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From the Editors

The First Time Is Always the Best.

For many of us, the first in what often turns out to be a series is held in a vaunted position. Whether it is our first love, our first car, or our first job after college, we feel obliged to defend its primacy against late-comers. Even the fact that one’s first girlfriend dumped him at the county fairgrounds for another chap, that one’s first car barely crept above fifty and was held together with wire and duct tape, and that the first job entailed the longest hours at the lowest rate of pay we would ever again merit during our careers does not demote them to their deserved rankings near the bottom of the list. We are not thinking rationally when we’re in the thrall of nostalgia.

There are some areas of human endeavor in which nostalgia, rather than being merely a pleasant delusion that fools no one but ourselves, becomes a detriment. Think back not so distantly to Version 1.0 of Windows. How about, in fact, the first draft of anything, or even the second? Can you fondly recall your first apartment and the first, and possibly last, time you attempted home improvements? Why should our reactions to these situations be so decidedly unsentimental?

The difference seems to lie in the fact that in most aspects of life, other than living itself, we aspire to get better at what we do. The chart of our progress is rarely a straight line, but, stepping back, the general upward trend becomes clear. There are no extant versions of the earliest drafts of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but we can safely assume they weren’t quite as good as the poems we know.*

For that reason, we at Manhattan Literary Review are not content to rest on our laurels. We consider the magazine a work-in-progress. One issue at a time, we hope to get better at bringing our readers what they like. Our formula is not esoteric. We want to present clear writing to those who don’t have time to parse the inner ramblings of the self-absorbed.

We hope you’ll find an improvement over our debut. The submissions from which we culled our final selections ranged much further afield than last time, arriving from places as diverse as Bombay, India, and Prague, Czech Republic. It is our honor to present two authors who have never before been published. We hope they will remember us fondly, yet we also expect they’ll be published again. But first things first.

        Brian Skinner
        David Breitkopf
        Barbara Cranford

* The latest scholarly research indicates that the works of William Shakespeare were actually written by another fellow who went by the same name.

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