Category Archives: Uncategorized

Except for epistolary pieces, the form reminds me too much of this–

from The Guardian:

Want to choose your own adventure? There’s a books app for that

Childhood days of cheating on the Choose Your Own Adventure books by jumping back 10 pages after being eaten by a monster or falling down a chasm may be over, after the series was launched as an iTunes app last week.

The classic title Return to the Cave of Time – in which the reader can journey through the ages using “all of your numerous talents and much of your enormous intelligence to avoid disaster, even death” – was launched this week as an interactive reading experience for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

from Newsweek:

Salinger Like You’ve Never Seen Him
Filmmaker has never-before-seen photo of the reclusive author.

In April of 1968, the stamped date of the never-before-seen photograph above, J. D. Salinger would have been 49 years old. He was recently divorced, and three years into the seclusion that would span the last 45 years of his life. He has bags under his eyes and grooves in his face but, ever so faintly, he is smiling. The intimacy of his setting—the milky tangle of used blankets and sheets—is offset by the spare thrift of his Cornish, N.H., bedroom, with its humble furnishings: small wastebasket, austere dresser. Bare, blank walls. Pack of smokes. But the most telling detail is on the door, at the left edge: a flash-enhanced glint on the room’s steely lock. It’s a reminder of its tenant’s unflinching mantra: keep out.

and from Herald.ie:

Back to Ground Zero

WHEN Catcher in the Rye author JD Salinger died last January, many US literary figures were quick to publicly lament his passing. Not Bret Easton Ellis, who tweeted the following: “Yeah!! Thank God he’s finally dead. I’ve been waiting for this day for-f**king-ever. Party tonight!!!”

Rapidly re-tweeted around the planet, those 17 words caused almost as much controversy as some of Ellis’s novels (which is really saying something when you consider he wrote American Psycho).

Michael Swanwick wrote a story about me. Srsly, dude. Or at least, he wrote a story with a character named Dennis Ginoza. I suspect it has something to do with my reading his novel The Iron Dragon’s Daughter while fiddling with some magnetic coils I found behind the UW’s Particle Physics lab. Could also be because I sent  some cash to Clarion West‘s Writeathon, but I’m pretty sure it was those coils.

Smoker of Cheap Cigars
by Michael Swanwick
This is Dennis Ginoza: wheelchair user, collector of typewriters, smoker of cheap cigars. If he were a city, he’d be Chicago and Carl Sandberg would write a poem about him, throwing in hog butcher for the world, stacker of wheat, and player with railroads just for good measure. Perhaps in some larger cosmic sense, that’s how and why it ahappened. Some people warp the reality about them; they’re strangeness magnets.

Ginoza could go them one better, however. He had a flatulent bulldog named Leo. That pushed him into new realms of oddity. As the sign on his desk said: THE STRANGENESS STOPS HERE.

from io9:

The dystopian novel that’s turning China upside down

Chan Koon-Chung’s novel Shengshi Zhongguo 2013 (which roughly translates to “The Gilded Age: China 2013”) has gone from being a marginalized, underground text — which couldn’t even get published in Mainland China — to becoming a major sensation among China’s intellectuals. And according to an essay in China Beat by Professor Zhansui Yu, Shengshi Zongguo 2013 “has changed the way that Chinese define political fiction,” and its success is due to the fact that it exposes “the shocking darkness behind [China’s] dazzling economic miracle.”

And earlier this month in The Guardian:

Workers in China grasp the power of the strike

There was no chanting, no speeches, no violence. When the workers got tired, they sat down and chatted for a few minutes. Then they got up and carried on walking until the end of the shift, marked their time cards and went home.

Industrial action does not get much lower key than this, nor does it get much more significant. The Denso strike was reported across the world because it took place on the frontline between global labour and global capital: workers in the workshop of the world had downed tools – and won.

First started reading Doerr earlier this year, really good stuff.

from Paper Cuts blog (NYT):

Living With Music: A Playlist by Anthony Doerr

Supposedly some writers work in rowdy coffee shops or compose whole novels to Megadeth but when I write, I wear a pair of chainsaw operator’s earmuffs. Every morning, I clamp those things around my head, the world sheds its noise, both literal and figurative, and a level of concentration comes over me that I’m hard-pressed to reproduce in other parts of my life.

Sometimes I’ve got the muffs on for six or seven-hour stints, and when I take them off I feel as if I’ve been yanked suddenly to the surface from the bottom of a well. Then it’s a bunch of e-mail or a bike ride in the hills, but when I get home? When dinner is done, and bills loom and the kids are hurling Legos across the carpet? Then it’s Music Time.

Review of his new book, Memory Wall:

The Nonpersistence of … What’s That Remembering Thing Called Again? By JANET MASLIN

A single overarching preoccupation connects the six brooding stories in Anthony Doerr’s “Memory Wall.” It is Mr. Doerr’s relentless fascination with memory and with the way memories are destroyed, eroded, drowned, faded or eaten away. “How can it be such a frail, perishable thing?” he asks about memory in the title story. He finds an assortment of somber ways to answer that question again and again.

Think they forgot one.

from The Huffington Post:

This week, check out our list of some of the best MFA writing programs in the country, inspired in part by this helpful 2007 article in The Atlantic. What do you think? Are these programs worth it, or are MFA programs a thing of the past?

Back in my undergrad days at The Evergreen State College, I had a professor who introduced me to the concept of “surplus population”. He believed that global trends in robotics, globalism, and post-industrial capitalism would render many American workers obsolete. “What is there to do when there is nothing left to do?” he would often ask his students. It was an idea that deeply concerned him but that I couldn’t really grasp at the time.

In this era of permanent unemployment, I think I understand the concept much better. There are some hopeful counter-trends, but the pessimism at the end of this article is hard to argue against.

via Salon:

Are the American people obsolete?

Offshoring and immigration, then, are severing the link between the fate of most Americans and the fate of the American rich. A member of the elite can make money from factories in China that sell to consumers in India, while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country. With a foreign workforce for the corporations policed by brutal autocracies and non-voting immigrant servants in the U.S., the only thing missing is a non-voting immigrant mercenary army, whose legions can be deployed in foreign wars without creating grieving parents, widows and children who vote in American elections.

If the American rich increasingly do not depend for their wealth on American workers and American consumers or for their safety on American soldiers or police officers, then it is hardly surprising that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people. The rich don’t need the rest anymore.

I got a chance to talk with Ted Chiang at this year’s NORWESCON. A cool guy and an extremely good writer (his short story “Hell is the Absence of God” remains a story I return to again and again), his new novella, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, will be available soon from Subterranean Press and a reprint of his short story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, is also due to be released by Small Beer Press.

via io9:

Ted Chiang redefines how everybody will write about artificial intelligence

Chiang’s longest work to date is pure idea crack. Writing a longer work doesn’t make the award-winning short-story writer spread out his legendary inventiveness and gift for challenging the reader — if anything, he goes into overdrive. The Life Cycle of Software Objects keeps surprising you. Not just in the sense that you think the story’s going one direction, and then it suddenly veers in a new, totally logical, direction. But also in the sense that the story isn’t really about what you think it’s about. New ideas, new ways of looking at the conundrum of artificial intelligence, keep coming up, although they feel as though they’re organic to the story and the characters.

*Ted Chiang, Me, and a Steampunk Photobomber

from The Huffington Post:

We have found the most amazing bookstores in the world– the places that would make any reader shut their laptop, put aside their Kindle, and go out to buy a book. From New York to Portugal to China, we’ve picked the most inspiring.

* EDIT – Page seems to be down, maybe they’re adding Powell’s to the gallery.

Come on, HuffPo– think you forgot one.

Powell’s City of Books is a book lover’s paradise, the largest used and new bookstore in the world. Located in downtown Portland, Oregon, and occupying an entire city block, the City stocks more than a million new and used books. Nine color coded rooms house over 3,500 different sections, offering something for every interest, including an incredible selection of out-of-print and hard-to-find titles.

* 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.

If you’re submitting to literary magazines, you probably already know about Caketrain. Besides publishing an excellent magazine for only $8 (shipping included), they’ve made Issue #3 and Issue #4 available to read in full online or as a free .pdf download.

from Duotrope:

Caketrain is a literary journal and press based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our interest is in bringing readers the very best in contemporary creative writing, full stop.

*Full disclosure– I’ve submitted a short story to Caketrain and am looking forward to my rejection letter. – DYG