Antennae 12
The most recent issue of Antennae 12 is out, and will be the journal’s last issue. Antennae has consistently been one of my favorite literary journals out there, thanks to Jesse Seldess for his fabulous editorial work. I’ve been introduced to the work of many new writers in its pages over the years and am really glad for its existence.
antennae 12 (the last issue)
January 2012
$10
Lee Gough
Andrew Zawacki
Cupola Bobber
Ray DiPalma
Kristen Gleason
Thomas Hummel & Brett Fletcher Lauer
Joshua Ware
Andrew Durbin
Matha Oatis
Janice Lee & Laura Vena
Cover by
Thomas Hummel & Brett Fletcher Lauer
Leaving money on the table
If you’re related to me, don’t read the rest of this sentence: I got most of the people in my family books this year for Christmas. I don’t usually do that, actually. For a writer, it seems rather hazardous. Because, for one thing, though I love my family and I want them to be happy, I’m not going to intentionally purchase things that I consider truly shitty on their behalf. But on the other hand I’m not going to go out and buy them, say, the FC2 catalogue just because I happen to like it; that would be a Real Dick Move. But even once I’ve negotiated that mess and found the place where my tastes and those of a given family member overlap, there’s still the risk that you’re essentially giving someone homework for Christmas. The fact that I want to read a book someday has nothing at all to do with whether or not I want to read it now. By giving someone a book, you either rob them of that decision or, more likely, give them something that they’re going to feel guilty about for several months (or even years) but likely never actually read. But this post isn’t about giving books for Christmas, really. It’s about ebook pricing. READ MORE >
Whoa: PRISM Index and What You Will
Here I have two great publications with incredible design and construction. They are 1) Prism Index, a magazine in its second issue, edited by Jeffrey Bowers, and 2) What You Will, a chapbook of poems by Kyle Schlesinger and published by NewLights Press.
They are both amazing — unbelievable, really, in their existence. It’s remarkable that human beings can do this stuff.
Adam Robinson—
Booksellers, concerned about the prevalence of eBooks, are making their print books look better, says this article in the NYTimes. The paperback of Jay-Z’s book has shiny embossing and costs $25.
5
Megan Boyle’s Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee out today
Officially released today from Muumuu House, $12.
Beautiful logics, awkward brains, fun sentences, fresh new shitt!
TYRANT 9 PRE-ORDER/POST-OP
A year’s passed since the last issue of the Tyrant came out. That’s fucked up. This is unacceptable for a magazine that is supposed to be a bi-, or even tri-, quarterly, and my sole excuse is that I don’t have an excuse. I want to blame it all on Luke (co-editor, friend, part-time lover) in full, for moving to Texas, but I won’t, because I really can’t. Whatever took it so long (and come on, who noticed or really cares that much?), to try to make up for the time you’ve had to wait, I thought I would expose/humiliate/shame myself for you all to have a good cringe or laugh at. Hopefully maybe both. My idea for the cover was to have me in drag on it because I thought it would be really like, self-absorbed-seeming. I wanted to try to get ultra-vanity press on it, even though that doesn’t even mean that.
I’ve always thought drag queens were exceptionally brave people, but personally, I’ve never been “into” wearing women’s clothes or looking like a woman. However, I have done it twice in the past year so who knows what’s up with that. Drag is such an odd experience. For me, it was strangely intoxicating. While I was dressed up, and even for a couple of hours after, I felt like I’d been drugged, but in a good way. Probably best we don’t get into all that here though. READ MORE >
Mud Luscious Acquires Blue Square Press
This week, J. A. Tyler’s Mud Luscious Press announced that they were taking over/buying out/merging with Blue Square Press, run by David Peak and Ben Spivey, as an addition to their imprint series. As Tyler says in the brief interview below, the deal gets BSP in on MLP’s distro (and more), while MLP gets to participate in the publication of more great books.
To celebrate the union, they are offering Jack Boettcher’s Theatre State and Ben Spivey’s own Flowing in the Gossamer Fold at a reduced price, here.
I asked the parties involved some questions, starting with J. A. Tyler:
When did you first start paying attention to Blue Square Press? READ MORE >
Belladonna* Chaplet Sale
Fundraiser sale = 3 chaplets for $10.
With tons of good-sounding ones, including:
Amina Cain: Hunger
Danielle Dutton: from A World Called the Blazing World
Carmen Giménez Smith: Can We Talk Here
Bhanu Kapil: (a poem-essay, or precursor: NOTES: for a novel: Ban en Banlieues)
Vanessa Place: Untitled #5
Nada Gordon: SOng of My OWnself
Leslie Scalapino: ‘Can’t is ‘Night’
and many more!!!
Sale ends Nov. 15th, so get them while you can.
Also check out their Annual Benefit Performance and Live Auction on December 13th in NYC. Advanced tickets are on sale now.
One example of the future tense is “Future Tense Books will do amazing things for the next 20 years too”
20 years is a long time. Future Tense Books, run by Kevin Sampsell, has been putting books out for 20 years. These books are about things like talking to the moon and petting whale carcasses. They’re about finally figuring out what it means to belong to what you are, which is that it means you’re a freak. They’re about when your son loves Spiderman. They’re about pictures of ceiling fans in different emotional states. They’re also Gary Lutz, Zoe Trope, Elizabeth Ellen, Shane Allison, Chloe Caldwell, and 20 years worth of folks all the other peppermint cans were too freaked out to publish.
Along with putting out these books, Kevin Sampsell has also been, for 10 of those 20 years, single-handedly curating the most amazing small press cave at Powell’s in Portland, OR. Occupy Indie Lit is a leaderless casserole, except Kevin is probably the one who lent us the stove. He’s been around. He’s helped everybody. He’s sexy. He’s the shit. All of which is to say: do you want a cake maybe? Do you want someone to write a ukelele song for you maybe? Do you want incentive perks, I mean? Most importantly: do you want to support a press that’s been around 20 years and is now running its first ever official fundraiser to help push itself to the next level, literally shank anything depressing you can think of about “the state of publishing,” and take over the world? Well then go here. Help the Future of Future Tense.
slaw
- The Broken Plate is open for submissions until the end of October. This magazine is run by undergraduate students in a literary practicum class at BSU. I can personally vouch the end product as a glow print artifact for holding your words. Think of it this way: service. These are students learning to edit. You could help them along their way. Do send.
- Stoked Press would be, uh, stoked if you would submit. Tyler Gobble likes to wear sleeveless shirts in the spring and you wouldn’t want to bring children to a Layne Ransom reading, if that helps you get mouth-feel for the pub. Submit like a vertebrae.
- The International Algae Competition in Algae Landscape Design is only open until Oct 11! Get growing, I advise. I bet some of you knowledge base hydroponics.
- Hobart needs more stuff about luck. Think of this way: If they accept you, you kick dino-ass. If they blar your work, no worries. It was just bad luck. Here is a pretty epic “wish-list” and I wish more editors would do this, announce what they are thinking, on a rolling level, week to week–I feel it germinates a writer. This list has made me write. I see a future where editors throw out sparks like such as this. Glow.
- Can someone confirm or deny that Brautigan left a suicide note saying “Messy, isn’t it”? It smacks of mean, lazy urban legend and sort of pisses me off.
- Creative Nonfiction would like your “True Crime” stories. All of my favorites are Morrissey songs. No, no, here’s my favorite: I’m a Memphis teenager. I shoplift Pac-man cards. I walk outside the mall and 5 kids surround me, threaten to go exponential on my spleen, rob me, of my stolen cards. Irony? I hate that dumb word. This: welcome to Memphis.
- John Dermot Woods–drawings or words or source material–is bad-ass right here, right now. Just saying.
- Betty has collected 11,020 labels from bananas. In a hundred years, we will know Betty. Us? Never. It makes you wonder.
- Airplane Reading is surprisingly OK, these little flashes about flying on airplanes. They want you. Fly.
- Go right ahead, friend. The entry fee is one dollar, sixty cents.
Two New Books From Chin Music Press
Since I first discovered Chin Music Press, and their philosophical and elegant title Oh, I’ve been interested in the books they publish because each title is produced not only as a book but as a well-designed art object. Their books use high quality papers, sharp page design, and full color printing for images. This attention to detail makes reading their titles a truly sensual experience.
Broken Levee Books, a Chin Music imprint, has in recent months released two compelling books about New Orleans post-Katrina–Hurricane Story by Jennifer Shaw and Where We Know New Orleans as Home edited by David Rutledge.
BlazeVOX Update
Geoffrey Gatza, the editor of BlazeVOX, has issued a statement. In it he writes:
BlazeVOX is not closing its doors.
That said, I feel like I should explain a bit further the co-operative nature of our business model. I am not going to change what we do, but I do acknowledge that perhaps I could communicate what we do a little better.
I, for one, am glad to hear that BlazeVox will not be closing down, and that Gatza has decided to work toward a more transparent policy.
Conversation abounds: Johannes Göransson, Shanna Compton, Michael Kelleher, Craig Santos Perez, Reb Livingston, Collin Kelley, Justin Evans, and Christopher Janke are among the voices to have weighed in on the subject.
A Kingdom of Kings
Whenever a press or magazine closes or threatens to close or when the reality of their dire financial situation comes to light, everyone freaks out as if it is a surprise that small presses and magazines are constantly facing immense financial pressure. When will the economic realities of small press publishing stop being shocking news? At this level, there are too many of us publishing and not enough readers to sustain these efforts. More people want to edit or publish or be published than want to read books that are published. I don’t know a writer who doesn’t support publishing actively, but there are simply not enough of writers to solve this problem, given the sheer volume of presses and magazines out there. As I noted in my last post on this subject, a day doesn’t go by when I receive at least one press release or request from a new press, magazine, collective, or other publishing endeavor. These editors and publishers basically say, “I have a unique vision and I want to share that vision.” They are more invested in the uniqueness and sharing of their vision than supporting the vision of someone else. How many people in Chris Higgs’s post said, “I’m a small publisher”? We are an army of generals, a kingdom of kings.
BlazeVOX Goes Vanity Press?
I saw on Facebook where Matt Bell had written:
A really disheartening post at Bark about BlazeVOX’s new “acceptance” letter for book manuscripts, where they require a $250 donation from the author before publishing. BlazeVOX has published a couple books I’ve really loved, which makes me sorry and disappointed and angry to read this. I know times are tough, but preying on writers isn’t the solution.
I clicked on the link and read the article written by Brett Ortler, which outlines his exchange with BlazeVOX editor Geoffrey Gatza.
I echo Matt’s response: this is troubling and disheartening. For those of you out there who are new to creative writing, who are currently in the process of learning the ropes of publishing, it is considered unethical for a publisher to ask you to pay to have your work published. Back in the day, before the internet, there used to be this thing called The Writer’s Market (maybe it still exists?), which was this huge brick of a book that helped writers find places to send their work. It also included helpful essays about publishing. One of the first rules you would learn by reading The Writer’s Market is that anyone who asks you for money to publish your work should not be trusted.
Like Matt, I admit that BlazeVOX has published a few books I’ve loved (and written about or run promos for here), but this sort of pay-to-publish policy seriously threatens to diminish the press’s legitimacy in my eyes.
2 New from Calamari: Gary Lutz’s Divorcer & Vincent Standley’s A Mortal Affect
Calamari Press jumps back to action with two exciting new titles, both now available for order: Gary Lutz’s Divorcer & Vincent Standley’s A Mortal Affect.
“DIVORCER is a collection of seven harrowing and hyperprecise short stories about ruinous relationships and their aftershocks.” $13
“A Mortal Affect is a satire of meaning systems targeting the role bureaucracy and cultural assumptions play in creating, distorting, and replicating the things we believe to be true. Informed by an absurdism in the Modernist vein, the novel is a celebration of error and folly that questions the wisdom of conviction and the faith in metaphysics. These themes play out in a fictional world inhabited by mortals and immortals, the oppressed and the oppressors. The former understand their condition of being oppressed but have no concept of freedom, while the latter emulate mortals but lack the ability to eat, reproduce, or die, even by suicide. Never allegorical or polemical, the novel operates comfortably within the bounds of comedy, avoiding the earnestness and self-conscious urgency common to the novel of ideas.” $18
POOR CLAUDIA 5
The fifth edition of Portland, OR’s POOR CLAUDIA has come to.
“Clean-cut, slim, and summery, if No. 5 were a cigarette she’d be a Gauloises, if she were a drink she’d be a tart negroni. Saddle-stitched chapbook on laid and linen paper. Get your copy while supplies last. “
POOR CLAUDIA NO 5
Jae Choi
Julia Cohen
Jennifer Denrow
Brian Foley
Graham Foust
Noah Eli Gordon
Dorothea Lasky
Anthony McCann
Sawako Nakayasu
Christie Ann Reynolds
Mathias Svalina
Subscriptions for this years POOR CLAUDIA output are cheap too. $30 gets you everything they publish – chapbooks, nonbooks, broadsides and two issues of journal. Plus free shipping. Yes. So! For example, if you’d subscribed for this past year you would’ve received
Summer BF Press
Summer BF Press is run by poets Lindsey Boldt and Steve Orth from their apartment in Oakland, CA. They just released as new title called The Truth About Ted by Bruce Boone. The only do small runs of chapbooks and they have rad taste. You should visit their website and buy one of everything.
Noo Duende Edition
I like NOO Weekly when Goodie Mike Young let’s others take over curating for a week. This week it’s Ben Kopel.
Ben says, “consider this the Duende Edition: “Extra! Extra! Bleed all about it!”
See this week shake in the shapes of Graham Foust, Gordon Massman, Chelsea Hogue, LaTasha N Nevada Diggs, Bianca Stone, & Matt Suss.
Do Yo Know Matt Suss? O shit.
You should.
Prayer for What They Said and What They Were Not Told by Paul Maliszewski
This week marks the release of Paul Maliszewski’s new chapbook, Prayer for What They Said and What They Were Not Told, published by Varmint Armature, Trnsfr’s new publishing racket. Do pick one up. You shan’t regret it. The cost? A mere $8. And if you subscribe to Trnsfr, you’ll receive P.F.W.T.S.A.W.T.W.N.T. entirely free of charge. Be one the first 25 and Maliszewski will sign and number your copy, and almost certainly entertain fond and benevolent thoughts about you all the while. Now what could be better than that? Just go to here.
2 New From Fence: Brenner, Holiday
Super excited about new Daniel Brenner book June available now from Fence. I’ve read his first one, The Stupefying Flashbulbs, at least a dozen times. His images are jellyfukked. Also new from Fence is Harmony Holiday’s Negro League Baseball, which comes with music. You can get them both together for 30% off.
