Dec 12

Call for Submissions

Welcome to The Five-Forty-Eight!

We are now accepting submissions for the third issue of The Five-Forty-Eight! This is really the first issue of this literary journal, but we wanted to get all those first-time jitters out of the way.

We are a journal of ekphrastic fiction inspired by Raymond Carver’s “The Train,” inspired by John Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight.” The Five-Forty-Eight accepts only stories which are inspired by and written as extensions of the work of others. If you know what happened with Captain Nick of “The Train,” we want you to tell us. If you read David Means’ “The Secret Goldfish” and have thoughts on father’s lover, we’d like to hear them too. Though, while we are certain, you and your friends are fantastic writers, be sure to give us some context also. When submitting to The Five-Forty-Eight, please put the story you are responding to into the body of your submission e-mail.

We are also a journal of ekfrantic fiction inspired by our love for the way stories expand the universe into myriad and inexplicable wonderments. Please give us more to wonder at. Give us more that life could be. Render us dumbstruck by the awesome and the awful and everything in between. But do so always with a firm and loving handle on your sentences and structures. We want to know that what we experience with you is real.

(Your stories can be responses to novels or short stories.)

The Five-Forty-Eight is accepting only short fiction (10,000 words or less) at the present time.

  • We are accepting short story submissions through March 5th 2013.

Much Love,

David, Adam, and Miss Dent

Dec 12

Welcome to The Five-Forty-Eight

John Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight”, first published in 1954, is a strange slither of a story. It complicates point of view with a mysterious royal, or rather upper-middle class, we. It is a story of a desperate attempt at communication, to be heard, for resolution, but it illuminates the inherent loneliness of being. Raymond Carver can smell loneliness on your clothes. You can change your detergent. You can iron, and mask yourself in perfume, but Carver can smell loneliness on you. “The Train”, first published in 1983, is Carver’s sequel to “The Five-Forty-Eight”, which takes us back to the night Miss Dent held a gun to the back of a man’s head to understand compassion. And yet, this is not the story of Miss Dent. A story concerned with meticulous, monotonous actions, with vanity and emptiness and vacant eyes, this is not your mother’s “Five-Forty-Eight.” Where we’re going, even the names are lost.

 

Here at The Five-Forty-Eight, we are interested in stories that continue a conversation and enlarge an existing world in surprising ways.  Not necessarily sequels of events, but sequels of theme, of motive, of sensibility. Your story must, somehow, connect to someone else’s prose. Please do not send us sequels of your own stories.

At the moment, we publish only prose. We may publish poetry in the future. We will be older then, and so will you, and you will have much to tell us.  

We publish original short stories that are responses to someone else’s short story. You have a sequel to John Updike’s “A&P?” Excellent. It takes place 150 years later? Excellent. It takes place later that day? Excellent? Your story takes place across town a week later and features no characters from the first story? Excellent.

In how many ways can a story speak to another story, become its aunt, its pet, its boss? We believe in playfulness, but also craft and reason. You better have damn good reasons for what you’ve done, see!