Amy Bonnaffons on the Georgia Review's Spring 2024 Issue

October 2025

Dear Chillsubs writers,

I hope you enjoyed your first back issue! This time we’re sharing our issue from Spring 2024, which features fiction by Munachim Amah, Renée Hayek, Lilia Shrayfer, Nicole Haroutunian, and Kathy Chao—as well as a special comic feature and some fantastic poetry, essays, and reviews.

Shrayfer’s story, “A Man Without a Burial,” is a debut publication—something we get very excited about here at GR. We take seriously our mission to “support writers at every stage of their careers”; while we are highly selective (we get about 10,000 submissions a year and can only publish a handful of those), many stories we pull out of the Submittable queue to discuss in our editorial meetings are by emerging or even debut authors. About 25% of the stories I’ve advocated for in acquisition meetings have been debuts, several of those by writers without MFAs. This is partly possible because most of the work we publish goes through at least one round of editorial exchange; this means we often work with the writer on revisions (sometimes quite significant ones) before publication. We believe our writers deserve the gift of a careful reader who pays serious attention to their work and helps them realize its full potential. We’re able to engage in this kind of old-fashioned editorial practice because we are well supported by the University of Georgia (many lit mags are staffed by volunteers engaged in labors of love; we do love our labor but we also, blessedly, earn salaries.) I often tell potential submitters to keep this in mind: if we love a piece, we’re willing to work with the author to get it just right. So while we do want your best and most polished work, we’re especially excited by work that takes big swings, that feels alive and full of potential.

I wasn’t at GR when Shrayfer’s story was acquired, but reading it, I’m entranced not only by the window it provides into the Bukharan Jewish community and the provocative way it deals with identity and gender, but also by the aesthetic risks it takes. The plot’s dreamlike logic would confound many a workshop—yet somehow this craft choice enables Shrayfer to elegantly capture the way in which memory and desire collapse into each other.

Chao’s story, “One of You Will Betray Me,” has such wonderful humor and specificity; it went through the editorial exchange process here and went on to win a Pushcart. I also appreciate the heartbreaking lyricism of Amah’s story, the skillful illumination of family dynamics in Hayek’s, and the way Haroutunian’s dramatizes a young woman’s consciousness coming into focus. This issue makes clear just how diverse GR stories can be—aesthetically, geographically, and in many other ways. Each one speaks with precision from its own specific context, while also offering something valuable to the general reader.

Happy reading!

Warmly,

Amy Bonnaffons
Interim Fiction Editor