Charlie Kondek Writes

I can't remember how I stumbled on it. I think it was listed in the bio of a writer whose story I liked. But I put it on a list of pubs to check out and when I finally got around to it I thought: these are my kind of people, just like it says in the masthead. What I particularly love about The Rye Whiskey Review is not just its commitment to good writing but it's inclusivity, its accessibility. There are a lot of real earthy people contributing to this pub, and usually with the earthy theme of boozing involved. Most seem to have esteemed credentials, others are plainer or more grass roots. Professors and published writers publish here, the president of the Robert Frost Society published here, but so did a guy that states his credentials as having published " various works in between having bad luck and making people rethink their humanity . No matter. He sees sentences in the smoke and scribbles furiously." There's not a lot of gatekeeping going on here. Better s...

Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold and lie heavy as the perfume of a flower shop on the dark slope of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city. Sometimes I just read John Updike the way I watch birds land on water. How about this, from a story called...