We have decided to go on a literary inter-railing trip this coming summer and, for Transmission #11, we will be looking for short fiction on the theme EUROPE for publication in May 2008.
Europe is steeped in literary greatness, from Kafka to Flaubert, Dante to Mann, Nabokov to Hamsun. We want the magazine to reflect this, the pages steeped in European culture, stories set anywhere from Helsinki to Hamburg, Catalonia to Copenhagen – if it’s in Europe we want to be taken there!
What we DON’T want are stories set in Britain, stories that are as dry an uninteresting as a Lonely Planet guide, or stories about a Gap year spent as a holiday rep in Greece, complete with drink, drugs and sordid dance-floor frottage.
We DO want to luxuriate in the culture of Europe, stories that capture the essence of a place: the people, the food, the smells. We can’t afford to go on a summer holiday, so take us on a tour – be original and surprise us!
The deadline for submissions is: Monday 10th March 2008. For the full submission guidelines see our submissions page.
2 Comments
Since, like it or lump it, Britain is a part of Europe (and a lot of us don’t actually like it that much) it might be better if you modified your theme to ‘Continental Europe’ since this excludes all the islands including Britain and doesn’t make you look like anglophobes. I’m Scottish. We’re pretty much all anglophobes anyway.
What you mean is a lot of people do not like the fact that Britain is a part of the EU, not ‘Europe’ in a conceptual sense. Of course culturally Britain is a part of Europe, like it or lump it (and post-Enlightenment most people like it consciously or otherwise). And yet there has always been a sense since the Reformation in which Britain has regarded the idea of “Europe” i.e. Catholic Europe or as you say ‘Continental Europe’, as The Other, not just geographically but culturally also, and in which the very term Europe, unless defined against some larger Other, say Africa, is implicitly referring to the rest of the continent. The thematic constraints here plug into that sentiment and as such I don’t really think that it needs to be qualified by the word ‘Continental’.
Plus, I think that if anything the endemic elimination of Britain from Europe by the British points not to Anglophobia (or would Anglo-Celtophobia better push your Caledonian buttons?) but to a somewhat deranged Anglophilia. The implication is that we are different not because we are inferior, but because we are inherently superior.