The wonderful Kate Zambreno has offered to give three copies of her book O Fallen Angel to HTMLGIANT readers. In our recent interview with her Kate said:

“I had these three characters haunting me—Maggie is in many ways a grotesque carciature of another character I had written before, Ruth in an unpublished novel Green Girl, a sort of postfeminist libertine who’s also quite passive and tragic, sort of like if a Jean Rhys heroine was alive now or Clarice Lispector’s Macabea.”

As such, we’d like to hear about your inspirations, or stealings. Comment with a brief confession of something you’ve manipulated or stolen, language-wise or other. Kate will pick three winners sometime late Wednesday.

[Also, this week a new limited edition and only briefly available piece from Kate has been published by Legacy Pictures: I AM SHARON TATE.]

Tao Lin’s Richard Yates contest, encouraging entries of video or chats about his forthcoming novel, ends tomorrow. Alongside this, Tao has offered to give away copies of Richard Yates to the first 5 people who comment here with 200+ words about one of the people appearing in one of the video entries so far (below). Comment with your email included so prizes can be received. Also, entries to Tao’s contest, with cash prizes and such, remains open until 10 PM Eastern Tuesday.

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

John Jodzio has sent us three copies of his collection If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home for a quick giveaway contest. If you’d like to be eligible for the giveaway, tell us about the weirdest thing you or someone you know has swallowed. John will select from the comments section his favorite three later this week.

The winner of the Ten Walks/Two Talks who-has-walked-the-farthest contest is Michael the Girl’s father. Other people might have walked farther than his 50 puking miles, and some people might have walked in hillier terrain, or in a sooty 9-11 city, but Michael the Girl’s father is the only person who was nominated by someone else. And also, he still walks 10 miles a day. He’s probably walking now, dang.

Michael the Girl’s father wins a copy of Ten Walks/Two Talks, courtesy of Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch. Michael the Girl, contact me at adam at publishinggenius dot com and off we go!

14. Flash, prose, short thing? This is your last day to enter the Fineline contest.

2. There is a Gordon Lish Facebook page.

7. Ten best short story collections? Maybe…

5. Here is that David Foster Wallace piece about Federer you should read every year around Wimbledon.

1. Sexcast # 8: Interview/podcast with Roxana Shirazi, author of The last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage.

As Chris Higgs discussed a while back, ELS’s recent hybrid memoir-philosophic mania-idea machine-joke book-power assemblage From Old Notebooks is simply out of control. In the vein of Markson or D’Agata, but with a manic, hilarious, intense vision that makes it so singular it’s almost its own genre, this is the kind of machine you could keep returning to at any point inside it, any line as much its own as it is a contribution to same insane whole.

Here’s a line at random: “What if God had said to Phil Mickelson, Would you rather shit your pants or shoot a double bogey on the 18th hole in the U.S. Open?”

I have an extra copy of FON to giveaway to the commenter who tells the most compelling something he or she should probably keep hidden. Winner will be selected Saturday morning.

Excerpt reading and purchase here.

I’ve finally gone through the 24 entries (forgive my slowness), double-checked them, emailed the winners, and then I also had to wash the dishes and do a few other things before I could get this post live. Anyhow, thank you for being patient; I now present to you the 20 Under 40 Pick ‘Em Winners:

1st place: James Tanner (13 correct picks); Tanner selected prize package #2.

2nd place: Snowden Wright (12 correct picks); Wright selected prize package #1.

3rd place: Georgia Cool (12 correct picks, submitted one hour after Snowden’s entry); Cool will receive prize package #3.

Last place: Marshall, who submitted the following list:

1. Tao Lin 2. Tao Lin 3. Tao Lin 4. Tao Lin 5. Tao Lin 6. Tao Lin 7. Tao Lin 8. Tao Lin 9. Tao Lin 10. Tao Lin 11. Tao Lin 12. Tao Lin 13. Tao Lin 14. Tao Lin 15. Tao Lin 16. Tao Lin 17. Tao Lin 18. Tao Lin 19. Tao Lin 20. Dave Eggers

Congratulations, again, to the winners, and thank you to everyone who took the time to submit an entry! I hope this was a bit of distracting fun for all. If you liked this contest, please help us spread buzz about our next pick ‘em: 10 Authors Most Likely to be Dropped by Their Publishers in 2011!

Thanks, especially, to all the authors and publishers and editors who donated products of their hard work to the prize packages. Please consider supporting them however you can.

(illustration from Dan McPharlin’s series Inland)

Via Matt Rohrer of the awesome Northern California-based Small Desk Press, a poetry contest!

Are there monsters in your closet? Or under your bed? Do you see them when you close your eyes? Do you love them? In celebration of the upcoming release of Lizzy Acker’s Monster Party, Small Desk Press is thrilled (and terrified) to present the Monster Poetry Contest. Send us a poem about monsters: think Frankenstein, Loch Ness, serial killers, childhood nightmares, the REM album, The Aileen Wuornos movie, etc., etc., etc. The contest winner will receive a free catalog of all Small Desk Press titles – including Monster Party when it’s released this fall – plus publication on We Who Are About to Die.

Please send submissions to contest@smalldeskpress.com by August 1st, 2010, and write “Lizzy Acker Monster Poetry Submission” in the subject line. Please include a cover page with ONLY the title of the poem. The winner will be notified by email.

Jackie Corley has announced a Published For A Day event.

Do you have an atrocious novel sitting on your hard drive? Do you have an awesome short story collection you want to expose hard and fast like the town pervert? Well, step right up…
Monday, June 7 will be “Published For a Day” day on Word Riot. We will post an entry with links to downloadable PDFs of novels and book length short story collections (at least 25k words) that will be available for one day and one day only: 12 a.m. -11:59 p.m. on Monday, June 7.

Rules, Regulations, Bull Shit

1. This is open to writers who have been previously published in Word Riot or any of the following sites (in no apparent order – let me know of any I should have included in the comments):
3:AM Magazine, Anderbo, Collagist, decomP, Dogplotz, Electric Lit, Eyeshot, Hobart, Identity Theory, JMWW, Keyhole, Laminantion Colony, Necessary Fiction, No Colony, NOÖ, NYTyrant, Pank, Pindeldyboz, Monkeybicycle, mudlucious, Opium
2. Upload the PDF to your server. If you don’t have a server, email us the PDF and we will upload it to Word Riot. Email information in the format below to jcorley AT gmail DOT com by 10 p.m. on Sunday, June 6:

Subject: Published For a Day

Novel Title by Author Name
File Link:
Previous Publications: [Must have at least one publication credit from list above]
Summary: [Under 250 words. Make it sexy. You want people to download you.]
3. Any PDFs uploaded to Word Riot will be deleted on June 8. The links will die on June 8, as well.

Readers: Download all you like on June 7. There are no other rules for you.

Last week The New York Observer reported that on June 7th The New Yorker will name the top twenty American writers under forty, and we’d like to celebrate this really incredibly important event in the history of American letters by running a free March Madness-style Pick ‘Em contest for you HTMLGIANT readers. If you’d like to enter, all you have to do is email to htmlgiant [at] htmlgiant [dot] com your list of the twenty authors you think The New Yorker will select as “the key writers of this generation.” Then we all wait with baited breath until The New Yorker publishes their list! The top three entrants who have the most picks that correctly match the names on The New Yorker list will each receive a prize package. Should you wish to pay an ‘entry fee,’ please consider making a donation to any of the presses/publishers/people who have put up swag for the prize package; however, there is no requirement for an entry fee.

Details after the jump.

READ MORE >

Three pieces of news from our friends at the other O.C (above, not left).

First, from the Department of How Time Flies- has it really been a year since the last Open City benefit? Well, judging by the fact that the linked-to post is from exactly a year ago tomorrow, I would say “yes.” Last year’s event, at the National Arts Club, featured (among other things) an open bar and a reading by Billy Collins–the two went very well together. This year the benefit is being held in a private residence (wanna bet it’s a nice one?), and will feature a reading by Walter Kirn, author most recently of Up in the Air, which you might remember that Hollywood liked so much they Clooneyed it. (Aside: anyone other than me remember (read= “love”) Kirn’s first book, My Hard Bargain, a taut, brutal little collection of stories edited by some guy named Gordon Lish?) Anyway, it ought to be clear to you by this point that whether it is publishing books and the magazine, or whether it’s fund-raising, the one thing Open City does not do is screw around. These guys define what it means to be indie without being small-time, by which I mean to simply say that I think they are great, but the casual reader may wish to steel her reserve before clicking through to check out all the details and price tickets. If it’s a bit out of your range (dollars-wise or distance-wise), no shame in treating yourself to a shiny new subscription, and/or a couple of books, and calling it a day.

Second, from the Department of Education. The First Annual Open City Summer Writing Workshop will be held at the NYU Writers House over a long weekend in high July. The core faculty is Thomas Beller, Jason Brown, Martha McPhee and Said Sayrafiezadeh. Visiting writers include Mary Gaitskill, Sam Lipsyte, Edmund White, David Goodwillie, and the great David Berman–plus a whole lot more; interested parties should avail themselves of the full details, which live here. Good times!

Last but not least, the 2010 RRofihe Trophy is currently accepting submissions, and will be through October 15. At first I thought (read=”hoped”) that this somehow had something to do with Katie Roiphe, but it turns out to really about short fiction, which is pretty good, too. It’s a contest, to be judged by Rick Rofihe of anderbo.com, and the winner gets $500, an actual trophy, and publication in Open City.

And that’s pretty much everything I can possibly tell you about Open City, short of the colors of their underwears. Reader–would that I could.

Will the Open City benefit look like the above? Mischa Barton wonders, but is sad because she knows that she will probably never find out.

In one of my favorite books last year, Robert Lopez’s Kamby Bolongo Mean River, a man is locked in a room with a telephone and a bed. He spends a lot of time answering phone calls from strangers, and a lot of time drawing stick men and masturbating, and rummaging through his brain contents of growing up in a place called Injury, Alaska.

The book’s title comes out of the narrator’s remembrance of his brother repeating the phrase from the TV miniseries Roots. The phrase, along with other odd small ideas, indented moments, phrases looped, present themselves so seared on the narrator’s head it is as if he’s not in this single tiny room at all. If you’ve ever wanted a perfect book to teach or observe voice as character, setting, etc., Rob is the one, both here in Kamby, and in his first book Part of the World. Few maintain such control line by line of what, where, and when while managing to keep you hypnotized in tone.

Rob has offered to give away a few copies of a rare purple-covered edition of Part of the World, never before available. To enter, just comment here with a memory of your own childhood related to some looming repetition of phrase or sound or image from TV or film.

Three winners will be selected late Thursday night.

1. Neil from ESPN has been emailing me. And he says, “In short: We’re inviting folks to submit (to fictioncontest@espnthemag.com) sports-themed short stories of up to 3,000 words, and the best story (as picked by me and the editor of Stymie) will run in a future issue of ESPN. Then comes the fame and fortune, naturally.”

If you have a sports story, send it. Deadline is June 1st.

2. I just got an iPhone. Why should writers care? What can I do now besides take notes and commit “Douche baggery in a mesmerizing false flame.”

3. This invisible bookshelf is like emo-in-a-seatbelt badass.

To enter to win the original PG version of Light Boxes, together with the new Penguin version, buy a book from an independent press and forward the receipt to lightboxescontest at gmail dot com. If you buy a book from an indie press at a brick and mortar store, scan the receipt or take a good photo of it and email that. Your name will be entered once for every book you buy. Then I will conduct a fair drawing. ENTRIES ARE DUE BY MIDNIGHT MAY 24th. Penguin will officially release their version on May 25, and I’ll do the drawing then.

Ok, for the “Wink Wink” contest, the 2010 results are in!

It was tough, very tough–like counting lilies in a pond or bicycling on a bowling lane tough–to reach a decision.

I want to thank everyone including the various ANONs who turned in the usual crudely sexual themes. The internet could not exist without you, ANONs of the world.

The winner is “twice, never again” by Tom.

I found it ambiguous in a satisfying way, as opposed to confusing. I found I could read off-the-page and feel personal (I’ve felt this way with drugs, diet sodas, noodle shops, certain bedroom follies, etc.) but also universal (forgiveness of_____, themes of relationships, guilt, etc.). I thought it worthy of a late-night ponder. It generated momentum. It did not teach or preach. It appealed to my deeper self.

Congratulations, Tom. Send me an email (leapsloth14@hotmail.com) with address for your book, hot sauce, and deck of cards.

Finalists include:

“spooning in church” by Ben Brooks and “Corby trouser press” by Donald.

Look out in 2011 for Wink Wink 2.