The Best of The Fairfield Review

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The Best of The Fairfield Review,
1997 - 2002
Introduction

Celebrating five years of Literary Excellence on the Web

We are proud to have assembled this selection of works from Connecticut’s first on-line literary magazine, The Fairfield Review. The works selected were published from the year of our debut, 1997, through the year 2002. We decided to create this collection in order to both commemorate our anniversary and to pause to look back at the path we’ve traveled.

It’s been difficult, culling through the pieces, to make our selections. Through this process we’ve realized how much has changed since we began. We’ve matured from a “home grown” journal, publishing local writers, to an international presence, accepting submissions from almost every continent. Our web-site now enjoys 2300 visitors a month, and the number keeps growing…

To select the pieces here we formed two review boards, with additional readers for each category (poetry and short stories). Each reader rated each story or poem and the top-ranking pieces from the group were then selected in each category. The culmination of this process is our favorite 50 poems and five stories. As any reader knows, the “judging” process of a written work must be subjective; therefore, our choices are not meant, in any way, to be disrespectful or to diminish the non-selected works. We regret we could not select all our published authors; we made these selections in order to keep the book a reasonable size.

In collating the works before printing, we realized that there were a select number of works that seemed to epitomize “the Best of the Best;” works we feel define what we are looking for in our roles as editors. Therefore, we’ve created an “Editor’s Choice Award” for these pieces and noted them in the Table of Contents, as well as on the pieces themselves. Their titles are, in Poetry, “The Flasher” by Jean Aloe, “Lighthouses” by Robert James Berry, and “Costa Rica” by Michael Zack; for the Short Stories, “On the Gray Hill” by Tom Brennan.

We hope this collection will inspire all writers, young and old, novice and experienced. As always, our goal is to find and encourage new voices, delivering exciting new works to our audience through the powerful medium of the Internet. Because we are a not-for-profit organization, we donate our time and efforts and, though our costs are low, we still do have expenses, from printing this book to maintaining our web-site. If you appreciate our mission and our success to date, please consider a donation to The Fairfield Review. You can give a gift online at www.fairfieldreview.org. Most importantly, tell your friends, family, and students you know about it, and encourage them all to write, write, and write!

We hope you enjoy these works as much as we did: back when we first found them and in this, their first printed version. We thank all those who submitted these works – for our enjoyment, and for the world’s.

From "The Best of The Fairfield Review," Edward and Janet Granger-Happ editors, Fairfield, CT, pp. 3-4.

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