Fictionaut Blog

I’d like to not write a mediocre piece on Salinger. Death, a subject we writers pull from often, ironically, is tough when you’re talking about an icon who shaped the voice and face of so much literature for so many authors in the 20th century. [Read more]

Recently:
   Fictionaut Five: Terese Svoboda
   Luna Digest, 1/26
   Bid on Nicholas Rombes’ Music Box
   Fictionaut Faves, 1/25
   Checking in with Short Story Challenge
   Line Breaks: “We” by Mary Grimm

What story or book do you feel closest to?

I would sleep with Calvino anytime.

Recently:
   Luna Digest, 1/26
   Bid on Nicholas Rombes’ Music Box
   Fictionaut Faves, 1/25
   Checking in with Short Story Challenge
   Line Breaks: “We” by Mary Grimm

This week Luna Park continues our series on race, class, gender and sexuality in indie publishing with an article on publishing and the body by Sherisse Alvarez, which begins:

As a writer, I have thought a lot about “community” and what it means. I am often hyper-aware of my identities as I write: female, gay, Cuban-American, daughter of exiles.

Recently:
   Bid on Nicholas Rombes’ Music Box
   Fictionaut Faves, 1/25
   Checking in with Short Story Challenge
   Line Breaks: “We” by Mary Grimm

Out of several entries in the Significant Objects group, Nicholas Rombes‘ story was chosen as the official tale of “the music box disguised as a gift that everybody knew was a music box.” The story is now up on the Significant Objects site, and you can bid on the box on eBay. Proceeds from the auction are donated to 826 National.

For the second round, an egg whisk begs for signification. For more on Significant Objects, read Nicolle’s check-in with the S.O. group.

Recently:
   Fictionaut Faves, 1/25
   Checking in with Short Story Challenge
   Line Breaks: “We” by Mary Grimm

Like all Angi Becker Stevens‘ stories, “If Everything is Inevitable” made me ache just right. I love the imagination and inventiveness here, the tenderness and yearning. [Read more]

Recently:
   Checking in with Short Story Challenge
   Line Breaks: “We” by Mary Grimm
   Fictionaut Five: Susan Tepper
   Luna Digest, 1/19

I am calling on all Fictionauts to check out the January challenge and to step up. [Read more]

Recently:
   Line Breaks: “We” by Mary Grimm
   Fictionaut Five: Susan Tepper
   Luna Digest, 1/19
   Fictonaut Faves, 1/18

Mary Grimm is too modest to say it in her “Author’s Note” to this story, but “We” was not a “typical” New Yorker story when Roger Angell and his colleagues had the good sense to publish it, October 17, 1988.

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Recently:
   Fictionaut Five: Susan Tepper
   Luna Digest, 1/19
   Fictonaut Faves, 1/18
   Checking in with Opium

Susan Tepper is the author of Deer & Other Stories and the poetry chapbook Blue Edge. Her work has appeared in Salt Hill, American Letters & Commentary, Green Mountains Review, Crannog, Poetry Salzburg, New Millennium Writings, Snake Nation Press and many other journals. [Read more]

Recently:
   Luna Digest, 1/19
   Fictonaut Faves, 1/18
   Checking in with Opium

Last week was our exhausting and hopefully exhaustive week-long look at McSweeney’s Tolstoyesque (in length) issue 33, the Panorama newspaper issue. Reading the issue all week was sort of like hanging around in the physics lab of literary publishing, if there were one, and with Richard Feynman rather than Freeman Dyson. Lots of hollering, throwing things against the wall. [Read more]

Recently:
   Fictonaut Faves, 1/18
   Checking in with Opium
   Fictionaut Five: Jim Ruland

Like Elizabeth Bishop or Joseph Cornell, Morgan Harlow’s art is not great but small. An Elizabeth Bishop poem or a Joseph Cornell box reveals a world in miniature and invites us directly in. These two artists offer us layers of art, a sedimentary aesthetic that contain boxes within boxes, riddles wrapped in paradoxes, suffused in mystery-there is a certain indeterminacy in their work that multiplies hermeneutical possibilities and closes off no room for investigation. [Read more]

Recently:
   Checking in with Opium
   Fictionaut Five: Jim Ruland
   Luna Digest, 1/12