Dzanc Books recently released the 2008 edition of its new Best of the Web anthology series, an anthology that collects some of the very best, fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction that appeared on the internet last year.  Today, a number of blogs are hosting guest posts by the contributors of this anthology.  The following post was written by Ron Tanner, who has published stories in such magazines as The Iowa Review, the Massachusetts Review, the Literary Review, Story Quarterly, and dozens of others. His work has been anthologized in Best of the West, the Pushcart Prizes, and Twenty Under Thirty: Early Work of America's Influential Writers. Awards for his short fiction include a James Michener Fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, first prize in the New Letters national fiction competition, gold medal in the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society national competition for short fiction, and many others. His first collection of short stories, A Bed of Nails, won the first-annual G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize, sponsored by BkMk Press at he University of Missouri-Kansas City. 

Here's what Ron had to say about his appearance in Best of the Web 2008:

I appear in Best of the Web, Dzanc books’ new anthology of best writing from the web. My story is called “My Small Murders.” In fact this was the first story that I web-published. All my other stuff has been published in conventional magazines. I avoided web publishing only because I didn’t know where to start. I sent in “My Small Murders” after David Wolach at Wheelhouse magazine asked me to send something. So now I’ve started and I feel good about that.

Web publishing has become a big deal and it’s becoming bigger by the day. I can hardly keep up with the increasing number of online magazines, not to mention great blogging sites like this one. I myself am running five websites – one for my writing, one on Myspace, another on Facebook, one for my band, and one about my old house. I have a blog too. I’ve heard that now there’s a service for those of us who can’t keep up with our websites – you pay someone to manage traffic on your sites. That seems to defeat the purpose of putting the web-maker in contact with the public. But, then, I wouldn’t mind somebody doing my laundry too. And ironing.  

“My Small Murders” is about an infestation of mice in a young couple’s apartment. It’s mostly a true story, about the demise of my first marriage and the mice that ran amok in our apartment just before that happened. Occasionally a mouse shows up in the old house I now share with my third wife. (Yeah, funny how those numbers multiply.)  Mice don’t last in this house, however, because we have cats.  They always find the mice before we do. Mice KNOW when a house has cats and so they will go elsewhere. Mice have choices, that’s what I’m saying. People in small mouse-infested apartments have choices too. That’s what my story’s about.

The web is about choices too. Sure, there are a lot of choices here. Some say too many. But that’s the way I like it. I live in a city – Baltimore – because I want to be immersed in choices, like having a 24-hour supermarket down the street. It doesn’t matter that I never go there at, say, four in the morning. I like to know I can.  Good for you for reading this far in a too-busy world. Let me express my thanks. Go to this link at my website, take a look at the cool, one-of-a-kind, writer’s greeting card I’ve invented. Tell me which one you like. I’ll send it to you via conventional mail. Honest.