Friday Links
Pollen (it’s brutal right now!)
April 24, 2026
Announcing the 2025 J.F. Powers Prize for Fiction Finalists
Thomist Poets Reading: Eric Cyr
Faith and Imagination Podcast with Paul Pastor
New Verse Review: Translation Issue
Infinite Jest, the Internet, and the Politics of Reading
Little Magazines Are Back
Announcing the 2025 J.F. Powers Prize for Fiction Finalists
What a list of finalists!
We are pleased to announce the following short list of finalists for the 2025 J.F. Powers Prize in Fiction, chosen from over five hundred submissions. We are grateful to all of the writers who submitted to the prize this year and who are working to keep the art of fiction alive and thriving.
Thomist Poets Reading: Eric Cyr
You can listen to Eric’s reading from Sunday night here.
Faith and Imagination Podcast with Paul Pastor
This was excellent. As always, Matthew ask fantastic questions and listens to the answers:
Paul J. Pastor is a poet, writer, editor, and a former guest on this podcast. He is the executive editor for Nelson Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, where he publishes work that encourages spiritual renewal. In our last conversation, recorded four years ago, we discussed his poetry collection Bower Lodge. We speak today about his recent collection, The Locust Years, and about the rich field of contemporary Christian poetry.
New Verse Review: Translation Issue
This issue looks superb! You can also read an interview with Steve Knepper and myself, should you be interested in poetry, Ireland, nursing, and other things HERE.
Infinite Jest, the Internet, and the Politics of Reading
Infinite Jest was published in the earliest days of the web, and even by 1998, Wallace still claimed to have never used it. Yet somehow, over the last three decades, this bandana-clad author and his magnum opus have risen to the upper echelons of online adoration and ire. Wallace is a key figure in the internet canon, especially the literary one—that special contingent of books and authors that are endlessly quoted, shared, memed, flamed, and just plain talked about online. He thus offers a way to understand the internet, and the internet, in turn, a way to understand Wallace, though admittedly in a fun house mirror kind of way, where both his searing insights and his flaws are magnified and distorted.
Little Magazines Are Back
I mention all this as backdrop to the launch of another magazine, this one a quarterly, Portico. Its editor is a friend, Micah Mattix, formerly a resident of Virginia, lately of Reverolle, Switzerland. Readers may know Mr. Mattix as proprietor of the books and arts Substack newsletter Prufrock. Portico, begun under the auspices of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, which also publishes First Things, is what was once commonly called a “little” magazine: a periodical devoted to literary subjects, “literary” in the broadest sense, encompassing every area of serious arts and letters. The word “little” describes the numerical size of its readership, though not always of its influence.
