I can't read this. It's giving me painful flashbacks to grad school when I used to spend hours at the kitchen table, bobbing my head up and down like a cleric muttering over some holy book, desperately trying to convince myself that the high-brow crap I was reading was not just good but the manna of the gods. It wasn't. And so far as I can tell this book isn't either. Please, read it for yourself and tell me otherwise.

Me? I read the first three pages of each of the first seven stories and after not a single one of them grabbed my interest I let it go. Yes, not even the T.C. Boyle story – whose short story Bloodfall ranks high among my list of some of the greatest things ever written – grabbed my interest. Actually, my favorite part of the book was the introduction by Stephen King.

“The American Short Story is alive and well. Do you like the sound of that? Me too. I only wish it were actually true.”

Then he goes on to write about how hard it is to simply find literary journals in the bookstore despite the miasma of car mags and bride guides. Admit it, these days the hardcore porn mags are not hidden as well as the little/lit journals. King also mentions a major problem about insularity in the literary world. Writers who write for professors and editors but not for readers. And he's just right and right and right. Until he starts sounding like the ringmaster of the boring circus to ever walk the Earth getting everyone psyched for the big show. Then it gets a bit tinny.

Sorry Steve, perhaps my ass has grown too calloused to squeal at the smooth slap of literary guile, but your picks ain't kickin' it.

I'm reminded of an interview with the editor of the Red China literary journal. The editor had an interesting answer to the question of “Is Literature Dead?” He said something snide along the lines of, “It's dead to those don't matter,” or possibly, “It's dead to those who don't read.” I can't remember the exact quote yet I am certain it drew a direct correlation between people who don't read and people who don't matter, making them one in the same. As mean as this sounds, the twerp does have a point. Why would anyone want to write for an audience that has grown too fat and lazy to pick up a book? It almost guarantees that your work will not find a reader.

My answer is that you do so because you like what you like. I don't know about you, but I am a media omnivore. I was raised with one foot in the world of TV-weened carnivores and another in pleasant veldt of Book-fed herbivores. Even though those two worlds have been pulling apart at a regular rate since my birth, leaving the hemispheres of my brain doing a stretching split to keep a foot in each, I simply refuse to give up my stance on either planet I would become somebody besides who I actually am. And maybe that is why I do such wacky things as create DigitalPulp.org. This place is my planet between planets. Like it or not, this is my homeworld. Hopefully I'm not as alone on it as populations of the other two worlds seem to think I am.

It's hard not to lust over the big names and the known journals. Ann Beattie, John Barth, Richard Russo, Alice Munro. The Paris Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The New Yorker. It's easy to say, “I could do that. I I could apply myself and become THAT writer, the one everybody wants to be yet no one wants to read.” I could also get a sex change. But why would I want to? This is like sitting in coach, reading the inflight magazine and dreaming over the glossy image of an upscale couple in a bright white restaurant in the south of France about to eat an elegant meal which is mostly plate and garnish and thinking that it might be nice, conveniently overlooking all the caustic changes one would have to go through to even get close to the possibility of being there – such as paying for a first class seat for starters. Ugh.

So, in the million to one chance that you happen to be reading this, I am sorry Mr. King. I'm sure you did your best with what you had to work with, and gave it your all, and it would be foolish to think that anything resembling your canon of work would show up here. But. I have a paperback copy of Night Shift from the early 80's on my bookshelf whose spine is so worn you can barely tell what it is. That book I will probably read and re-read until the pages fall out. The Best American Short Stories of 2007 is going back to the library.