“I’ve got two words for you. Absolutely hilarious.”

Also, this:

“The caliber of social commentary it presents is out-of-this-world authentic. Anti-capitalism, anti-establishment, and anti-consumerist ideas burst off the page with unnerving but comedic accuracy. Each selection plays with genre, rebels against literary trends, and is not afraid to be terrifyingly honest about life’s emotional and social hierarchies.”

There’s a bunch more, and it’s all great. She seemed especially taken by the pieces from Daniel McDermott, Gavin Broom, Bruce J. Berger, and Jonathan Plombon. You can see what she has to say about them, and the anthology as a whole, by checking out the whole review here.

First on the docket is Curbside Splendor, run by Victor David Giron. They’re looking for literary fiction and poetry based in contemporary urban settings.

Next up is Bananafish Magazine, edited by Daniel McDermott. A spectacular journal, looking for literary short fiction and memoir.

Brevity more your thing? Then take a look at Short, Fast & Deadly, published by Joseph A. W. Quintela. He wants prose written in 420 characters or less. Yes, characters. Not words.

And new to the online publishing world is Waterhouse Review, spearheaded by Gavin Broom. It’s a quarterly e-zine showcasing excellent fiction from Scotland and beyond. The inaugural edition is due out October 1st, 2010.

As always, check their submission guidelines and read a few stories before you start sending them anything. But you knew that already, right?

*cover art subject to being less blurry

After a couple of weeks of dicking around behind the scenes, it’s our pleasure to formally announce the 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology!

The 2010 Anthology showcases the best of what we’ve published so far, as well as six — count ‘em, six! — new stories, all of which epitomize what we here at Jersey Devil Press are about. Stories rife with Jersey attitude, dark humor, and zombies, and werebears, and unicorns, oh my! It’s a veritable bacchanal of genre-straddling, clown-fearing, taco-hunting, world-ending prose!

The 2010 Anthology is set for release on Tuesday, July 27th, and will be available in paperback and a variety of digital editions.

Featuring work by:

Andrew Frankel
Ansley Moon
Bruce J. Berger
Christina Murphy
Danger_Slater
Daniel McDermott
Gavin Broom
Jenny Ortiz
Jonathan Plombon
Jonathan H. Roberts
Kate Delany
Kevin Brown
Louis Wittig
M. R. Lang
Mike Sweeney
Ryan Werner
Stephen Schwegler
yt sumner
Z. Z. Boone

Pre-orders begin next week!

Bananafish is “an online venue for exceptional, short-form literature with a focus on wit, originality, and innovation,” founded by Daniel McDermott, author of “Three Dates in Orlando,” currently online in our very own Issue Four.

And if that wasn’t enough, Bananafish’s first issue also includes stories by previous JDP contributor and all-around exceptional writer Anne Wagener (“Time Machine,” Issue Three) and our very own editor Eirik Gumeny.

So go check them out. Not only is it a mini Jersey Devil Press love-in, but it’s an excellent, worthwhile literary journal in its own right.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that missing this issue would be a terrible way to end the year. You would regret it forever. I’m serious, man, don’t even joke like that. You need to read this.

The online version is available here, and the .pdf is here.

As always, you can follow us on Facebook or subscribe to the RSS feed in your reader of choice to get all the breaking, up-to-the-minute JDP news.

It was the vomit that ended things. I’m pretty sure. Vomit does that to people: scares them away, makes them cringe, makes them question their most recent decisions. And Bluette’s vomit was no ordinary, run-of-the-mill, I-have-the-flu-will-someone-please-hold-my-hair-back kind of vomit, nor was her regurgitation a single occurrence. No. Bluette’s vomit was the projectile kind, with a far-spewing arch normally reserved for garden hoses, rainbows, and powder-chucking snow blowers. And her nauseating episode was threefold: once in the bar on an open-toed pack of screeching coeds, once on the rust-colored cobblestone of Church Street before a cheering crowd of beer-handed onlookers, and once in the parking lot, in the car, in the driver’s seat, on my lap.

I had a hunch about that third time.

“Should I wait a little bit?” I asked, the ignition key inserted but the car not yet started. “Do you feel like you’re gonna be sick again?”

Bluette slumped her petite, 100-pound frame into the front passenger seat, her frilly yellow skirt pushed up inappropriately high, an errant bite of dirty-blond hair tucked in the left corner of her mouth, and a heaving cadence to her sour breath. She turned to me, sat upright, and leaned in across the cup holders and change console with eyes wide and mouth open, as if to say, “Yes. Thank you for asking. I do have to vomit again. Look!”

It was our second date. It was our last date. I sped down I-4, pushing the limits of my dilapidated, 4-cylinder Honda with viscous stomach bile seeping into my crotch. The scent was worse than foul-smelling things are supposed to smell, like putrid, horrifying, defecated things not of this world, like a weapons-grade version of that ubiquitous hotdog odor that lingers around deli counters and fast-food joints. It lives in my brain, this smell, tattooed into my memory. It waits for morning breakfasts and Thanksgiving dinners. It comes alive and swims to the front of my temporal lobe to say hello.

“Forget about your mother’s candied ham,” It says. “Put down that crispy bacon. Throw away that cheeseburger and remember, forever, the little French woman who threw-up in your lap.”



Nancy

I thought the idea of a gym date was cool: music, raging endorphins, a pumped physique, and the knowledge that your partner is at least mildly self-respecting (if not a bit narcissistic). But I didn’t realize that Nancy’s daughter would be coming to the gym with us – I didn’t realize Nancy had a daughter at all – and I didn’t realize her daughter’s biological father was a personal trainer at the gym, and I didn’t realize her daughter was still an infant, and I didn’t realize that Nancy would be breastfeeding her infant daughter on our date, in the gym, on the exercise bike.

It’s not often that you are spectator to the suckling of your date’s nipple. And, if you are, it’s usually not on the first date, and it’s usually not in public, and it’s certainly not nourishingly so.

For some reason, I did not feel inspired to exercise while the baby fed and the breast explored the exterior of its stretchy red sports bra, despite Nancy’s pleasant assurance.

“You can go ahead and start without us. She’ll be done in a minute,” she said, peddling away, stroking the little bald head of her nipple-sucking child. But I decided, instead, to awkwardly converse with Nancy’s vascular, neck-less, cologne-and-gel-scented ex-husband.

“How’s it going there, buddy?” said the ex, with a vice-grip handshake and an arm-swinging shoulder slap. He seemed fine with the scenario – with me, and his ex-wife, and his daughter, and his ex-wife’s milk-spigot-breast – which didn’t seem normal given that, considering the baby’s fledgling age, he couldn’t be more than a year or so removed from the making of this adorable, publically breast-chomping little girl.

“How’s it going?” I said to the meaty ex. “Say, could you tell me where the restroom is?”

“Right through those doors,” he pointed, with a calloused, karate-chop hand.

“Thanks. I’ll be right back.”

The gym was relatively empty, just a gum-chewing high school kid manning the front desk and a couple spandex-clad women trolling through a rack of dumbbells. The quickening swish of my nylon track pants carried me away from Nancy, her ex, their child, and her exposed bosom. And, fortunately for me, the restroom was located near the front exit, and the front exit emptied into the parking lot, and in the parking lot I could see my vomit-scented Honda, and I drove my Honda back out onto International Drive, down Westwood Boulevard, and back to my single bedroom apartment and my single life.



Laura

She said it over pizza; that’s what’s really disturbing. It wasn’t late at night, we weren’t playing Truth or Dare, and we weren’t clinking shot glasses or licking salt from our wrists. It would have been weird regardless, but it’s just not the kind of thing I wished to associate with pizza. Before Laura, pizza was birthday parties, college late-nights, and little league victories. But now pizza is simply Laura, our third date, and her twisted past.

She was talking about her father, how he is tall, handsome, impressively athletic, a financial executive for a large credit card company who now spends most of his time in South America, and that she sort of had a relationship with him a few years ago.

“What do you mean… a relationship?” I asked.

“You know, like an actual relationship,” she said, her mouth half full of pepperoni and dough, “like a boyfriend/girlfriend kind of relationship… a sexual thing. But it’s OK; he’s not my real dad; I was adopted.”

My heart began to palpitate. The pizza tasted bitter and oniony, the cheese now infused with Laura’s rancid dysfunction.

“How old were you when you were adopted?” I asked.

“Just a baby… why?”

“What about your mother?”

“Oh, she doesn’t know. She’d kill me if she ever found out.”

“I see.”

“Oh no!” she raised a French-tipped hand to her mouth, still chewing. “Does it bother you?”

Yep.

“I mean, it’s over now. I promise. It was just for like a year or so in my early twenties.”

“And how old are you now?” I asked, still palpitating, wanting to scream and cry and run and phone the authorities.

“Twenty-five.”

“And even though you’ve, uh, been with him you still call him dad?”

“Well, not really. I mean, he’ll always be my daddy–”

Gross.

“–but now I mostly call him Roy.”

“I see… Roy… right.”

Laura narrowed her eyes, scrunched them between brow and cheek, tossed a nibbled chard of crust onto a plate-side stack of red and green napkins, and reclined into our wooden booth with arms folded.

“It’s not like he forced me or anything.”

I didn’t know what to say. People who have had sexual relationships with their parents should not be talking to me, or dating me, or casually eating pizza. People who have had sexual relationships with their parents should be in large gated buildings with white-collared doctors and stockpiled Lithium supplies. They should be heroin addicts, carnies, or homeless street-folk who dance on park benches and whisper to statues. And their parents should be locked up, or caned, or burned at the stake. And, yes, the same goes for someone who adopts a child and waits for her to grow up before perpetrating his sexual deviance. Moreover, a minimum $100,000 fine should be imposed on any man whose daughter refers to him as “Roy”.

I did not lecture or ridicule Laura; I pitied her. But I was not prepared to deal with her borderline reality. So I paid the bill, said goodbye to Laura, said goodbye to pizza, stepped from the crisply air-conditioned eatery into the torrid Orlando humidity, revved up the vomit-smelling, nipple-escaping, Roy-evading Honda, broke my apartment lease with eight months remaining, and drove back to New Jersey.






DANIEL MCDERMOTT is a Jersey-born writer with a fetish for words and orange tic-tacs, both of which have progressed to the point of injury. He is the Executive Editor at Bananafish Magazine and has new work currently appearing in Fray Quarterly and Monkeybicycle. He can often be found procrastinating here: creepwriter.com.