Editor Interview: Big Other

Unruly literary art.

Burning Deck, Mud Luscious Press, and the Gordon Lish-edited Quarterly, all now defunct, alas, nevertheless still inspire us. As for contemporary journals, we admire Conjunctions, Diagram, Fence, Noon, Salt Hill, and Black Warrior Review, among others.

We also love many other small presses with big ideas, especially FC2, Stalking Horse Press, Anti-Oedipus Press, Black Square Editions, Bellevue Literary Press, Dzanc Books, Essay Press, Europa Editions, Graywolf Press, Haymarket Books, AK Press, Les Figues Press, Letter Machine Editions, McSweeney's, Milkweed Editions, New Directions, Nightboat Books, Noemi Press, Omnidawn, Open Letter Books, Archipelago Books, Verso Books, Belladonna Collaborative, BOA Editions, Counterpoint Press, Soft Skull Press, Coffee House Press, Copper Canyon Press, Dalkey Archive Press, Future Tense Books, Dorothy (a publishing project), Sarabande, Wave Books, Wesleyan University Press, Outpost19, Deep Vellum Publishing, Ravenna Press, and 7.13 Books.

Here's a list some of my favorite writers:
Harold Abramowitz, César Aira, Will Alexander, Roberta Allen, Osama Alomar, Gary Amdahl, A. R. Ammons, Donald Antrim, Louis Armand, John Ashbery, Nicholson Baker, James Baldwin, Djuna Barnes, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Roland Barthes, Augusto Roa Bastos, Paul Beatty, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Sarah Blackman, Gabriel Blackwell, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Giannina Braschi, Jeff Bursey, Mary Caponegro, Italo Calvino, Alejo Carpentier, Tobias Carroll, Anne Carson, Olivia Kate Cerrone, Jimmy Chen, Jane Ciabattari, Kim Chinquee, E. M. Cioran, J. M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Robert Coover, Julio Cortázar, Hart Crane, Lynn Crawford, Stanley Crawford, Rachel Cusk, Susan Daitch, Renée E. D’Aoust, Guy Davenport, Jeremy M. Davies, Lydia Davis, Samuel R. Delany, Sergio de la Pava, Gilles Deleuze, Don DeLillo, Helen DeWitt, Debra Di Blasi, Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, John Domini, Rikki Ducornet, Marguerite Duras, Lawrence Durrell, Umberto Eco, Stanley Elkin, Will Eno, Jenny Erpenbeck, Brian Evenson, William Faulkner, Thalia Field, Leon Forrest, Janet Frame, Carlos Fuentes, William Gaddis, Grace Campbell, William H. Gass, Forrest Gander, Renee Gladman, Jaimy Gordon, Tina May Hall, Peter Handke, Barry Hannah, John Haskell, Alissa Hattman, John Hawkes, Lyn Hejinian, Karen Heuler, Brandon Hobson, Noy Holland, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Gabino Iglesias, Shelley Jackson, Henry James, Andrew Joron, James Joyce, Michael Joyce, John Keene, Michael Kimball, Brian Kiteley, György Konrád, Joshua Kornreich, László Krasznahorkai, Babak Lakghomi, Janice Lee, Karen An-hwei Lee, Hillary Leftwich, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Ursula K. Le Guin, Eugene Lim, José Lezama Lima, Sam Lipsyte, Gordon Lish, Clarice Lispector, Norman Lock, Robert Lopez, Sean Lovelace, Malcolm Lowry, Gary Lutz, Nathaniel Mackey, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Ben Marcus, Peter Markus, David Markson, Michael Martone, Carole Maso, Cris Mazza, Joyelle McSweeney, Herman Melville, Anne Michaels, Marianne Moore, Bradford Morrow, Thylias Moss, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Herta Müller, Vladimir Nabokov, Pedram Navab, Maggie Nelson, David Ohle, Lance Olsen, Grace Paley, Aimee Parkison, Georges Perec, Fernando Pessoa, Vanessa Place, Nick Francis Potter, Padgett Powell, Richard Powers, Lia Purpura, Annie Proulx, Manuel Puig, Thomas Pynchon, Ann Quin, Dawn Raffel, Victoria Redel, Ishmael Reed, Mark Richard, Doug Rice, Rainer Maria Rilke, Fran Ross, Salman Rushdie, Pamela Ryder, Juan José Saer, George Saunders, Christine Schutt, W. G. Sebald, Rone Shavers, Will Self, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Lisa Russ Spaar, Muriel Spark, Ken Sparling, Gertrude Stein, Robert Steiner, Wallace Stevens, Laurie Stone, Terese Svoboda, Cole Swensen, Alexander Theroux, Henry David Thoreau, Jean-Phillipe Toussaint, J. A. Tyler, Mario Vargas Llosa, Paul Valéry, Enrique Vila-Matas, William Vollmann, Antoine Volodine, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joy Williams, C.D. Wright, Stephen Wright, David Foster Wallace, William Walsh, Paul West, Curtis White, Colson Whitehead, Diane Williams, Tyrone Williams, Virginia Woolf, Can Xue, John Yau, Lidia Yuknavitch, Edgardo Vega Yunqué, Rafi Zabor…

Big Other publishes unruly fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that realizes William Carlos Williams's assertion that "beauty is a defiance of authority."

Read Big Other. If you see yourself there, within that enduring autonomous zone, send us your literary art.

Definitely send a cover letter that includes previous publication credits. That said, this does not affect my consideration of your submission.

I nominate work we've published to the Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. Big Other has received awards from the Best American Poetry, the Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, the British Science Fiction Association, Entropy, and Wigleaf.