Summer is coming to an end. And that can only mean one (important) thing: The August 2014 issue of Defenestration is here!

The August issue is always the hardest to put together. The winds of literary magic don’t blow very strong in late August, so we’re forced to accumulate magic through other, more labor-intensive means. We have to plan for this in advance. Eileen, for example, takes a trip to Ireland every summer to collect leprechaun feces (also known as “leprechuano”). We have to sacrifice three times as many unicorns, and it’s always a pain getting enough of them. Not to mention all the manticore tears that need to be bottled, all the demons that need to be castrated, and all the wizard bile that needs to be picked up from our cannery in North Carolina and shipped back to Defenestration HQ. And this happens before we even choose the content for the issue!

So. Here were are at last.

It’s time for the April 2014 issue of Defenestration, everyone! Last year Eileen and I took a break from the magazine to rest our fragile bodies and minds. Three months in a chemical bath and several cybernetic upgrades later, we reopened Defenestration to submissions and got back to work. The response was truly humbling. We started getting submissions immediately–and so many were awesome that we ended up holding on to more for consideration than we ever had before. That made choosing the content for this issue a little more difficult than usual, but Eileen and I are professionals and know how to handle these sorts of things. (We never resort to violence, unless that doesn’t work and we’re forced to resort to violence.

Ten years, you guys. This October, Defenestration will be ten years old!

Have any of you ever read slush? Have you ever read slush for ten years straight? After so long a time, Eileen’s lucky to still have her sanity, and I’m lucky to still have my sanity and my rakish good looks. But the slush is wearing us down, and we’re quickly becoming editors on the edge. We don’t sleep well. We don’t eat well. Our nerves have been rubbed raw. I have literally—literally—seen Eileen turn into a Tyrannosaurus over seemingly insignificant things. The other day she almost leveled an IHOP after finding an uneven distribution of blueberries in her blueberry pancakes. This sort of destruction cannot continue no matter how awesome and no matter how many views the resulting videos on YouTube attain.

I’ve had a busy, busy couple of weeks. So busy, in fact, that I was having trouble coming up with something to write about for my editorial this month. Eileen suggested I write about pie, but this year also marks Defenestration’s TENTH volume. So in place of an editorial, here’s a list of ten pies…

Welcome to December 2012, travelers!

I’ll jump right into this editorial biz: I love it when a submission stick with me.

After the initial read, the hold request, the dozens of other submissions that come and go… it’s nice to reach the end of the reading period and vividly remember the stuff I held onto. Take, for example, Addison Clift’s “The Passenger.” That was one of the first stories we added to the pending pile, way back in early September. But when the reading period closed, I knew I wanted it in this issue. I remembered it. More than that–every time I stepped into a subway car, I though about it, as if any moment a fellow commuter would shed his skin and devour the other passengers. (This was especially true when a crazy guy boarded the train and started talking about how he was President Obama’s brother and how Dr. King “never took shit from no one,” and then had a long discourse with an invisible friend that involved the Kennedy assassination and several unkind comments about women. “Phara Koltana I am your vessel!” wasn’t far off.)