What goes through an editor’s mind when they read the first lines of your story? What can you do right away to hook them and keep them turning pages? Which tired moves make them groan and lose interest fast? One of our most exciting salon events is back by popular demand! Recommended Reading editors Halimah Marcus and Brandon Taylor return to edit your anonymous first pages, submitted just for this event. They will read each page for the first time live on screen, sharing their immediate reactions as they go. Here’s what previous attendees said about this event:

“Immediately planning to rewrite all my first pages.”

“Live impressions are true-to-life and that's why this session has been so uniquely valuable.”

“Just listening to the way they think has inspired me with like 5 revision ideas for a story I’m working on.”

You can find the link to submit in the chat, on the righthand side of the event page. (Please note, you will only see the chat if you are registered for the event.) If you are unable to find the submission portal or have questions about submitting, email editors@electricliterature.com. Please submit one page of fiction, double spaced, in 12 pt, Times New Roman font. Your submission should be the first page of a story or novel chapter that you would like to submit (to a literary magazine, agent, MFA program, etc.). Do not include any identifying information on the document.You may submit only one entry.

Submissions are due by 11:59 PM EST on Monday, July 12, 2021.

We will select and anonymize a dozen or so submissions to read and respond to during the salon. Prescreens will be conducted by other RR editors so Brandon and Halimah will read the work for the first time live on Crowdcast.

Submissions are optional. You are welcome to attend the salon without submitting. Please be advised that salon submissions will not be considered for publication, and that not all submissions will be read during the salon. For information on how to submit your stories for publication in Electric Literature, please visit our submissions page.

PANELIST BIOS

Halimah Marcus is the Executive Director of Electric Literature, an and the Editor-in-Chief of its weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading. She is also the editor of Horse Girls, an anthology that reclaims and recasts the horse girl stereotype, forthcoming from Harper Perennial in 2021. Her short stories have appeared in Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, One Story, BOMB, The Literary Review, and The Southampton Review.

Brandon Taylor is the author of the acclaimed novel Real Life, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. The editor-at-large of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Lit Hub, he holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.

Submission Roulette II