Category Archives: Uncategorized

Neil Gaiman has posted five short stories on his website. If you’ve never read his stuff before (American Gods, Anansi Boys, Coraline), here’s your chance to sample the work of “one of the top ten living post-modern writers.“

* Online lit mags are publishing some of the most intriguing writing available today. Every Monday, I post a pointer to a site that offers fiction either as free content or as samples from subscriber issues. Today’s pointer is to Corium Magazine.

About:

The corium is the dense inner layer of skin beneath the epidermis, made up of connective tissue, blood and an elaborate sensory nerve network. Corium aims to showcase work that touches on nerves and lingers. That evokes and awakens. That leaves an imprint that sticks around for awhile …

Born March 22, 2010, Corium Magazine is an online, quarterly magazine, featuring short and very short fiction and poetry, as well as artwork.

Fiction excerpt:

Night Train from Seattle
Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

I.
Minnie is a boxer, and she doesn’t let the enemy get away with anything. But exactly what side Minnie is on tends to shift from day to day according to the vicissitudes of the more-than-marginally screwed up world that Minnie inhabits and the oddly tuned moral code that she carries around with her like an invisible pocket edition of Fordyce’s sermons updated to the extreme for a girl’s life hopping trains. And that’s always been Minnie’s way. With her, you can find yourself facing flashes of ferocity and bared teeth one day, then hot tea and a homemade chicken stew the next, all because the balance changes and you suddenly need rescuing from a threat even worse than the one you pose yourself (and she’s smart, so she knows it–and pities you enough to mother you for a while).

I remember the smooth chill of the winter night when Minnie and Sky laid it all out for me. Their distrust of the men in blue polyester suits with their radios and badges and patrol cars, set to harass them at any turn for not exactly having a home address to put on the report at the precinct. Their rule that a friend knifed in the back or a kid sister catcalled one too many times would mean one thing and one thing only: vengeance meted out swift and savage by their little community taking matters into its own hands. No recourse to courts of evidence or restraining orders, just eye for an eye, quick and sweet.

OK, so I’ve written about how I’m letting my magazine print subscriptions expire in favor of digital copies. But when you get something like this in the mail– something that treats paper and ink as more than a simple delivery system– the advantages of electronic text seem cold and ephemeral in comparison.

Behold the unboxing of McSweeney’s Issue 36!

McSweeney's Issue 36, still in it's shrink wrap.

Back

Opened

A Box Full of Awesome

Subscription definitely renewed.

Not surprised by the article below, only curious why the corporations didn’t simply offer an “opt-in” program where users allowed access to their reading habits in exchange for discounts on books, much like supermarket “Club Cards” give discounts in exchange for tracking one’s grocery habits. As consumers first and foremost, our personal data is one of the few valuable commodities we have left to offer at the altar of the ever wise, ever benevolent Free Market.

via NPR:

Is Your E-Book Reading Up On You?

E-books are quickly going mainstream: They represent nearly one out of 10 trade books sold.

It’s easy to imagine a near future in which paper books are the exception, not the norm. But are book lovers ready to have their reading tracked?

Most e-readers, like Amazon’s Kindle, have an antenna that lets users instantly download new books. But the technology also makes it possible for the device to transmit information back to the manufacturer.

“They know how fast you read because you have to click to turn the page,” says Cindy Cohn, legal director at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It knows if you skip to the end to read how it turns out.”

Ending my subscription to One Story was tough– One Story’s format and content was excellent– so I was excited to come across a new iPad/iPhone app that promises to deliver high quality short stories every week for six months for just $4.99 (21 cents per story).

Storyville:

One great story delivered to your iPhone or iPad every week
We’re excited to bring you the beta launch of Storyville, which premieres today, December 14 2010. Our mission is to bring you one great story every week. Stories are timeless, but the world has changed the way stories come into our lives, and how we share them.

Storyville publishes one story each week to your iPhone or iPad (soon other platforms as well). The stories are always with you. Read on the bus, in an airport, waiting in line, in bed, or wherever you are inspired to enjoy a well written story.

Storyville currently has two public domain pieces (used in Beta testing, I assume) and Ben Greenman‘s, “The Transgression”. Upcoming authors include:

… Joe Meno, Robert Boswell, Mavis Gallant, Pasha Malia, Charles Baxter, Shannon Rouss, Belle Boggs and more. New story collections represented in Storyville will include work from Akashic Books, Archipelago, HarperCollins, W. W. Norton, Simon and Schuster, Random House, Graywolf Press and more.

The app itself seems well designed. Fonts, font size, and background color are all adjustable. There’s no landscape mode and, in my initial testing, I found some adjustments finicky and had one crash– minor issues that are common in new releases.

Some pics of the app on my iPad:

Title Page

Text

Awesome! Ploughshares, one of the best lit mags out there, just announced that it will now be available via Kindle for just $4.00 (regularly $10 each for a one year subscription).

I’ve already received my printed copy of Ploughshares Winter 2010-11, but I couldn’t resist buying a digital copy:

Blurry image of my iPad running Kindle app.

Looks good!

* Online lit mags are publishing some of the most intriguing writing available today. Every Monday, I post a pointer to a site that offers fiction and/or poetry either as free content or as samples from subscriber issues. Today’s pointer is to DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION.

The weather here on the Kitsap Peninsula has been more volatile than I can remember, from the big freeze of two weeks ago to today’s 6″ of rain. I think plague and/or locusts are due up next.

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

via Duotrope:

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION is a bi-weekly flash fiction site that features things under 200 words. A Best of print anthology is published annually. DOGZPLOT is what the description says, erratic, so send us precise, playful, honest, original, disgraceful, hopelessly optimistic, dirty, beautiful, ugly, thoroughly proofread, over the top writing. So don’t send us the good stuff. Send us something that will blow our fucking minds.

*

Fiction excerpt:

X – marnie shure
The shadow on the x-ray is actually almost lovely, my sister told me: a flourish on something as static as bone. I wasn’t prepared to believe her but when she took the square cardstock envelope from off her bed and turned off the lights and pressed the contents against the apartment window to push the sun right through I saw just what she meant. Like a Rorschach test on her lumbar curve.

Good article below. I was slow to get on Twitter but now have it constantly running in a browser window. Using the Lists feature is especially nice, allowing you to group people into categories such as Politics/News, Science, etc. Really fun to follow writers such as Margaret E. Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Tayari Jones, Catherynne Valente, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Benjamin Percy, Joe Hill, and Peter Straub.

via Los Angeles Times:

Twitter is full of readers: ‘Why I Read’ makes trending topic

On Wednesday, the hashtag #whyIread rolled out of bed in New York and caught the attention of Twitter readers everywhere. It was repeated so widely, so many times, that within hours, #whyIread had made Twitter’s Top 10 trending topics in Los Angeles, New York and nationwide.

While Twitter’s 140-character limitation makes it a strangely truncated place for communication, the #whyIread hashtag’s popularity shows that its users may be intellectually engaged after all.

Literary types, who spend much of their time on Twitter discussing books and reading, wondered why suddenly everyone else was too. “Wow! What influencers sparked the first RTs?” tweeted Charlotte Abbot, a journalist and publishing consultant.

I tried out Google’s ebook app for iPad (using a public domain copy of GREAT EXPECTATIONS) and noodled around a bit at their online bookstore. The app itself is pretty crude: no bookmarking, no highlighting or taking notes, no landscape mode, and a sluggish response when turning pages. The app also seems to need a constant internet connection; every time I turned a page, I could see my iPad downloading data. As for the bookstore, I priced FREEDOM, THE PASSAGE, and a couple other books but found no difference in price from other vendors. And the partnership with indie booksellers? Nowhere that I could see.

Unless you really need the ability to read “from the cloud” on multiple devices (like at a computer lab or on another person’s iPad), Google’s latest offering is a major disappointment.

via Salon.com:

Is Google leading an e-book revolution?
By the time Google eBookstore finally launched on Monday, it was already being touted as a revolution in the marketplace for digital books. It offers more titles — nearly 3 million free, public domain books and “hundreds of thousands” of newer books available for purchase — than any other retailer, and promises every customer “seamless” cloud-based access to their personal e-book library from (almost) any device, no matter where they are.

Whether these features will mean much to the average e-book reader, however, is another matter. Sales of e-books have grown by triple-digit rates in the past year, and industry experts predict no immediate end to the expansion, given that e-reader devices and tablet computers are expected to be popular gifts this holiday season. For every person I’ve met who swears she will never be lured away from her beloved print books, there’s another who raves about finally reading “Middlemarch” on his smart phone during his daily wait for the bus and someone else who reports devouring twice as many books as she did before she got a Kindle.

Google’s latest venture seems like a nice option, especially if you can buy from independent booksellers like Powell’s Books instead of directly from Google.

via NPR:

Test-Driving Google eBooks: The Good, The Bad, And The Competitive Spirit

Today, Google launched its online bookstore, Google eBooks — a long-awaited and much-discussed entrant into electronic bookselling. Google is advertising the store as compatible with computers, obviously (for those who want to read that way), but also with iPads and iPhones, Android devices and standalone e-readers including Sony and Nook devices as well as others that run Adobe Digital Editions.

(But not your Kindle, there, buddy.)

We thought we’d give it a try by buying a recent book — David Sedaris’ Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, which cost us $9.99 — and test-driving it on a few different devices.