And here’s a truism: if you’re going to give yourself the best chance of success with your fiction this year when it comes to submitting it to different outlets, make sure you follow the fiction contest and literary submission requirements to the T. You’ll find these requirements (or submission guidelines) on the contest and entry pages, and if you’re logging into Submittable or Duosuma or Moksha or Subfolio or wherever, the submission requirements should be pretty prominently displayed.

There’s something extraordinary of how Lehane leverages Catholicism. Lehane “describes himself as a ‘literary Catholic,’ using the faith's atmospheric impact on storytelling rather than adhering to strict dogma.” – Google AI Overview. If you’ve lived around Catholic churches and attended Catholic ceremonies like I have, having grown up for a time in Brooklyn, New York, and then basically everywhere else I’ve lived, primarily in Miami, you understand what’s happening, or feel it.

Murakami writes minimalist prose that is surreal, and often deals with themes of memory, existential longing, alienation, and lonely men living mundane lives but who face metaphysical, magical-realist, and fantastic or strange, surreal journeys. Early in his career Murakami wrote by translating his thoughts from English to Japanese. This process morphs into something slightly different in his later works, but the American influence is there in his pop culture references.