Dear Identity Theory Readers,
It’s Friday. You don’t want to read a long email, do you? You probably have at least ten other Substack emails begging to be read, nestled in your inbox between some just-tempting-enough sale offers from Costco or Victoria's Secret or maybe Malarkey Books.
I don’t want to get in the way of that.
So here, quickly, are our best links. These are the Identity Theory pieces we officially nominated for the 2024 Sundress Best of the Net anthology this week:
Our 2024 Best of the Net Nominees
"Miss Venezuela" by Naihobe Gonzalez (fiction)
"Ten Silver Cars" by R. B. Miner (fiction)
"Woodwork" by Luke Larkin (nonfiction)
"Knowledge of Missing Out" by Diane Shipley (nonfiction)
"southern apocrypha smeared with duke’s mayonnaise, 1974" by Evelyn Berry (poetry)
"Twitter is Abject" by Katie Berta (poetry)
"Storm" by Jacob Griffin Hall (poetry)
"Lake Valley" by Santana Shorty (poetry)
"Coppering" by Donna Vorreyer (poetry)
"Old Sons" by Jane Zwart (poetry)
How Do You Plan to Spend Your Wild and Precious Weekend?
Ampydoo has ideas:
New Fiction: “The Laundry Room”
“As Mrs. Nayar tended the prayer plant that had oval-shaped leaves, she thought of her neighbour’s sky-blue underwear she had hidden in her wardrobe.
Mr. Nayar got her the plant only a few weeks back, on their seventeenth anniversary. After being married for so long, they hardly had any more surprises left for each other. And yet, the plant caught her off-guard. When they were younger, Mr. Nayar often got her flowers. That overused, tired symbol of love. But none of them realized where the fragrance had disappeared to. One moment, it was right there in all its palpable sweetness, the next, it had vanished, replaced with dry air. Between this moment and that, two stillborn deaths, three homes, one whole country, and seventeen good years had passed.”
Read the rest of “The Laundry Room” by Abhimanyu Acharya.
A Mindset Change
Here’s a thought: What if we ended every email with “Looking forward to it,” no matter the context?
Looking forward to it,
Matt Borondy
Founding Editor
Identity Theory