someone else's perspective just as easily as they can write their own thoughts,” Marquardt says.

Ryan Marquardt , an astrologer

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Roland Lazenby’s big biography of Magic Johnson gives us a wealth of detail, a huge cast of characters and, in a way, the tapestry of our time.

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MAGIC: The Life of Earvin “Magic” Johnson, by Roland Lazenby

I once asked a portrait photographer why no one ever smiled in her pictures, and she replied, “A smile is a mask.”

I thought of this aphorism as I read Roland Lazenby’s 800-page biography of Magic Johnson. Sports Illustrated declared his smile to be one of the two greatest smiles of the 20th century. (The other was Louis Armstrong’s.) As Missy Fox, the daughter of his high school coach, says in the book, “That is the one thing he’s always had, that smile.”

This was apparent very early on in Lansing, Mich. “The chuckles and grins for Christine Johnson’s newest baby boy came so often and brought such delight to all who witnessed them that there was no way they could just be attributed to mere gas,” Lazenby writes. Soon enough, it “became the business of nearly everybody to greet him with a funny face or a noise or toss him up and down until he squealed and giggled and cackled.”

Johnson was a lanky child, remarkably coordinated and obsessed with basketball. He was six feet at the start of seventh grade, 6-foot-5 at the start of 10th. “He would often spend his summer days lost in the game and deliriously happy about it.” Yet by junior high school something was amiss. He was behind in his reading, and “those who knew him then have described him as being decidedly inarticulate, a condition mitigated and hidden somewhat by his smile and demeanor.” His reading issues, “defined as dyslexia,” left him “profoundly embarrassed.”

But he had other skills, other passions and agendas. The Johnson children anticipated attending a nearby high school that was “the center of the community.” But the Lansing schools had come up with a plan “to advance racial integration by busing Black students.” The older Johnson siblings were sent across town to Everett High, where they joined a group of about 100 Black students in a school of 2,500 “that was 99 percent white at the time.” The first buses were greeted with rocks.

When it was time for Earvin Johnson to go to Everett, he intuitively knew how to proceed through the delicate matter of playing for a coach whom his brother (and bedmate) hated, biking all the way across Lansing to shoot baskets, unannounced, in the coach’s driveway.

A remark about Johnson’s high school career from Missy Fox, recalling the raucous scene at his games, stands out: “He was having fun at all times. Everything was just so much fun and his getting everybody involved made it more fun. The no-look pass he would like to make, they called it putting on a clinic because he loved to choreograph some wild plays.”

There is something both breathless and intimate about her insistence on fun. Like many of the subjects quoted in the book, she is looking back at this history decades later, when a dense mesh of legend and history has enveloped Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and Michael Jordan and the birth of the business and cultural phenomenon that is the N.B.A. Maybe her emphasis on fun is another way of saying that this was the last time Magic Johnson was a private citizen, a kid on a high school team that Lansing cherished, not yet the property of the world.

Perhaps this is true for all transcendent athletes who become public property. But one of the interesting facts in the book is how Jordan, just a few years younger, idolized Magic Johnson, going so far as to coin his own nickname, Magic Mike, and put it on the vanity plate of his car. Think how ferociously private Jordan is compared with Magic. Both of them superstars, among the best ever to play, unquenchable in their will to win, yet one closed off, remote, cold, and the other quite the opposite.

In 2019, when Missy Fox was speaking, who could have imagined the HBO series “Winning Time,” dramatizing Magic’s first years playing for the Lakers, or the four-part documentary about Magic on Apple TV, or the ever-heightening obsession with Jordan, such that a major motion picture, “Air,” was built around his shoe deal. (Jordan’s getting royalties on his shoes was a source of vexation for Magic and the entire league, at the time.) “The Last Dance,” about Jordan and the Bulls, appeared in 2020, at the dawn of those pandemic months without N.B.A. basketball, when even the ancient Dream Team documentary from 1992 became must viewing. The episodes Fox describes are removed by only a year or two from Johnson’s two years at Michigan State, which is when his impact, in tandem with Bird’s, began to be felt nationally.

Lazenby (the author of previous books about the Lakers) includes an anecdote about NBC’s announcers, Billy Packer and Al McGuire, preparing for the 1979 championship game pitting Bird’s Indiana State against Michigan State. Don Ohlmeyer, the executive producer, was late showing up to the production meeting, and when he asked to be caught up on the ideas for the pregame show, which focused on the teams and the coaches and the schools, he responded: “That’s the dumbest damn thing I’ve ever heard of. You guys have no damn clue what you’re talking about. The real story about this game is going to be Bird and Johnson. It’s going to be part of basketball history.”

“At the time,” Lazenby notes, “there was not a single major national highlight show in American sports television.”

The curious thing about this compendious, scrupulously researched biography, so rich in basketball and cultural lore, is that the best parts are not about basketball at all. The many pages devoted to accounts of games are the least compelling aspect of the book. What “Magic” gives us is a wealth of detail, a huge cast of characters and, in a way, the tapestry of our time as illustrated by this supremely talented and beguiling figure.

During the press blitz for that N.C.A.A. tournament, Johnson remarked on how much he loved basketball, never tired of it. “Everyone else, including the girls, has to realize that basketball comes first in my life.”

About the girls: Lazenby gives the bacchanal that ensued in Los Angeles as much attention as it deserves, which is a lot. Terms like “satyriasis” and “compulsive sexual behavior” are considered. Mae West is invoked. We learn of his code, “refusing on game days to engage until after the game, then gorging on it,” which sounds a lot like an alcoholic waiting until 5 p.m. to have a drink. We hear of women bribing hotel employees so that they may be seated naked on the bed when he arrives in his room. We hear of unprotected sex. During one training camp, a group of Lakers players and staffers discuss the possibility of Johnson’s developing AIDS. They conclude, “If he doesn’t have it, you can’t get it.”

When the diagnosis of H.I.V. came in 1991, it was widely understood to be a death sentence. Magic turned this setback into something of a positive, joining President George H.W. Bush’s commission on AIDS, becoming a spokesman for people with H.I.V. The details of his falling-out with Isiah Thomas, and Thomas’s suspected role in rumors about how Johnson may have contracted it, are melodramatic but also painful, the ending of what had been a genuine friendship.

The last part of Magic’s career is handled with relative circumspection, though there is a compelling scene illustrating Magic as budding tycoon, pitching Peter Guber, the chairman of Sony Pictures, on a community that loves movies but has no good movie theaters. Guber wants to know where this Shangri-La of untapped markets is, and Magic strings it along until the big reveal: “It’s 15 minutes from here,” he says, in South L.A. “That and 30 more places in America where the African American community is completely underserved.” Guber’s response could stand in for that of many people who have encountered Johnson: “Wow.”

In the acknowledgments, we learn that people close to Magic spoke at length on the record, but that he was not interviewed directly. Magic kept putting it off and, in the end, declined. He was, it turns out, producing a documentary about himself.

MAGIC : The Life of Earvin “Magic” Johnson | By Roland Lazenby | Celadon Books | 813 pp. | $40

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