Why the change in the way the Atlantic Monthly publishes fiction?
I wish I knew the answer to that. All I’ve been told is that space in the magazine is at a premium. It’s expensive to produce it, and the management feels they can make better use of that space in other ways. How does the move from Boston affect your plans? At this point, nobody knows exactly what is going to happen, because we’re going to have essentially an entirely new staff of editors, and the new editors will be determining policy after the end of the year. In theory, I am still the fiction editor and thinking about the August 2006 issue, and reading stories with that issue in mind. But all of that can change. When a widely read magazine changes its policies on publishing stories, it naturally sets off discussion on the state of contemporary fiction. From your perspective, where does fiction writing stand today? We’ve always had to reject far too many stories that we liked, simply because we didn’t have room for them. And it’s probably true that we now have to reject still more. C
