The Essential Worker by Australian author Jane Turner Goldsmith is the newest Wordrunner eChapbooks in which an excerpt of seven linked stories from a composite novel in progress recall that eerie and uncertain time, the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, when no one really knew what was happening on our planet. Compelling and still timely, these short stories from down under are told in the voices of workers who kept Australians fed, well, and alive in Autumn 2020: supermarket workers, bicycle food couriers, and truck drivers, as well as overworked teachers and health care providers. By turns frightening, hilarious, and tender, each essential worker’s story is one of a survivor with a distinctive voice. This issue can be read online along with all the previous Wordrunner eChapbooks publications: 26 fiction, 5 CNF/memoir, and 5 poetry collections, each featuring one author — and 13 anthologies by multiple authors.

Find out more about many of these titles with our Guide to Literary Magazines and our Big List of Literary Magazines and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Salvaged is the Spring 2023 Wordrunner eChapbook anthology exploring what can be salvaged from lost or damaged relationships, troubled times, or long lives well lived. Twelve authors write about retrieved memories, industrial waste, car wrecks, lives rescued from despair or death, and what the dying leave behind that may or may not be salvaged. This 48th issue explores emotional residue ranging over time and space from pre-industrial Europe to 1930s Taiwan to an Afghani war zone. New to this issue is Prose Editors’ Choice: “Imperfect Machines” by Joyce Hinnefeld, a meditation on her mother’s life (and the history of the sewing machine). This issue can be read online or downloaded as a pdf along with all the previous Wordrunner eChapbook publications: 26 fiction, 5 memoir, and 5 poetry collections, each featuring one author — and 13 anthologies by multiple authors.

Wordrunner eChapbooks‘ 47th issue, Winter 2022 fiction echapbook, is Death in the Cathedral: A Novella in Five Stories by Malcolm Dixon. These five linked stories immerse readers in the turbulent, disturbing and sometimes hilarious misadventures and rivalries of Catholic schoolboys in late 20th century Liverpool—Stephen Mattimore, the boy who tries to play by the rules, his rebellious and scornful classmates who torment their cassocked teachers, the misfit who runs the campus sundries shop. Death, lurking in the title story, whether sudden or anticipated, alters everyone. Outside the confining Cathedral College flows “the inky black waters of the Mersey, opaque to the point of invisibility, like the dark unwritten page of [Stephen’s] future.” This collection may be read free online or you can purchase an ebook edition for only $2.99. Authors receive 50% of all royalties, it’s a way to support a small press, and they make thoughtful gifts during the holiday season!

With its 46th and newest issue, Wordrunner eChapbooks‘ Summer 2022, The Satisfaction of Longing by Victoria Melekian, the number of fiction collections published in their free, online or epub format is 24. Add to this 5 memoirs, 5 poetry collections, and 12 anthologies, and visitors will find plenty to keep their reading needs satisfied, indeed!

Melekian’s stories are considered “emotionally rich and ethically complicated. . . suffused in longing and loss.” The collection of seven stories opens with the chance encounter of a woman and man who had once endured unbearable tragedy. A fatherless woman with an imprisoned husband has a mysterious benefactor. Two sisters conflict over what to do with their father’s ashes. In the final story, a woman and her son flee her estranged husband, who never wanted children.

This collection may be read free online but can also be purchased as an ebook edition ($2.99) from Amazon or Smashwords with authors receiving 50% of all royalties. ALL Wordrunner Authors are paid, and this also supports an indie press!

Later this year, Wordrunner will be publishing their 25th fiction collection, Death in the Cathedral by Malcolm Dixon. Look for it in December.

The theme for the Spring 2023 issue will be announced by December and submissions open January 1 through February 28, 2023. Guidelines may be found here.