Archive for March, 2009
Marc Fitten shops for a pillow in the New York Times: “Thirty dollars! Are they crazy? At 40 percent off?”
At Eyewear, Morgan Harlow reviews the 2008 edition of Best American Short Stories, edited by Salman Rushdie.
The New Yorker published Terese Svoboda’s poem “Mom as Fly.”
John Minichillo’s novel The Snow Whale was selected as a quarter finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. This phase of the contest will be decided by reader reviews.
“They snap shut with the satisfying click of the sleekest compact; they break open like perfectly shivered glass; they diagnose and recompose the heart’s and mind’s movements with a clinical yet sensual precision: these are Elizabeth Skurnick’s poems.” So says Maureen N. McLane in a new introduction to Lizzie Skurnick’s collection Check-In, recently reissued by Caketrain. The expanded second edition features 14 new poems.
Lizzie will be reading with Kate Christensen and Maud Newton at the Housing Works Cafe in New York on April 15. “You Could Marry Anyone” is a poem Lizzie started on Fictionaut and was just able to sneak into the book.
To celebrate the fall publication of Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas, indie publisher featherproof books is holding a remix contest: “Download Blake’s story “Tour of the Drowned Neighborhood,” and have at it. Write a new story using just a few sentences, rearrange all of the sentences, scrap the whole thing and write your own story under that title. Turn it into a goddamned sestina.” Blake will judge the contest.
Sabra Wineteer launches Live Oak Review, an online magazine dedicated to “promoting, celebrating, and providing stewardship for the authentic Southern literary voice.” The inaugural issue features a story by Marsha McSpadden.
Author Author’s Bethanne Patrick has a video interview with Michael Kimball about his novel Dear Everybody. Together with Luca Dipierro, Michael is also making a film called 60 Writers/60 Places. In the trailer, Blake Butler reads on the subway.
She’s a screw-up or a slut or a slacker, what used to be called Trouble with a capital T. She’s not a waitress or a girlfriend or a friend or someone you’d be able to take your eyes off. What we don’t know is her name, until the story is nearly told, and it is revealed by one of Mary Miller’s most delightful characters, the unlikely Norbert. (“What kind of name is Norbert?” he says. I shrug. “But if you picture a guy named Norbert he probably looks exactly like that.”)
Her name is Kate. She loves Beth (she of the permanent markered jeans, lettered with the title of the story, and a Chinese tat for luck “but so far, that’s for shit”), but she’s fucking Arthur, and fucking with Bee or Billy, or Traci or Tim, and, well, Norbert.
“Not All Who Wander Are Lost” is a tale of a pretty girl who’s down on her luck but still willing to draw the next card.
“The funniest books I’ve ever read are Lolita and American Psycho,” Nick Antosca confesses in an interview with Tao Lin. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Elizabeth Hand describes his second novel Midnight Picnic (Word Riot), a book based on dreams and set in the afterlife, as “a riveting and terrifying 21st Century Book of the Dead that’s one of the most frightening novels I’ve read in years.” Midnight Picnic, just released, is the followup to Antosca’s 2006 novel Fires.
More good publication news: Alice Lichtenstein’s novel Lost, her follow-up to 2000’s The Genius of the World, “an intimate record of love and loss” (NYTBR), has been acquired by Scribner and is slated for publication in March of 2010.
PANK No. 3 is out, and you’ll need both hands to count the Fictionauts in it: Rosanne Griffeth, Michelle Tandoc, Rachel Yoder, Daniel Nester, Blake Butler, Molly Gaudry, Kathy Fish, and Scott Garson.
Keyhole #6 looks especially tasty. Guest-edited by William Walsh, it features stories by Matt Bell, Blake Butler, Kim Chinquee, Michael Martone, and Tao Lin. Michael Kimball provides the artists’ bios in postcard-form.
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