What Does Online Publishing Mean To You?

That's the question American Short Fiction is posing to a number of very talented writers this week, the latest edition begs the question of Matt Bell.

My professors at the small university I attended in one of the small nearby cities didn’t know any of the writers I was reading, so I thought people like Denis Johnson and Dennis Cooper and David Foster Wallace must not be very well known, even though they were better writers than anyone I’d ever read before. I didn’t understand why the books I loved were so unknown, and I didn’t know how to get more books like them, or what genre those books even were. I’d only managed to find out about these three at random: Johnson showed up in an interview with Chuck Palahniuk; Cooper’s Guide was given to me by a friend who had been given it by a friend; Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men I bought off the shelf on the strength of the title and that unforgettable cover.