Brown Hound Press

08/19/2026

Wishing good luck to Dean Crow, Merceline Ochieng, and Carolee Anita Boyles!

We support our authors and nominate when appropriate. It's an honor to help launch debuts!

08/17/2026

Book rec. Did you know Joyce Carol Oates wrote her first novel under the pen name Rosamond Smith? Her early stuff is very pulpy 1970s suspense. Loved it. Hard Case Crime packaged two of those early novels together and put them out a few months ago. Definitely a fun read with early insights into a master’s process.

08/09/2026

Season Two is coming. Submissions open September 1st. The first story publishes on September 17th.

We pay our authors, and we respond to all submissions within two weeks. Get your best piece ready. 1,000-3,000 words.

brownhoundpress.com

07/16/2026

Book rec. In light of Bob Johnson's "The Train to Union Station" being the most read story of Season One, I want to recommend again his collection The Continental Divide. It was my pick of the year for 2025.

The book was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and described by the New York Times as "Flannery O'Connor meets Quentin Tarantino."

Also a cute photo of Gwenda Bond and I rocking t-shirts that Bob sent us.

"The Train to Union Station" is available to read on https://www.brownhoundpress.com/stories/bob-johnson-the-train-to-union-station, along with a link to buy Bob's book.

07/14/2026

Here are our five most read stories from Brown Hound Press Season One. For the record, all twenty stories had hundreds of readers at a minimum—and some had many more. These are the five with the highest reader counts in order.

Every story is available for FREE at brownhoundpress.com. Thank you to all who visited for Season One! We are gearing up for Season Two in September.

Swipe to see our Top 5 Most Read Stories.

5. Ghost Town by Carolee Anita Boyles

4. Bloom by Shelly Jones (Shelly Jones)

3. The Pantry by Libby Cudmore (Libby Cudmore)

2. The Last Detail by Judy Penz Sheluk (Judy Penz Sheluk )

1. The Train to Union Station by Bob Johnson (Bob Johnson)

06/29/2026

Book rec. Ready for a master class in dialogue? Check out the first two novels by George V. Higgins. The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Cogan’s Trade. I think Cogan’s Trade only has about 20 pages of exposition total in the entire novel. It’s pure dialogue all the way through. Great films, too. HT Frank Reardon

06/25/2026

Here they are! All twenty stories from Brown Hound Press Season One. What a great collection of authors from around the world. You can read them all for free at brownhoundpress.com.

Bob Johnson
Libby Cudmore
Damieka Thomas
Judy Penz Sheluk
Soramimi Hanarejima
Christopher McCurry
Merceline Ochieng
Deb Blenkhorn
Suvajeet Duttagupta
Dean Crow
Ellen Birkett Morris
Chelyen Davis
Nivara Lune
Carolee Anita Boyles
Ronald Coleman
Shelly Jones
Aurora Bodenhamer
Josh Boldt
Norie Suzuki
R. Hunter Whitworth

06/23/2026

We pair every story with a song and call it the Story Track. Here is this week’s:

The mother in R. Hunter Whitworth’s story (who is curiously never named) is a watcher, an observer of people. She watches Paradise Dave as he lectures her. She studies the guests of the resort through windows as she cleans their cabanas. And, whether her kids know it or not, she is always keeping an eye on them—when they’re at the beach with their secret cooler, or while they tell each other stories among the crashing waves. She even follows them on their clandestine adventure and hides in the shadows without alerting them to her presence.

Although the lyrics of Lucinda Williams’s “Side of the Road” aren’t an obvious match (sometimes the Story Track is more about the vibe), the woman in Williams’s song reminds me a lot of Whitworth’s protagonist. Something about the idea of wanting to know how it feels to be alone but still in the company of those she loves, even if just for a few moments. It’s more about the way she longs for some sweet moments of agency, for a taste of autonomy, in a life that is consumed with the need to care for others.

06/20/2026

Have you read our story of the week yet?

R. Hunter Whitworth’s fiction has appeared, among other places, in the Chicago Quarterly Review, the Threepenny Review, Driftwood Press, the Saturday Evening Post, and in the Cincinnati Review. His debut collection is forthcoming at Cowboy Jamboree Press. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughters.

06/18/2026

Story of the Week - the finale of Season 1!

R. Hunter Whitworth’s “Graveyard of the Atlantic” is filled with characters and images that misrepresent or obscure reality. As you might expect in a vacation town, everything is covered with a veneer–right from the opening paragraph when we meet Paradise Dave and his lying teeth. Later, Dave’s mantra about “facilitating an escape from reality” echoes the literal veneer that he’s manufactured for his own image. The beach house guests, too, live in a fantasy world filled with performative rituals of wealth and beauty.

The story’s title comes from another hidden truth–the graveyard of ships that lie wrecked beneath the serene surface of the ocean. Interesting that the old woman’s unseeing eyes ultimately expose the falseness of Paradise Dave’s fabricated world by reminding us that objective truth is not determined merely by what we see. In fact, a facade is only useful to those whom it is capable of seducing.

And speaking of seduction, the final scene reinforces the hollow nature of constructed reality with its transactional climax that could have been lifted straight from one of Rhiannon’s ghost stories.

Josh Boldt, Editor

It’s the secret dream of a certain kind of man to have his face on a series of billboards along Highway 17 heading towards the sea, and in the case of Paradise Dave–the current one, not the original–each billboard is a big, flat lie about the color and size of his teeth. The real Paradise Dave...