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Heat up the cocoa, stir up the fire, and chill with VerbSap Winter 2008. And let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Congratulations to contributor Tai Dong Huai who won an inscribed copy of Joshua Henkin's novel Matrimony by being the first author to have a story, Chinaman's Chance, accepted in Winter 2008. Thank you Joshua Henkin for hosting the competition

The Somerville News Writers Festival features Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz, Steve Almond, and VerbSap graduate Timothy Gager, among other luminaries... Spencer Dew's Songs Of Insurgency from Vagabond Press has been a Small Press Distribution bestseller. Go Spencer! His last story for VerbSap was The Body Museum... Friend Of VerbSap Russell Rowland will be co-editing a new online literary magazine, Stone's Throw. Russell also edits The Smoking Poet... VerbSap contributor John Flynn has a story in the Istanbul Literary Review. Kenneth Pobo, whose flash fiction appears in Winter 2008 is also featured... VerbSap alum Chigozie John Obioma's novel The Native Hurricane is now available from Athena Press.

Publishing? Send "brags" to the editor.

VerbSap's latest Drop-Everything-And-Read-This List includes: What Is The What, Dave Eggers's novel about the life of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng. Sample a chapter.

VerbSap Winter 2008 was compiled and edited under the musical influence of Reina Del Cid, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Coldplay, and Rent.

The Winter 2008 masthead is derived from Julian Fałat's Śnieg (Snow) and Lynne Lancaster's Winter Tree. The front page features details from Charles Hobson's Madame Bovary and Dez Pain's Graphic-Summer Moon Rising. Arctic sea ice image courtesy of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Speaking of snow and ice, take a few minutes to visit the cryosphere.

VerbSap reviews select novels and short story collections. Query the editor.

NewPages.com hails VerbSap writers' "unwillingness to settle for the second-best word." Precisely.

Ice

Winter 2008

How can there be a place
so cold any movement saves you.
Naomi Shihab Nye

Fiction>1000 Words

Gary Moshimer: Drift
There was a snowstorm. I was six years old. Our old garage was one big snowdrift. I tunneled my way inside it and was playing around when the roof buckled and buried me.

Nick Ostdick: Brothers
This is how it’s going to be: You’re old enough today to hear it, and if you screw this up, if you don’t pay close attention or do something stupid, I’ll kick your ass because I’m older than you and I totally can.

Neil Crabtree: My First Handgun
He’d lived with us as long as I could remember, except when he went away to college. I was a teenager before I figured out the college he went away to was the county stockade.

Nick Chandler: Lessons
She had hung 20-some-odd bright softball-sized Nerf balls on her ceiling, each on six inches of heavy fishing line. Her hand and blue wrist would twirl them...until the whole room was under the soft tentacles of her movement.

Christopher Williams: Drunk Off The Moon
Once we rode bikes on a country road in the middle of the night...We were going to a party in a barn and when we got there my friend broke a window because some girl he liked was there. He was like that.

Simon Langham: Dawn Breaks Everything
Life, it’s fucking complicated.

g. martinez cabrera: A Day In The Life Of A Donut Store
On cold nights, like tonight, when the glass gets all steamy, I feel like I’m in a dream.

Tai Dong Huai: Chinaman's Chance
My lips begin to move, but I am as silent as smoke.

C.A. Cole: Learning From The Setter
We wound our way through the pines and buffalo grazing along the river in the park until we came to that spot half way between the equator and the North Pole.

Fiction<1000 Words

Tori Malcangios: Nothing Left To Miss
I told him that I was looking forward to missing him. I hadn’t missed him in a while and I missed not missing him.

J.A. Paks: Mixtape
5. I Melt With You (Nouvelle Vague). Now I know what you're talking about...I like it.

Edith Pearlman: It is I
The audience went wild. "Signora," they shrieked, "Signora we could listen to you forever; we would come in great numbers to hear you read the telephone directory."

Kenneth Pobo: Up, Up And Away
Jerry no longer finds it odd when Jeff rises on a hot air balloon from just beyond the porch...He returns with such interesting stories.

Bernard Kronik: Free Coffee
For a hundred miles everything looks like pink skin, a brown mole, a print dress. Then the rain comes.

Creative/Nonfiction

V. Kann: Smart Girl's Love Affair
I was weirdly paralyzed; the head had been occupying my trunk for so long that I thought to remove it would disturb some kind of tenuously preserved order.

Michael Gallagher: Whistling In The Wind
Ah, boys, we are such fools for love.

Colleen Wells: The Snake
Black and yellow, friendly fellow. Red and black, nasty Jack.