Although it has nothing to do with me personally, I'm happy to announce that my short story "The Lexicon of the Sword," which will appear in The Moon City Review, will be placed in the same volume as unpublished letters and manuscript fragments from literary master John Updike. This is a terrific honor, one I never would have expected.
John Updike attended Harvard with a man named Robert Wallace, another writer and poet, from Springfield, Missouri. Updike once called Wallace "the smoothest typist" ever to come out of Springfield. Throughout their lives, they stayed in contact, and when Wallace died, he left his literary estate to the special collections department at the Meyer Library.
I am told the correspondence might be as much as fifty pages of typed material, including a fragment of Updike's famous novel, Rabbit, Run, which was ultimately cut from the final manuscript.
I will be an alumnus when the book appears, but if you're interested in the volume, The Moon City Review is an annual anthology published by the Moon City Press at Missouri State University (distributed by the University of Arkansas).
My short story The Lexicon of the Sword will appear in the Spring 2009 Moon City Review. The MCR is rebooting its image with a whole new look, so I'm flattered the fiction editors thought enough of the story to include it in this inaugural issue.
If you'd like a copy of the journal when it comes out, send your name and mailing address to
ben [at] benpfeiffer [dot] net
