When Matt Briggs emailed me last week, offering to send a copy of a litmag he's reading from tonight at Inner Chapters bookstore, he enticed me with this description: "Birkensnake has a fuzzy cover and smells like Ace Hardware."



This journal, published and "imperfectly bound" in Rhode Island (see above) was a happy find. The stories actually live up to the journal's aesthetic guidelines of "narrative and quasi-narrative work that creates its own logic." Each one is unique, almost to the extent that they could fall into different genres, but they are all delicately crafted and fun to read.

(I showed it to a friend, who, as simultaneously hopeful and skeptical about new litmags as I am, looked surprised when he said, "I actually know a some of these people.")

So, tonight, you could go see Jonathan Lethem's blockbuster reading at the Sunset Tavern, or you could hear Matt Briggs , Caren Gussoff, Evelyn Hampton, and Tina Connolley read from their Birkensnake stories (the kind of fiction that Lethem was publishing when he was a fiction editor in the early days of FENCE). It's at 7:30 at Inner Chapters Bookstore. You can also read the journal online here.