Category Archives: Uncategorized

* 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 Bartleby Snopes.

Bartleby Snopes was recently included in Flavorwire’s 10 Online Lit Mags You Should Be Reading:

The publication focuses on short fiction, but the range of its subjects and styles makes up for the lack of other literary genres. In other words, you won’t find stories of marital drama, gratuitous sex and violence, or self-indulgently navel-gazey artistic angst.

*

About:

Bartleby Snopes is an online literary magazine with several goals in mind. We want to publish the best new fiction we can find. We want to give the many writers out there an opportunity to publish their best work. We want to inspire you to create great works of fiction.

We currently publish two stories per week and end each month with a Story of the Month contest. We also publish our favorite stories in a semi-annual magazine format available as a free pdf download every January and July.

*

Fiction Excerpt:

The Incident with the Artist
by Steven Berkowitz

A gleaming silver moon shone high up in the night sky as waves of anxious, curiosity-driven people flooded into and–when no more could fit inside–in front of the artist’s loft.  Those who had arrived earliest, the artist’s close friends and chief appreciators, had found a spot for themselves in his small crowded studio; they watched him closely and were filled with joy and awe as he came nearer and nearer to finishing his masterpiece, a work of art that was rumored would be, upon its completion, peerless in beauty and absolute in its perfection.  It was said that prior to starting the piece, the artist had been visited by an angel, and the angel did nothing but slowly move its hand to the artist’s forehead, lightly pressing its center with two glowing, divine fingers.

This is a fascinating book, well written, and well researched.

via The New York Times:

The Flesh and Blood Behind the AK-47

It is no accident that C. J. Chivers opens “The Gun,” his bold history of the AK-47, not with the loud crack that is the report of the rifle but with the monstrous bang of the first detonation of a Soviet nuclear bomb. As Mr. Chivers’s detailed history then skirts as far back as the United States Civil War and brings us right up to the current conflict in Afghanistan, the message of his prologue is clear: For all that the escalating cold war shaped the last 60 years, no one was ever killed in conflict by a Russian nuke. By contrast untold millions have been wounded and killed by the AK-47 and related weapons, as they have proliferated and mutated from tools of engineering ingenuity, honestly wrought in defense of the socialist motherland, to the firearm of choice for both oppressor and oppressed.

As a fan and casual collector of manual typewriters, this warms my heart.

via Make Magazine:

A pleasant afternoon of manual typewriting?

Announcing the first Philadelphia
Type-IN
A Pleasant Afternoon of Manual Typewriting

Long before the laptop or the mainframe, writers, reporters, and bureaucrats alike relied on the typewriter to get the word out. Today, only a few companies make typewriters—but thousands of classic Remingtons, Underwoods, and Olivettis are still around, waiting to be dusted off. Just as vinyl records have held their mojo in a digital world, these miniature printing presses are attracting a new group of fans, many half the age of the typewriters they’ve lovingly restored.

They’ll be gathering to clack out letters, poetry, perhaps the beginnings of their next novel at the Type-IN, an off-beat gathering of manual typewriter users coming to Bridgewater’s Pub at 30th Street Station. Typewriter aficionados will enter a typing competition, buy and sell at a typewriter swap meet, and consult with an experienced typewriter technician, who’ll offer tips to keep that vintage machine cranking out words smoothly.

*hat tip to BoingBoing

A couple of months ago, I noted an intriguing new project in social reading. After downloading the iPad app for  The Mongoliad and reading some excerpts, I decided it wasn’t my cup of tea. Still, the community that is developing around this experiment is intriguing.

via Publishing Perspectives:

How Neal Stephenson’s The Mongoliad is Revolutionizing Immersive Online Storytelling

People constantly talk about social reading as the next business model for publishing. Well, it’s here, it’s The Mongoliad.

In the febrile, occasionally paranoid, always news hungry world of digital publishing, it seems strange that something so important should have slipped by so unnoticed, yet The Mongoliad seems to have been largely overlooked by the publishing Establishment. Perhaps it’s the name. Perhaps it’s the knights and swords. Perhaps because it’s from a bunch of SF writers and outside the science fiction imprints this style gets short shrift from the literati. Perhaps people just don’t care. This is a mistake. The Mongoliad is one of the most radical experiments in the history of publishing and writing that, if it works, could reshape the nature of both for generations. Yes, really.

via The Rumpus:

Joe Owens: The Last Book I Loved, The Wilding

Benjamin Percy can probably kick my ass.  At least his prose gives me no reason to believe otherwise.

Equal parts grit, subtlety and a silver-tongued bravura, Percy’s style makes me kind of want to call him a prosaic assassin if only prosaic assassin didn’t sound like a new flavor of Cheetos.  But there is a lot more to The Wilding than sheer alpha-male badassery, a lot more.

This guy is rapidly becoming the most famous Creative Writing student the world has ever known. Makes the whole MFA vs. New York City discussion seem a little unambitious.

via The Los Angeles Times:

Creative-writing MFA student to co-host the Oscars

James Franco will co-host the 83rd annual Oscar telecast on Feb. 27 with Anne Hathaway, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Monday.

Although most of the world knows Hathaway and Franco as talented young actors who can move from blockbusters to indie films and back again, book geeks know that Franco has a literary side.

Franco enrolled in Columbia University’s prestigious creative-writing MFA program in 2008; three credits shy of his degree, he stepped away from classes to film Danny Boyle’s “127 Hours.”

*

via Slate:

MFA vs. NYC: America now has two distinct literary cultures. Which one will last?

In his 2009 book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Mark McGurl describes how American fiction has become inseparable from its institutional context—the university—as particularly embodied in the writing workshop. The book is remarkable in many respects, not least for McGurl’s suggestive readings of a host of major American writers, not just Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver, the compact form and ashamed contents of whose work have made them program icons, but also verbally expansive writer-professors like Nabokov and Joyce Carol Oates. In terms of the intellectual history of the writing workshop, The Program Era marks a turning point after which the MFA program comes to seem somehow different than it had previously seemed. It feels, reading McGurl, as if the MFA beast has at last been offered a look in the mirror, and may finally come to know itself as it is.

* 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 w i g l e a f: (very) short fiction.

It’s been a pretty miserable week here on the Kitsap Peninsula– 10″ of snow, temps in the teens and single digits, downed trees resulting in two days without power county-wide. Things have cleared up now and the local mall is swarming with shoppers who have been cooped up the last few days. Post office resumed delivery two days ago– funny, but during the blackout I read a history of the Battle of Marathon and learned that the motto “Neither rain, nor sleet, nor dark of night, etc.” was actually the vow couriers of the Persian Empire pledged to their King.

Back on a regular posting schedule until Christmas.

*

Stories under 1,000 words. Good selection, impressive examples of narrative compression.

Fiction excerpt:

Lullaby
Meakin Armstrong

We lived above an auto repair shop in that part of town where they kept the warehouses and strip joints. Every morning, we awoke to hammering and clanging. When they were painting a car, a fine mist wafted through the bathroom vent and turned our tub, toilet, and sink murky blue.

Nights, the glowing roof sign for the Players Club leaked through the bedroom curtains, orange and red. Below our kitchen window was a hidden alleyway where the strippers took their breaks. I watched them in that alley on Mondays and Fridays, when Myfanwy was at Pilates. I liked watching the topless strippers while they yawned, stretched, and spoke on their cell phones.

* Two days without power, 10″ of snow, and temperatures in the teens. Screw YOU, Winter.

End of the year and these kinds of lists start piling up. I’ve only read the four books below, one in hardcover (bought before I got my iPad) and three as digital copies. Full list with links to reviews and a brief commentary at The New York Times.

THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY. By Zachary Mason. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The conceit behind the multiple Odysseuses here (comic, dead, doubled, amnesiac) is that this is a translation of an ancient papyrus, a collection of variations on the myth.

MEMORY WALL: Stories. By Anthony Doerr. (Scribner, $24.) These strange, beautiful stories all ask: What, if anything, will be spared time’s depredations?

ROOM. By Emma Donoghue. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) Donoghue’s remarkable novel is narrated by a 5-year-old boy, whose entire world is the 11-by-11-foot room in which his mother is being held against her will.

THE SURRENDERED. By Chang-rae Lee. (Riverhead, $26.95.) As death draws near, Lee’s heroine, a Korean War orphan now living in New York, sets off for Europe to look for her estranged son.

* 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 Bound Off Literary Audio Magazine.

I’ve written before about how helpful listening to fiction has been for me. Bound Off takes original short stories and turns them into download-able audio podcasts that you can get directly from their site, by email,  or via iTunes subscription. Many of the stories are read by the authors, which is especially cool.

*

Bound Off Literary Audio Magazine

About Us
Bound Off is a monthly magazine of literary short stories, founded in 2006 and based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Our mission is to merge the oral tradition of storytelling with new technology to create a digital audio magazine.

Bound Off is an independent, nonprofit organization committed to paying authors for their work. All staff are unpaid volunteers.

We aspire to showcase work that is compelling and driven by narrative, with a force that keeps the listener listening. We are dedicated to publishing stories by both the established and emerging writer.

The article below prompted me to examine how my reading habits have changed since I got an iPad. Six months in, I’ve bought 21 ebooks and 6 digital magazines vs. around 5 or so printed books, three of which were used. I’ve let most of my printed magazine subscriptions lapse in favor of electronic editions or publications like Electric Literature.

Since the iPad became my primary reader, I’ve found that when I want a book that doesn’t have a digital copy available, instead of looking for a used copy, I just pass it by. I’ve also taken chances on books I might have skipped such as 03 by Jean-Christophe Valtat.

iPad in Marware case running Kindle app. Note the eye-soothing reverse color. Shelf in the background is for books I haven't read yet.

via The New York Times:

Great Holiday Expectations for E-Readers

This could be the holiday season that American shoppers and e-readers are properly introduced.

E-readers will be widely available at stores like Target, Best Buy and Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, and offered at prices that make sense for Christmas gifts — less than $150.

Publishers and booksellers are expecting that instead of giving your mother a new Nicholas Sparks novel or your father a David Baldacci thriller in the hardcovers that traditionally fly off the shelves and into wrapping paper at this time of year, you might elect to convert them to e-reading.

“This is the tipping-point season for e-readers, there’s no question,” said Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book market research company. “A lot more books are going to be sold in e-book format. It also means that a lot fewer people are going to be shopping in bookstores.”