If you haven’t already seen this at my co-editor Delia Sherman’s blog, you heard it here first (and if you did read it at Delia’s blog, you heard it hear second, or third, or maybe fourth):  The Table of Contents for the second volume of Interfictions has been announced, and looks like this:

Jeffrey Ford, “The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper”
M. Rickert, “The Beautiful Feast”
Will Ludwigsen, “Remembrance is Something Like a House”
Cecil Castelucci, “The Long and the Short of Long-Term Memory”
Alaya Dawn Johnson, “The Score”
Ray Vukcevich, “The Two of Me”
Carlos Hernandez, “The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria”
Lavie Tidhar, “Shoes”
Brian Francis Slattery, “Interviews After the Revolution”
Elizabeth Ziemska, “Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken”
Peter M. Ball, “Black Dog: A Biography”
Camilla Bruce, “Berry Moon”
Amelia Beamer, “Morton Goes to the Hospital”
William Alexander, “After Verona”
Shira Lipkin, “Valentines”
Alan DeNiro, “(*_*) ~~~ (-_-): The Warp and the Woof”
Nin Andrews, “The Marriage”
Theodora Goss, “Child-Empress of Mars”
Lionel Davoust, “L’Ile Close” 
Stephanie Shaw, “Afterbirth”
David J. Schwartz, “The 121”

As Delia says:  “It was hard, hard, hard to choose these stories. We got a lot of good ones. In fact, we got so many, we decided to put up an online Annex of stories that we didn’t want to get away. They’ll appear in the weeks leading up to the publication ofInterfictions 2 in November, not in the order they appear here:”

Kelly Barnhill, “Four Very True Tales”
Kelly Cogswell, “For the Love of Carrots”
F. Brett Cox, “Nylon Seam”
Chris Kammerud, “Some Things About Love, Magic and Hair”
Eilis O’Neal, “Quiz”
Ronald Pasquariello, “The Chipper Dialogues”
Mark Rich, “Stonefield”
Genevieve Valentine, “To Set Before the King”

And for those of you wondering what the life and times of an editor trying to put a book of stories together is like, let me re-emphasize Delia’s own summing up:  it’s very, very hard.  We had somewhere around 500 submissions for this anthology, which was a beautiful thing in and of itself, so many people sharing their work with us, wanting to be a part of this endeavor.  It was difficult to sort through them all and to make decisions.  Delia and I loved more stories than we could take, and of course that’s how the Annex came into being to begin with, and even beyond the Annex there were other stories that sparked a lot of conversation between us that we hope find homes elsewhere, since ours became crowded to the point that we created a virtual house as well, and then that filled up, too.  

I learned a lot about storytelling from this process, though.  I’ve acted as an editor on small chapbook and zine projects in the past, but this was the first time I had my hands in a full-length book project.  It’s been an invaluable experience, and I look forward to doing it again in the future for Interfictions 3 when it’s time to pull together another assembly of interstitial voices.

But for now, look at that table of contents.  It gleams and glitters.  We were amazed by these stories, and you will be too.