Akopos

* 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 FRIGG, A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry.

This site is visually attractive and the stories are well written. It’s edited by Ellen Parker,  Sean Farragher (Poetry), and Dennis Mahagin. Graphics by EnoaraF.

Fiction excerpt:

Storm Drain Bob
Thomas Cooper

“Hey, kid,” a man said. “Knock knock.” The voice was gruff and grunty, like that baby gangster with the cigar in the cartoons.

The boy felt his heart pounding against his ribs. He looked around. A man several houses down sheared away at rose bushes. A woman a few doors farther swayed soundlessly on a porch swing, a newspaper or book spread open on her lap.

At first the boy thought someone was playing a trick. Maybe his father, or one of the kids from the neighborhood.

“Who’s there?” the boy asked.

“Bob.”

“Bob who?”

“Storm Drain Bob.”

The boy sprinted away, crazy-legged, sneakers pounding on asphalt. But Storm Drain Bob was there when the boy came back the next day.

* 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 Fantasy Magazine.

This is a terrific site, edited by Cat Rambo.

via Duotrope:

Fantasy Magazine is an online weekly magazine of all forms of fantasy fiction. High fantasy, contemporary and urban tales, surrealism, magical realism, science fantasy, and folktales can all be found in our pages. We are looking for stories that delight, entertain, and enrapture readers, stories ranging from delicious treats that melt on the tongue, leaving only a trace of sweetness, to the dark and poignant tale whose memory lingers with you for days, perhaps years. Fantasy Magazine is entertainment for the intelligent genre reader… From the very first issue, Fantasy has featured authors of significant literary reputation, such as Jeffrey Ford, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Stewart O’Nan, and Holly Phillips.

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Fiction excerpt:

Bloodlines
Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Elena flipped the picture of San Antonio de Padua on its head and placed thirteen coins before him. She split a coconut, bathed it in perfume and whispered his name. When neither worked, she phoned Mario. Five minutes later she was yelling at the receiver. My mother was shaking her head.

“She should have given him her menstrual blood to drink. Now there’s no way she’ll bind him. He’s out of love.”

Really interesting audio clips. Check out the last part where he talks about ebooks.

via The New York Times:

At a press conference in Manhattan this afternoon, the Peruvian writer greeted a rowdy international crowd of some 150 journalists — including a group videoconferenced in from Spain — and answered questions in Spanish, English and French.

From Nobelprize.org’s tweet:

2010 Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa, a truly international citizen, committed to social change #nobelprize

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I have a vivid memory of reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s, The War of the End of the World in a cafe in Seattle. It was a summer day and I was sitting alone when the waitress came up to me with my order and asked what I was reading. I don’t recall what I said, just that I showed her the cover of the book–

and that we ended up chatting for several minutes about Latin American authors. Books can do that, get two strangers talking, especially when they’re as brilliant as The War of the End of the World.

Garth Risk Hallberg at The Millions asks:

Is Sergio de la Pava’s A Naked Singularity the first great self-published novel of the new century? Aren’t you at least a little bit curious?

I am curious! Tell me more.

via  The Quarterly Conversation:

Reviewed:
A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava. Xlibris. 692 pp., $23.99.

At the end of 2008, Sergio De La Pava self-published his novel A Naked Singularity, a postmodern, re-envisioned, linguistic assault on the standard crime/heist/legal thriller. It’s very good—one of the best and most original novels of the decade.

It’s narrated by a public defender named Casi. Between his ruminations on boxing, television, philosophical conundrums, the existence of God, the legal system, ethics, morality, how to make empanadas, why you should never talk to the cops, and diverse other subjects, he processes the cases of the criminals who come through his office and works pro bono on a death penalty case involving a mentally retarded man named Jalen Kingg, who is imprisoned in Alabama, while elsewhere in New York an infant has been kidnapped and Casi’s downstairs neighbors are working on bizarre psychological experiments.

The National Book Foundation has named its “5 Under 35” for 2010. Just for jollies, I went and checked which of these writers had gotten an MFA. Answer: 4 out of 5 (University of Iowa, California Institute of Arts, Cornell University, and the University of Houston). Paul Yoon, the only author whose work I’ve read (and was greatly impressed by), did not get an MFA.

via The National Book Foundation:

The National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” Fiction, 2010

Leslie Shipman, Director of Programs at the NBF, comments, “In the five years of 5 Under 35, we’ve been thrilled to see many of our honorees go on to receive great acclaim. We’re delighted that 5 Under 35 provides us with an opportunity to recognize these young writers early in their careers, with the help of past National Book Award Winners and Finalists.”

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Odds are being posted on this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. I’d put money on Cormac McCarthy, especially after the embarrassment of Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury, saying of American literature that, “The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature …That ignorance is restraining.”

via Galleycat:

Cormac McCarthy Has Updated 3/1 Odds to Win Nobel Prize in Literature

As U.K. gamblers adjust the odds for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Cormac McCarthy has lept to the top of the heap with 3/1 odds of winning the world’s most prestigious literary prize.

via Chamber Four:

DESCRIPTION
This anthology contains 25 of the best short stories published on the web in 2009 and 2010 as chosen by the editors of ChamberFour.com, a website dedicated to making reading more enjoyable and more rewarding.

In this collection, you’ll find traditional, Carver-esque stories alongside magical realist tales of teleportation, long pieces that slowly pull you in, and single-page punches to the solar plexus. Some of these authors you’ve heard of, others you’ll be discovering for the first time, and you can be sure you’ll see them all again.

There is no factor that unifies the pieces collected here beyond their availability online and that hard-to-define but unmistakable hallmark of quality. These stories are as diverse and as wide in scope as the Internet, but each is true to their shared subject: the attempt to reconcile our world to the struggles of the human soul.

* 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 Short, Fast, and Deadly.

It’s remarkable to see how fiction writing is adapting to emerging technologies. Short, Fast, and Deadly limits each piece to 420 characters– the maximum length of a Facebook status update– while Nanoism, escarp, and Seedpod go even more minimal with Twitter’s 140 character limit. A lot of the pieces employ the joke format while others play with the negative space of what is unsaid. I’ve found that writing microfiction helps to sharpen my own writing. It’s also fun to submit them since responses tend to come swiftly.

About Short, Fast, and Deadly:

Welcome to Short, Fast, and Deadly. An eLit Mag where brevity reigns and the loquacious are sent to contemplate their sins in the rejection bin. Don’t be afraid. Write Short. Write Fast. Above all, write Deadly. You’ll be fine.

Fiction excerpt:

from Rolling Stone, 6 May 71, when They Published Poetry by Mark James Andrews

Dear Mark, Bitches Brew reads kind of old fashioned, all the long Latinate words of gothic Satanism. The 2nd untitled poem is just a defensive piece of verbal magic to wipe somebody out in absentia.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about Janette Turner Hospital‘s hilariously snooty email to her former MFA students. The article below just adds to the weirdness and self-delusion of her letter.

via HuffPo:

Columbia Professor’s E-mail to Students Was Pure Fiction

The larger concern over Professor Hospital’s missive to her former students is that most of it is not true.

Columbia is not a three-year program, as Professor Hospital asserts, but a two-year program. There are not 300 students in the program, as alleged, but slightly more than half that. Columbia does not matriculate a hundred students a year but eighty–the number reported by the University in its 2007 graduate school admissions summary. Columbia is not the largest MFA in the country (that “honor” goes to the largely-unfunded MFA at The New School) nor does it enjoy 100% yield — rather, it suffers from one of the lowest yields of any top 50 MFA. (“Yield” is the percentage of applicants offered admission to a program who accept their offer.) Columbia’s own website last reported an annual yield ranging from 60% to 80% between 2002 and 2007, and analysis of application trends since this last reporting of yield data suggests this figure has almost certainly dropped. It’s more likely, now, that between one in four and one in two Columbia admittees are sufficiently unimpressed by the largely-unfunded program to decline to attend.

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This article by Anelise Chen is funny, cutting, and provocative. I’d only add that low-residency MFA programs offer quite different experiences from the ones described here. Be sure to read the comments below the article.

via The Rumpus:

On Blowing My Load: Thoughts From Inside the MFA Ponzi Scheme

As we get closer to graduating, we might start to think that perhaps we have not actually learned that much. That maybe we were better writers before we entered The Program, and that we’ve actually just had a vacation with our student-aid money. It will have to be repaid! In our worst moments, we begin to wonder whether we’ve destroyed our genius by subscribing to this institutional mind-meld.

Or maybe contaminated genius isn’t the problem. Maybe it’s any one of these:

1.  These ten pages of writing–does this count as a novel…? (No.)

2. Aren’t I supposed to have like a fucking masterpiece by now? (No, but you do have two or three stories that are maybe worth publishing in semi-popular online website.)

2. Am I going to get a job after this? (Probably not.) Will I have to go back to food service? (Probably yes.)

3. Has my writing gotten better? Have I become good enough to get an agent? (Shrugs.)

4. Have I made “connections”? (Do classmates count?)

5. Should I just give in and apply for a PhD or something? (Yes.)

I don’t know if this model is going to work– I get impatient waiting for series novels (looking at you George R. R. Martin) so getting a chapter a week might be maddening. Then again, waiting years for a sequel is not the same as waiting a week– the story remains fresh in the mind, especially with cliffhanger endings. Worked for Charles Dickens, maybe it can work today. Plus the app is $6 with no further purchase of chapters, unlike Stephen King’s “The Green Mile” serial. Top notch SF writers, too. Could even get a blog post out of the experience. Okay, I’m sold.

via USA Today:

Serialized novel delivered by an app

Best-selling authors Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear are looking back to the future. This month, they launched a story —The Mongoliad— using a 175-year-old publishing model. Their novel-as-app (or app-as-novel) is coming out in weekly, serial segments, complete with cliffhanger endings and a cheap subscription rate.

Today, instead of reading serialized stories in magazines, readers will pay $5.99 at mongoliad.com for a six-month app that gets them a chapter a week zapped to their smart phone, iPad or computer. The creators hope to have the book available at the iTunes store in the near future.