Matthew Simmons
Matthew Simmons lives in Seattle.
Are you Henry Mansfield
I owe Monkeybicycle a lot. My first ever print publication was with them. One of my first online pieces appeared on their site. And for a brief time, they turned editing duties for their site to me—probably long before I was really ready to do it, too.
The last thing published before I took over (the last thing edited by Shya Scanlon) was this piece:
America Fell In Love with the Explosions Technician
Did you read it? Go read it. It rules. It seriously rules. It makes my top ten best fucking things published online list. (As does the previously linked to Thomas Game Boy thing Gene wrote.)
At some point during my tenure as the editor, I wrote to this person, this “Henry Mansfield” and attempted to solicit more work. I never heard back from him. I’ve never seen anything else by him online.
So I figure its a pseudonym. But I can’t be 100% sure.
Dear reader, are you Henry Mansfield? Say hello! Write to me at giantblinditems at gmail dot com.
Dear reader, find Henry Mansfield! Dear reader, let’s make a saint of Henry Mansfield.
Dear reader, write the hagiography of Henry Mansfield in the comments. A prize for my favorite.
Darby’s got a thing
You like Darby Larson, too! He’s got a THING! You could maybe do something about that thing!
Uncategorized / 10 Comments
November 12th, 2008 / 4:37 pm
November 12th, 2008 / 4:37 pm
Give a writer some of your money
Dzanc Books is sponsoring a Write-A-Thon. They need a little money.
Hey, you have a little money. A little, right? $5, maybe? You should sponsor one of the PARTICIPANTS of the DZANC WRITE-A-THON so that they can continue to publish Peter Markus and Yannick Murphy and Roy Kesey and Kyle Minor and Allison Amend.
And more Peter Markus is coming. And Dawn Raffel. And Robert Lopez. And Terese Svoboda. And Suzanne Burns.
Do it for Steve Gillis. Do it for Dan Wickett. Those guys love books and they take fiction seriously. And they do right by a bunch of really good writers.
You love those people. You know you do.
Hell, you all love Peter Markus. If you didn’t love Peter Markus, you wouldn’t be reading HTMLGiant. Do it for him. Sponsor him. He’s a participant.
Or Kim Chinquee. Sponsor her. She’s a machine. She’s a freakin’ short-short fiction machine.
Or Matt Bell! Everybody loves Matt Bell! He wrote that great essay about Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards for Hobart. Remember when you read that? And it made you laugh?
Or Jim Ruland! He had a great essay about the movie Repo Man in The Believer a while back. You loved that essay!
Wells Tower
Next March, Wells Tower will publish a book of short stories wuth FSG. So I will talk about Wells Tower now before it is too late.
I really like Wells Tower. I have come across maybe four short stories by Tower in the last five years. Fence. McSweeeney’s. A Public Space. This. His work seems to be leaking out very slowly.
Whenever a new New Yorker comes out, I open it up and check halway down the table of contents to see who wrote the story in the issue. Often it is Alice Munro. Quite often, really.
When that happens, I am just a little let down. Not because I dislike Alice Munro. Alice Munro is fine. Good, in fact. I eventually get around to reading the Alice Munro story, and often enjoy it. And now and again, I really enjoy it.
Sometimes it Yiyun Li, and that’s fine as well. Or Roddy Doyle. Or William Trevor. Or Stuart Dybek.
Lovely, one and all. But still, my heart sinks just a little.
This is why: I like short fiction because I like reading a lot of different people over shorter periods of time. I want more voices.
But, hell. Who am I to tell The New Yorker how to pick their fiction.
Hey! Last issue, Wells Tower. Go read it. Great stuff. (And then find “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.” It’s in that Ben Marcus Anchor Anthology.)
Here’s something to admire about the story: he manages the second person (a narrator who refers to “you” instead of “I” or “he”). A lot of people fuck that narrator up because they figure “you” means “you” instead of “you” means “me trying not to talk about me by pretending to talk about you.”
Underland Press, Blind Items
One: Blake mentioned the Brian Evenson interview on the Underland Press site. On the Extras page, you will find a really nice, beautifully brutal piece of fiction by Our Fearless Editing Leader.
***
Two: I would like to reboot my Blind Items feature. Please send indie/literary rumors, news, innuendo, and suggestions to giantblinditems at gmail dot com.
Anything, really. Send it on and I’ll consider spreading it.
*This’ll be Blake in a few years
I don’t know if you’ve read The Beans of Egypt Maine. I did—years ago. And I really liked it.
I remember reading something about it, forgetting the title, and then accidentally buying (and reading) that Dorothy Allison book instead. (Yeesh.)
A couple of years later, though, I found the real deal. I remember it being a bit bleak, but the language was strong and straight ahead. Good sentences.
There’s a really good article about Chute in The New York Times.
That’s her holding what looks like an AK-47. Her husband is a sculptor who never learned how to read. (Also, if you look closely at the photo of the two of them, he kind of looks younger than his giant gray beard suggests. It’s his eyes.) They have an anti-corporate militia. She still writes on a typewriter. They have a sign on their property that suggests one stay away: “Woa. Visitors Turn Back.”
They also have a bunch of Scottish Terriers. I don’t know why, but that strikes me as the weirdest part of the story.
Black Kids in Lemon Trees
I will write something about the other two ML Press books soon. I received them yesterday—simple design, simply made, good job J.A.—and enjoyed all three.
I’ll start with Black Kids in Lemon Trees by HTMLGiant’s Shane Jones. I’m a big fan of Shane’s writing. I am happy to cop to that. Shane is one of only two people I have let take over The Man Who Couldn’t Blog when I asked him if I could put an excerpt from his book Light Boxes on the site. So there’s that.
This almost seems unfair. It’s apparently already sold out. So you, dear reader, can’t go get a copy for yourself. But I want you to. That’s what I am here to say. It’s very, very good.
In 25 little sections, BKILT follows this wonderful thread of dream logic. Shane does surrealism about as well as one can and still make a readable story on a page. Police in the clouds, cop eyes, shooting at the sun, kids in dayglo shorts throwing lemons at the clouds—the images are so strong, so neatly and quickly rendered. And they all gather together well like cogs in a watch. Or, not a watch. Some sort of mechanism. The function of the mechanism may not make perfect sense, but the gears fit against one another, and the machine has an internal integrity.
There was a nice Believer article about how to read a Russell Edson poem. You can read it all here. That article has been very helpful for me when approaching work like Shane’s.
Nice job, Shane. Sorry, people who don’t have a copy on the way or in their hands.
Bottomless Belly Button
I was going to fold my laundry, but my cat is sitting in the basket on top of it. I think it’s warm still, and he seems to like that. Instead, I’ll post something about Bottomless Belly Button, a graphic novel from Fantagraphics that I read a few days ago.
It’s pretty darn good.
(Hey, why haven’t we been writing about graphic novels more? I mean, as we have established, I am the member of the group who’s a little longer in the tooth than the rest of you, but aren’t people in our “age category” still supposed to read lots of graphic novels?)
Here’s the thing I hate about graphic novels. I hate graphic novelists. That’s what I hate about graphic novelists.
Uncategorized / 8 Comments
October 31st, 2008 / 1:32 am
October 31st, 2008 / 1:32 am
Sorry, Nick
Apparently, Impetus Press, home of Nick Antosca’s novel Fires and Dave Housely’s Ryan Seacrest is Famous, is going away.
Sad. From their letter:
We are terribly sorry that things worked out this way. As much as it hurts to lose our business, the feeling of letting down our authors is even worse. We have always loved the close relationship we share with our authors and have prided ourselves on having them much more involved throughout the publication process than they would be at many other presses. We are doing our best to make sure that they come out of this as unscathed as possible. For those authors whose books have not yet been published, we are working on placing their titles with other houses.
Small Beer Press Sale
I wish I had seen this a little sooner. If you go to the Small Beer Press website and place an order, they will donate 20% of the proceeds to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
Possibly, this is moot. Obama is way up and has lots of money. And the election is next week. And. And. And.
But you might as well do it because the books are all also on sale. For $264 you can have hardcover copies of everything they have published.
For $78, you can have everything they published in 2008.
Even if you are apolitical, you should consider buying stuff. Small Beer Press rules. Recommendations after the jump.