Call for submissions

I received this (I've edited it down a little) from Ted Genoways (an amazing guy, by the way, and a wonderful literary ally) at Virginia Quarterly Review and wanted to let you all know about it. They pay extremely well. Have a look see:

The VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW is putting together a special issue for 2006--based on an idea given to us by Michael Chabon. We are asking writers to contribute stories that take one of their favorite writers as a central character. It may be a straightforward biographical narrative, such as Robert Walser's "Kleist in Thon," which recounts an actual journey of
Heinreich von Kleist; an imagined (or even fantastic) approach, such as Allan Gurganus's "Reassurance," in which one of Walt Whitman's soldier friends writes from heaven; or a humorous take, such as Ian Frazier's "LGA/ORD," in which Frazier riffs on Samuel Beckett's claim that, had he not become a writer, he would have been an airline pilot. The length is also completely open.

If you haven't seen the magazine recently, I encourage you to visit our website. In the last year alone, we have published new work by Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, E. L. Doctorow, Annie Proulx, Margaret Atwood, and Carol Shields. Our current issue features new work by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, and Isabel Allende, and our Fall issue (on stands October 1) features a short play by Tony Kushner, the first installment of a serialized graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, and a long story by Joyce Carol Oates. In the last year we have been nominated for a National Magazine Award in Fiction (and another in General Excellence), and our fiction has been reprinted in BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, the PUSHCART anthology, and HARPER'S.

The deadline for this issue is relatively distant--we wouldn't need finished stories until March 1, 2006. I hope that will give you enough time to consider this idea and see what you come up with.