Welcome to the premier edition of the new quarterly e-zine, Vestal Review.

A new magazine? You might ask, who needs yet another e-zine? The reader, especially the Internet reader, has more free magazines available than he or she can possibly browse, let alone read. So the only reason left for the Vestal Review's existence is to offer something new, or at least under-represented.

I have been enticed by the call of the most condensed version of prose—flash story—for a long time. While there are many magazines that publish flash, none of them are devoted entirely to this type of fiction. So this magazine will go after the sparsely covered niche of flashes or "sudden" fiction and therefore open a new venue for the reader.

This is an eclectic literary magazine. It covers almost all genres, and the stories published here rely on language and character development rather than plot gimmicks. Yet unlike some highbrow publications that write very well about nothing, the plot is an essential ingredient of Vestal Review stories.

The writers in this issue hailed from all over the world, and we are proud to have them on board.

All illustrations in this issue are the exact reproductions of the public domain paintings of an Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, except for the main page photograph which is the work the Vestal Review publisher.

Enjoy!

Mark Budman