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* 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 THE COLLAGIST.

THE COLLAGIST is published once a month. We publish fiction, non-fiction, and poetry from general submissions, as well as book reviews, novel excerpts from upcoming releases, and special features such as our Classic Reprint series.

Short Fiction excerpt from: Calvino’s Fingers by Brian Kubarycz

On Spring afternoons, when the scent of the ponds, which sat green and alive beyond the courtyard of cathedral school, drifted into the classroom and filled us with thoughts of rolling mud balls and heaving them like frogs against the sidewalks, or rubbing them into the newly starched collars of all altar boys, I knew we would soon be asked to find a jar big enough for a dozen pickles, poke holes in the tin lid, and walk out to the ponds to catch a frog we then could skin and anatomize as our faith-school science project. By then I had already smelled Calvino’s fingers.

Even if you’re not a baseball fan, this video is really cool. Takes a little of the sting out of a bad season, losing to the NY Yankees at home, and trading Cliff Lee to the Texas Rangers.

Run-in with Ichiro leaves teen ‘starstruck’

A teenage fan sitting in a seat near the right-field foul line at Safeco Field had an interesting “meeting” with Ichiro Suzuki in the first inning Thursday night.

The Mariners game against the Yankees was not even two batters old when Mark Teixeira hit a fly ball to right field. As the ball hooked toward the stands, Ichiro gave chase and reached into the first few row of seats trying to snag the ball.

He didn’t make the catch, and his extended arm collided with 17-year-old Aris Skinner, who was standing up and holding her cell phone.

These kinds of lists are always entertaining. I’d add Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (guys chained up and forced to watch shadow plays), the goblin cave in The Hobbit (where Bilbo riddles with Gollum), and the cave at the end of Jose Saramago’s appropriately titled novel, The Cave.

From The Guardian:

Ten of the best caves in literature

The Odyssey by Homer

In the land of the troglodyte Cyclops, Oysseus and 12 of his men visit the cave of the giant Polyphemus to ask him for food. But he makes them prisoners in his lair, which is sealed by a giant rock. Each day he eats a couple of them. How will they escape?

I started writing fiction about three years ago. One thing that has really helped me to get a feel for the cadence and musicality of prose is listening to audio books.  A skilled reader can evoke rhythms not readily apparent through text alone. Two examples of this can be found at Audible.com, the free samples conveying how hearing great writing can enhance the reading of it*–

– Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, read by Richard Poe. Poe is one of the finest readers I’ve encountered, rendering McCarthy’s prose with a magisterial, almost biblical, grace.

– Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, read by Will Patton. Another example of how a talented reader can make a story crackle and spark.

The danger is that a performance of the text can limit the scope of that text’s ambition, shading the listener into an interpretation constructed by the reader’s art rather than the writer’s. I think this can be avoided if one listens to books one has already read, the initial understanding of the text thus being opened to alteration rather than created from whole cloth.

*note: I don’t work for Audible or have any connection to it other than being a subscriber

One of my most vivid memories from childhood– I’m sitting beneath a banyan tree outside Kailua Library, my cheek bulged around a wad of black licorice, a can of RC Cola sweating in my hand. I’ve just checked out Ray Bradybury’s collection, The Illustrated Man, and I’m reading a short story called “The Veldt”– a breeze rustles the leaves above me and scraps of light flick across the pages and my eyes ache from the oscillation of glare-shadow-glare but I don’t stop reading, eager for that weird hollowness in my chest, part relief and part melancholy, that always comes when a good story comes to its end.

Nowadays I tend to favor Otter Pops and Diet Coke but summer is still the best time to get lost in strange places with strange people, literarily if not literally, and NPR has a fun list of books for those who “seek out fare that delivers dangerous thrills and uncanny chills without forcing you to endure still another scene in which the heroine’s getting a paper cut passes for narrative tension”. China Mieville’s latest book, Kraken, is on my iPad right now– if you haven’t read Mieville’s work, you’re missing out on one of the most exciting writers at work today (get Perdido Street Station or The Scar to see what I mean). Neil Gaiman’s anthology also looks excellent, the variety of writers he’s rounded up quite intriguing.

Zombies And Giant Squid: Summer’s Monster Hits!

The books below have got you covered. They feature gods, monsters, aliens, mutants, pulsating brains, sword-canes, dirigibles and derring-do. They’re enlivened, every one, by wit and wordplay, not more pale, bloodless introspection. Which is to say: They’re fun.

You can read the entire story online. It’s brutal, harrowing, and absolutely brilliant.

From the Guardian:

A “Homeric” story of life and death in a city rubbish dump has won Sierra Leone’s Olufemi Terry the Caine prize for African writing. Terry’s story, Stickfighting Days, follows a group of boys who sniff glue and fight each other with sticks in a dump.

The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks – Really can’t recommend this book too much or too heartily. It is essential reading for those who wish to survive the coming apocalypse.

Fun interview with the author at EW.com:

Grab the shotgun and cover your cranium: We talk to Max Brooks about selling 1 million copies of ‘The Zombie Survival Guide’

by Keith Staskiewicz

“It’s the lack of intelligence that scares the crap out of me. So I wanted my zombies to be as viral as possible. They literally are a walking virus, which you can’t negotiate with. So that was where I was coming from. The hard part was the real-world research, really finding guns that don’t jam, or what you would really need. I did a lot of studying for that, and I really had to think about it.”

I was lucky enough to be one of about fifteen people in a small conference room who listened as Ian McDonald read a chapter from one of his books at this year’s NORWESCON.  Imagine an Irish accent as you read the following excerpt:

Preview: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

The sound of an exploding skull is a deep bass boom that sucks every other sound into itself so that for a moment after the blast there is only a very pure silence.

Then the silence shatters into screaming. The tram jerks to a halt; the momentum almost throws Necdet from his feet. To go down in this panic is to die. Necdet can’t reach a handrail and steadies himself against the bodies of roaring passengers. The crowd surges against the still-locked doors. Their bodies hold the headless woman upright. The man in the fine velvet suit shrieks in an insane, high-pitched voice. One side of his purple jacket is dark glossy red. Necdet feels wet on his face, but he can’t raise a hand to test it or wipe it away. The doors sigh open. The press is so tight Necdet fears his ribs will splinter. Then he spills out onto the street with no sense of direction or purpose, of anything except a need not to be on the tram.

Note to self: email Pacific MFA and ask if it is too late to switch genres from Fiction to Non-Fiction.

From The Guardian:

Literary storm rages as critic Lee Siegel pronounces the American novel dead

“For about a million reasons,” Siegel claimed, “fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the non-fiction writers.”

* Online lit mags are publishing some of the most intriguing writing available today. Every Monday, I’ll 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 Word Riot.

Word Riot:

“Word Riot first opened up shop in March 2002 and has become one of the best known and most reputable online journals on the interwebs.
We like edgy. We like experimental. We like publishing the best up-and-coming writers and poets so we can say we knew ’em when.”

Publishes Flash Fiction, Short Stories, “Novulars”, Experimental, Non-Fiction, Poetry, Reviews, and Interviews.