Literature’s pulse is changing. We used to find it in big-circulation magazines, publishing houses, and university reviews. But these are dying sources, failing under the weight of the economic crisis and the existence of new technologies: kindles, blogs, e-books.

At the same time, there are more writers than ever. MFA programs are thriving, but, beyond that, more people are thinking about their lives and wanting to share these thoughts in the ancient form of the story. And the new technologies allow them to do this.

The old places of literature’s pulse can’t keep up. There is an abundance of literature on the Internet that cannot be published in university reviews and big commercial presses. There are small magazines, individual blogs, group websites updating their content daily, featuring new writers constantly. These are gaining readership and momentum. There are hundreds of them.

It’s hard to know where to go, what to read, or why. FictionDaily’s goal is to help aggregate and organize this sea of new literature. We try to make it accessible to readers who want to see what literature is up to. We aim to help others find the pulse of literature.

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An interview with the editor about FictionDaily.org.

A mission statement in essay form by the editor at The Millions.

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Commenting on a Mother Jones article called “The Death of Fiction,” Michael Copperman writes:

“The question is not whether print literary journals that are affiliated with universities are threatened today, their audiences dwindling and their funding threatened. That’s the situation that exists. The question is how literary journals can respond, who can innovate and demonstrate relevance…who can help us sift through so much content to find the best content. That will take new ways of thinking–”

Consider Fiction Daily an attempt to do this, following the enormously helpful model of Arts and Letters Daily (aldaily.com). Here, we select and aggregate content from the “independent” publishing world– the magazines, the websites, the small houses, the self-publishers–and put it into one place. Use this site to find stories to read, and to explore the myriad places that publish them (see our growing Literature list). Use it as a gateway to the vast sea of literature that’s being produced now in ways that the old industry can’t keep up with.