Hang Time by Brendan Gillen
December 4, 2025
Funny, bruising, and unexpectedly tender, Brendan Gillen’s new collection, Hang Time, reveals the fragile humanity beneath the myths of competition and control. Whether laced with surreal twists or grounded in everyday heartbreak, these stories—moving from little league dugouts and high school gyms to auto shops and monster truck rallies—remind us that “hang time” is never just about staying in the air—it’s about what it costs to come back down.
PRAISE FOR HANG TIME
“Sport may be a dependable touchstone for the stories in Hang Time, but beware, there’s LSD in the Gatorade. The nostalgia is spiked. Jesus Was a Cross Maker is a batter’s walk-up music, and Enya plays at the monster truck rally. A former ace pitcher tests his beliefs about fate by courting a bear attack. Skulls are unearthed by clumsy golf swings. These tense, urgent tales explore the past-your-prime turbulence of adulthood with the lush sentence-writing of Barry Hannah and the stop-short eeriness of Raymond Carver. In these pages, magic isn’t just possible—it’s necessary.”
— John Brandon, author of Penalties of June (McSweeney’s Press)
“An exploration of athletics and spectacle through the lives of little-leaguers, professionals, bachelorettes with machine guns, and a tiny advertising icon, Brendan Gillen’s work is filled with tenderness and violence, both in subject and in his tight, masterful prose; he unpacks the allure of competition to reveal a core brimming with humanity—its hope and desire for connection, its physical and soul-level pain, and its infectious nostalgia. Hang Time is a knockout.”
— Emily Costa, author of Girl on Girl
“There are too many stories out there about writers and college professors. Bring on the athletes, the down-and-out family men, the working class folks doing their best to get by. Gillen’s prose focuses on the grittier parts of these characters’ lives, but there’s poetry in here, along with the heartbreak. You’ll find hope, too, of last-second buzzer beaters, happier marriages, recovering deadbeat dads, and a taste of the glory only hard-fought competition can bestow.”
—Eric Rasmussen, Fiction Editor, Sundog Lit
Early Innings
March 18, 2025
The Twin Bill literary baseball journal is proud to announce Early Innings, an anthology of its 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 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.
PRAISE FOR EARLY INNINGS
“Like a box of ballpark Cracker Jack, there’s a delightful surprise on every page of The Twin Bill’s EARLY INNINGS. This is a collection to be savored, a loving and lyrical celebration of the art of baseball.” — Tyler Kepner, The Athletic
EARLY INNINGS is a sold out ballpark filled with writers and illustrators. The poems are stories,the stories are pictures and the pictures are memorable…I suggest you find a bookmark and pray for extra innings. Four years of Twin Bill is not enough. — E. Ethelbert Miller, Grammy-nominated poet and author of the If God Invented Baseball trilogy
In four short years, The Twin Bill has become an institution on the sports literary scene. There’s only one other way legends are created so quickly, through our great game—baseball. A Hall of Fame trajectory can be charted after a few great seasons, and Early Innings makes a very convincing case for The Twin Bill. — Sandra Marchetti, author of Aisle 228 and DIORAMA
Short Relief by Ben Shahon
March 7, 2025
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 shred 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.
PRAISE FOR SHORT RELIEF
“From Little League to line drives, Shahon’s Short Relief catalogues the beauty—and occasional heartbreak—between bases. Short Relief prods the tender heart of baseball and those drawn to it, following its cast from bloodied noses and mitts under pillows to broken dreams and batting cage rage. Shahon’s quiet meditation on masculinity more than steps up to the plate.” — Kristi MacKenzie, author of Better to Beg
“In Short Relief, Ben conjures feelings that are as old as the sport that holds each of these beautiful stories together. There’s something lost in the past, and each character – usually a minor league baseball player – yearns for it, even if they don’t know what it is anymore. In these stories, there is a life after love, after heartbreak, after breaking balls, after mediocrity, after winning, even after fastballs, where a man can no longer play the boys’ game. But that life can wait just a little longer.”
–Joshua Trent Brown, author of The Walls Are Closing In On Us, Malarkey Books, 2026