Some buzz about Stinging Fly magazine

The winter issue of the Dublin-based literary magazine the Stinging Fly is out. Started in 1997 as a venue for publishing new writers from Ireland and around the world, the Stinging Fly has an expressed interest in promoting the short story. The magazine has spawned a press that has published a book a year since 2005. (This year’s release, the short-story collection "There Are Little Kingdoms," by Kevin Barry, has won a leading Irish literary prize.) The new issue of the magazine boasts seven pieces of fiction set in such far-flung locales as Los Angeles and Donegal (who says relative location isn’t everything?), works by 16 poets as well as a quartet of book reviews. Samples can be found at the magazine's website.

Included in the issue is a piece by London literary agent Lucy Luck in which she details the joy she found in reading as a child, a joy that quickly dissipated when she entered secondary school and was subjected to the "reading of ‘proper books.’ This was very different from the stories I’d been loving--these were books read for instruction, so that essays could be written. It was all a bit like hard work."

Luckily, "Jane Eyre" got under her skin, and her enthusiasm was rekindled. "Now the written word defines much of my day," she continues, confessing: "Though there is nothing to compare to the thrill of being the first to appreciate a new literary talent, it can be exhausting to only read unpublished books when there are still so many published ones I’ve not managed to start." So don’t feel too guilty about that pile on your nightstand.

Orli Low