The Best Underground Fiction Volume One
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The book’s mildly effusive intro suggests that the idea emerged from a conversation in a bar, but The Best Underground Fiction actually originated in a college classroom. Scott Miles, 32, and Jeff Mikos, 29, met in 2003 while attending a workshop in Columbia College’s fiction writing department. Mikos was a systems administrator at the Board of Trade; Miles, a Detroit-area native, was working as a copywriter for an electronics catalog (“think Elaine Benes, just much much much less glamorous”) and had spent much of the previous five years working in a Seattle fish-packing warehouse. “It was one of those fortuitous meetings,” says Mikos. “There was a small writing group that sprung out of it, and after that we just all sort of became friends.”
Miles had some prior experience with underground publishing. After moving to Chicago in 2001, he started Trading Punches With Grandma, a photocopied fold-and-staple literary zine he passed around for free in cafes, bookshops, and “wherever we could find a little stoop,” he says. (And I published one of his stories at the2ndhand.com last year.) By early 2004 various collaborators had left town and the project began to fizzle.
Not long after they began foraging for stories, Miles came across The Best American Nonrequired Reading, an annual anthology edited by Dave Eggers. “I was like, ‘Oh no, here’s this guy who wanted to do what we wanted to do but did it much faster,’” he says. “It’s got you questioning one minute, but then you go, ‘Damn it, I’m gonna do this anyway.’” There are similarities between the two: The Best American Nonrequired Reading draws from independent print magazines and online zines. But where Eggers’s series is devoted to previously published stories, most of the stories in The Best Underground Fiction are new work.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Joeff Davis.
