Dear Editor: I had a very disturbing experience recently. For at least three generations, my family has gone to the Dixie Truck Stop on Christmas Eve for dinner. No one remembers how this tradition started, but like with all traditions, you just keep carrying them on. In case you don’t know what the Dixie Truck Stop is, it is pretty much what its name says it is, a place along Route 66 where truckers stop. A big buffet for $4.99, all you can eat. The food of course is awful, and the waitresses are brain-damaged, but that’s not the point. We all know the food is awful, and we also all know it’s a strange place to be on Christmas Eve. We spend half the dinner talking about how in the hell this tradition got started, and our best guess is that years ago some grandfather or other took his kids there and they loved it and wanted to do it the next year, and so there we are. This past Christmas Eve, though, I saw a guy sitting by himself in a booth looking around and taking notes, as though he was doing research of some kind for a travel magazine or writing a story. The thing about him is that heÌýlookedÌýlike a writer who was trying to look like “one of us.” But you couldn’t confuse him with one of us, or one of the truckers, or anyone else who wanders in here from Interstate 55. This guy was a fucking wise-guy writer, smug as can be. As I observed him, while trying to get down some tough roast beef (“Just like Mom’s!”), I knew what this asshole was doing. He was writing about all of the losers who show up at the Dixie Truck Stop on Christmas Eve and how they are all going to go back to their trailer park homes and open up their presents from K-Mart. And then he would publish this piece of crap in theÌýNew Yorker or some fucking place that thinks this is “real life.” In other words, he would picture all these people being at Dixie without having any consciousness of being there, as though they weren’t aware of the irony of it and though it was just the best goddamn restaurant they had ever eaten in. And that’s the problem with that kind of crappy fiction. The characters are just these fucking pawns who have no awareness of anything beyond the story that this hack writer puts them in. I mean what he should be writing about is a crappy writer who is at the Dixie Truck Stop on Christmas Eve writing a crappy story about people being at the Dixie Truck Stop on Christmas Eve. Now that would be a story! I wanted to go over and tell the guy to meet me in the parking lot, but my wife Gladys (just the kind of name this crappy writer would give her in his crappy story) told me to forget about it. That’s all I have to say on the subject. Any response?

Editor: I am not sure whether you want a response concerning “true-to-life fiction” or the Dixie Truck Stop. If the former, the I generally share your concerns. Despite what reviewers for theÌýNew York TimesÌýmay say, these are not “realistic” stories (see on this subject); further, as you suggest, the characters in this fiction are puppets and perhaps have reason to be upset at their authors (see on this subject). As to the Dixie Truck Stop, I also share your concerns about the quality of the food, and would add that the service leaves something to be desired.

(We also talk a bit about my son’s obsession with all 19 seasons of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. In fact, if you listen till the end, you can hear Aidan talk about it himself . . .)

Of course, we managed to forget a few obvious literary journals, but here’s a short list of ones we talked about, and a couple we didn’t:

• Monkey Business

Feel free to send some hate mail about all the journals we skipped over . . .

Also, we’re planning on doing an episode on “Books You Should’ve Read in College,” so if you have any suggestions—or any other comments—email me at chad.post [at] rochester.edu.

This week’s song is by Soft Landing.

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking . To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s , copy the following link.

The new issue of the from the folks over at Dalkey Archive is all on “Writing from Postcommunist Romania.” This was edited by Ehren Schimmel and looks pretty interesting. (I would write more, but don’t have a copy, and there’s nothing available online. If I get a copy, I’ll post some sort of update.)

One of my favorite drinks journals is and this “Spotlight on Romania” issue looks particularly good. The guest editor for this issue is Jean Harris—novelist, editor, critic, and translator who used to run The Observer Translation Project and is now working on a new site called the Romanian Literary Exchange.

In addition to pieces from a number of interesting Romanian writers—Mircea Cartarescu, Lucian Dan Teodorovici, Stelian Tanase, Dumitru Tsepeneag, etc.—there’s also an informative opening piece by Carmen Musat on “Contemporary Romanian Literature: A Tale of Continuity and Innovation.” Wish this was available online to link to, but instead, here’s a brief excerpt:

In the early ’90s Romanians hungered for new expressive forms—viscerally. A long-denied craving for the real coincided with a reaction against fiction—all those novels we used to praise for their resistance-packed political references. We ached to salvage the forgotten/forbidden past. Publishing houses brought out titles and promoted authors taboo under the Communist regime. They immersed themselves in autobiographical texts: secret diaries never published before and comprehensive memoirs. True stories, destinies dramatically changed: the most impressive came from well-known politicians and writers of the inter-war period, people who refused to collaborate, who defected or became prisoners of the regime. Many of the titles had documentary value. The new books helped to reconstruct (shine light on or through) the formerly impenetrable atmosphere of terror, the virtual daily prison of communist Romania. And, of greatest significance for contemporary literature, these reconstructive texts functioned as a literary school sui generis for the writers who would publish in the middle ’90s. All in all, literature worked to recover direct discourse and rebuild authenticity.

Definitely worth checking out. And hopefully the Romanian Cultural Institute is sending copies of both of these to dozens of editors at a range of publishing houses. It would be great if these anthologies led to the translation and publication of a few more Romanian novels . . .

It’s a very good collection—which isn’t surprising, due to the quality of Catalan fiction and the fact that everything the Institut Ramon Llull is involved with is always of very high quality—with a “Then” section featuring classic Catalan authors (such as Merce Rodoreda, whose Death and Springtime we’re bringing out next summer) and a “And Now” section with pieces from a number of more contemporary authors, such as Quim Monzo, Albert Sanchez Pinol, and Empar Moliner.

As Jaume Subirana (the guest editor) made an excellent selection, although as he points out in his intro, there are a number of equally worthy writers (Jaume Cabre, Biel Mesquida, Jorida Llavina) that had to be left due to the lack of space.

Mary Ann Newman’s afterword is also very interesting, putting the selections into a broader, linked context. (I would actually recommend reading this before the individual pieces to get a better sense of Catalan literary history.) Another reason this collection is so strong is because of the quality of the translators. In addition to Mary Ann Newman, other pieces are translated by Peter Bush, Martha Tennent, and Matthew Tree, among others.

It’s the first “Dalkey Archive Annual” and is made up of excerpts of Dalkey titles. What’s disappointing is that these are all old Dalkey books—nothing there to whet the appetites of real fans. And nothing from the issue—not even the book reviews—is available online.

Also, it’s odd that the look changed from to a more zine-type feel, to the new look for the Summer Issue (on Juan Emar), but all the changes at Dalkey over the past month might have something to do with that.

Regardless, it’s nice that RCF seems to be back, and hopefully the new issue of will be fully online in the near future. The TOC is intriguing, and the readable quote on the pdf placeholder is solid, but clearly that’s not enough . . .