Best American Essays, Best of the Net, and Pushcart Prize

Last week, we heard from our contributor Michael Nagel, who asked if we’d heard that his essay “Beached Whales,” which we’d published last summer, was included among the notable essays in this year’s Best American Essays?

We hadn’t heard! And it was featured on LongReads! It was an exciting hour or two.

Then I checked our site stats and saw we’d also had referring traffic from the fine crew at Sundress Publications, who publish the Best of the Net anthology. Lindsey Harding and her short story “List Lard Label” was a finalist for fiction this year!

So I ran off to email Lindsey with the good news.

Then I wanted to see the table of contents and the rest of the notable essays for this year’s Best American Essays, so I looked it up on GoogleBooks, and found that apt appeared more than once. Philip Arnold’s essay “Stereoscopic Paris” was also among the notable essays published last year.

If you haven’t read Michael’s and Philip’s essays or Lindsey’s story, there’s no time like the present to catch up on what you’ve been missing.

And while you’re at it, check out the stories, essays, and poems we’ve nominated for The Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes:

Pushcart Prize

Fiction:

Josie the Girl by Joanna Ruocco
Flashover by Sonja Condit
Water under the Bridge by Kirstin Ethridge

Poetry:

Defenses by Krysten Hill
Ever by Patricia Jacaban Miranda
Where the Gams Meet by Salem Dockery

The Best of the Net 

Fiction:

Water under the Bridge by Kirstin Ethridge
Nat Rat Anthems by Yusuf DeLorenzo

Non-fiction:

I Speak Four Dead Languages by Emily Jaeger
Frogs (#15) by Colin Rafferty

Poetry:

Cast, Credited and Not by Kelly R. Samuels
Feast Days by Suzannah Russ Spaar
Oft-aloft by Terrell Jamal Terry
Relations by Ben Kline
I Feel Most Black by Kamden Hilliard
The Frogs by Caitlin Dwyer

Congratulations to all our contributors—especially Michael, Philip, and Lindsey!

(Front page image via)

Other things you might want to read:

Pushcart Prize Nominations 2015 Pushcart Prize Nominations Pushcart Prize nominees 2014 Pushcart Prize Nominations