A thrice-annual literary journal publishing some of the finest poetry, prose and nonfiction anywhere. The Winter 2011 issue contains work by Pickney Benedict, Clifford Garstang, Nina Schuyler, Jessica Barksdale, Deidre Woollard, Jill Stukenberg, Christopher Woods, Brandon A.M. Rosie Forrest, George Such, Jay Rubin, Kirby Wright, Tim Suermondt, John Rodwan, Pamela Balluck, Jessica Hahn, Theodore Worozbyt, Amy Schreibman Walter, Lyn LIfshin, Changming Yuan, Angie Macri, Lois Harrod, Nancy Cook, Cathy Kodra, Donna Coffey, Carol V Davis, Mary Christine Delea and Jen Edwards.

"Sublimity, as we choose to define it, is that quality a story possesses when it is, in its entirety, completely unpredictable as well as completely inevitable and authentic.... A story-a real story, of the type that we've gathered here; not the mock-stories, the painless, bloodless vignettes that make up so much of today's "literary" fiction-involves apocalypse. Apocalypse means a revelation (the literal meaning of the word apocalypse is a "lifting of the veil"), and a very specific type of revelation: the destruction of an old order, followed by a time of disorder and chaos, and the replacement of the old order by a new and entirely different order.... Sublimity and apocalypse. Anti-rationality and surreality. The call for the literary artist is nothing less than to reveal and remake everything; and the writers whose work you are about to experience have boldly answered that call. We invite you to abandon to its well-deserved fate the wreckage of the rational, and to enjoy." - from the Introduction, by Laura & Pinckney Benedict

Welcome to the dream world. What you are about to encounter is the unfiltered stuff of the dream, and that is wild, terrifying, provocative, and unsettling material. In this volume, some of the best living Southern writers are offering up a feast of their dreams, wonderful and awful in equal measure, for you to enjoy. These dream stories and poems will tell you what you have always known, but what you are too afraid to say out loud in the full light of day: that we are a race of chimeras, beings made up of the incompatible parts of innumerable mutually antagonistic creatures. Our pieces do not fit together. We are, when were willing to tell the truth about ourselves, surreal at our hearts. Welcome to the Surreal South.

A widely hailed first collection of stories set mostly in the rural South.