Zoo Press Update

Last year, news broke on this blog that Zoo Press cancelled its short fiction contest, but decided to keep entrants’ fees. The post was picked up by several fine blogs, and by Tom Hopkins, who did a piece about it for Poets & Writers, as part of a new series called The Contester. According to Zoo Press editor Neil Azevedo, the manuscripts entered simply “were not interesting” enough to warrant having the judge (C. Michael Curtis of The Atlantic) read them. This seemed patently ridiculous, even before the revelation by Scott Kaunonen that he had entered his collection in the contest. The collection ended up winning the Ohio State University Press prize. (Coincidentally, Kaukonen also won the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award late last year.)

I bring this up because I recently received an email from Dan Wickett (of emergingwriters.net) who says that he’s seen uncorrected proofs for Edward Falco’s Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha and that the stories in the book have not only been published but widely anthologized. Falco, it turns out, was also an entrant in the prize. That brings the count of worthwhile manuscripts to two, and demonstates once and for all that Azevedo’s contention of “not interesting enough” simply doesn’t make sense.