Fictionaut Blog

In the new issue of flash fiction magazine SmokeLong Quarterly, Meg Pokrass and Dave Clapper interview Fictionaut co-founder Jürgen Fauth about the site’s genesis and design, his plans for the public launch, and how come everybody’s so friendly.

As always, we appreciate your feedback, so please stop by the forums or drop us an email if you have any thoughts.

Marcy Dermansky’s second novel Bad Marie, the follow-up to Twins pitched as “Mary Gaitskill meets The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” has been sold to HarperPerennial.

Roy Kesey’s story “Double Fish” won the Missouri Review’s Editor’s Prize Contest.

The 2009 Tournament of Books — a “Battle Royale of Literary Excellence “– is underway at The Morning News. Maud Newton is among the judges, and Keith Lee Morris‘ The Dart League King is in the running.

Caketrain rereleased Lizzie Skurnick’s book of poems, Check-In. Lydia Copeland’s collection Haircut Stories is now available in the Achilles Chapbook Series.

In Poets & Writers, Jofie Ferrari-Adler conducts a Q&A with four young editors — Lee Boudreaux, Eric Chinski, Alexis Gargagliano, and Richard Nash: “I do want to feel that the writer has access to something larger than himself.”

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We’re pleased to announce that we just pulled the lever that relaunched the Fictionaut Forums — a place to chat about the site and the great wide world of writing in general. We’d love for you to stop by the help, ideas, and metafiction forums and leave comments, questions, suggestions, and get up in our faces about the things that don’t (yet) work the way they’re supposed to. We know for a fact you guys aren’t shy.

The annual AWP conference is underway in Chicago, and we wish we could be there. We’ll have to console ourselves with Gail Siegel’s “Check-in, AWP.”

We already mentioned the Keyhole reading and Dogzplot’s flash fiction contest — but there are lots more events involving Fictionauts.

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Michael Kimball’s epistolary third novel, Dear Everybody, was greeted with rave reviews. The Believer called it a “curatorial masterpiece,” Time Out New York refers to the “stunning prose” that “evocatively hints at entire physical and emotional worlds lying just behind his story’s surface,” and the LA Times argues that “there is a whole life contained in this slim novel, a life as funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking as any other, rendered with honest complexity and freshness by Kimball’s sharp writing.” And the trailer’s a thing of beauty, too.

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Mary Akers’s debut collection Women Up On Blocks is available now for pre-order, and Press 53 offers signed copies. WeWomenGlobally has an interview with Mary — and a great photo.

Big World, Mary Miller’s collection of short stories from Hobart, is now shipping, and Shane Jones’s debut novel Light Boxes is available from Publishing Genius. If you hurry, you might still win the contest. Holy Land has an interview with Shane.

The Northville Review, edited by Erin Fitzgerald, makes its debut — with a story by Scott Garson.

At if:book, Dan Visel links Ben Greenman’s Correspondences to the postcard art of Ray Johnson: “Greenman’s work, like that of Johnson’s before him, anticipates a new kind of relation between the author and the reader. The reworking of this relationship in increasingly varied ways will be the most significant aspect of the way our reading changes as it moves from the printed page to the networked screen.”

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