Author: Scott

The Twin Bill literary baseball journal is proud to announce Early Innings, an anthology of their first four years. Featuring over 200 pages of baseball poems, short stories, creative nonfiction, and full-page color illustrations, Early Innings is a celebration of baseball. Featuring 29 poems,  16 pieces of creative nonfiction, nine short stories, two interviews, two comics, and Mark Mosley’s cover art of Sidd Finch, Early Innings is sure to be a hit with any baseball fan.

The Twin Bill was founded in 2020 and publishes quarterly online at www.thetwinbill.com and in print. They’ve published a total of 130 poems, 74 creative nonfiction pieces, 67 short stories, and 180 pieces of art. In 2023 they began holding a contest for the E. Ethelbert Miller Poetry Prize, Sidd Finch Fiction Prize, and Jackie Mitchell Poetry Prize. The following year, they began awarding trophies for the Best Baseball Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry books of the year.

For many American men, baseball is the game of boyhood. Memories of days spent at the park, fast friendships with teammates, and the culture of competition are the essential fabric that gives so many of these childhood memories their texture. But there comes a day for everyone when the game catches up with them, and they need to call it quits.

In Short Relief, Ben Shahon (A COLLECTION FOR NO ONE TO READ) asks the question of what happens when men are not yet ready to give up that boys’ game, the national pastime. In nine stories (including ones collected from Free Library of the Internet Void and Flash Boulevard), he traces the stories of a Minor League pitcher holding onto his last shed of hope for promotion to The Show, Little Leaguers’ formative experiences, and a host of men and boys in between.

Ben Shahon is the author of one previous chapbook, A Collection for No One to Read. His work has appeared in journals such as Ghost Parachute, BULL, and Flash Boulevard, and he serves as the founding EIC of JAKE. Ben lives and writes on the border of LA and Orange Counties in CA, where he bemoans the Angels’ decade-plus-long playoff drought.

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