“I tell them, ‘You never had the chance to make 7,000 women happy in one day.’”
It’s weird how the 1,364th story about Amazon sucks mentions my favorite book, Everyone Poops & a lady getting screwed by Amazon when she tried to buy books for my old school district, which I feel was a terrible place; in fact my principle retired & was arrested for soliciting sex in a public park where he told the cop he’d been with all sorts of young bods. Coincidence? I think not.
I was thinking the other day how the cycle of literature : how we burn oil for the light of life lived long ago :: paper pressed down as hard as possible : a blood diamond shines light like everyone deserves to know the truth but at what cost to whom. I don’t know. What do you think. When will small literary presses give Amazon the proverbial bird call? Would anyone care or would it be like when a kid throws a rock in a pond & people just glance & think, “Cute.” But imagine if there were like a thousand kids throwing rocks in a pond. I feel like people would notice that. Have we talked about this 782 times or 783? But if you whore it out someone will write about it maybe? Again? Worth a shot. Just like cage-free eggs. THIS BOOK SOLD WITHOUT AMAZON. Give some good Ra Ra’s & record yourself on VHS kicking an elephant in the junk. So why haven’t you? What are we going to do. Does anyone even care about the weather anymore or was that just something to talk about because the clouds looked like a chorus for a second.
Ugly Duckling Presse + 1s
It’s 12 o’clock, I wish it were 11:59. (Who knows who wrote ~ that?) The sale is over but some of the books aren’t sold out. But so many are. So still go.
Until midnight, the discount code LEVITATE gets you *50% off* the *already reduced* price you always get for ordering any book directly from UDP.
So, for example, Corina Copp’s PRO MAGENTA / BE MET and Jacqueline Waters’ ONE SLEEPS THE OTHER DOESN’T will run you $10 $8 $4 and $15 $13 $6.50, respectively. Your total for both books, even with shipping, will be less than the list price of Waters’ book alone. Read from / about Copp’s chapbook there there, and hear to Waters read here.
Until midnight I’ll add 12 13 more eleventh hour pairs. Suggest things in the comments, on Facebook, at my window, to your neighbors. Of course you don’t need to buy two books, but you probably do.
Uljana Wolf’s FALSE FRIENDS (tr. Susan Bernofsky) + Lev Rubinstein’s THIRTY-FIVE NEW PAGES (tr. Philip Metres / Tatiana Tulchinsky) [Megan Burns, via Fakebook, suggests some Michael Ford with one's Rubinstein]
Aase Berg’s TRANSFER FAT (translated by Johannes Göransson) + Johannes Göransson / Joyelle McSweeney, DEFORMATION ZONE
Tomaž Šalamun’s ON THE TRACKS OF WILD GAME (tr. Sonja Kravanja)+ Laura Solomon’s THE HERMIT
Julian T. Brolaski’s GOWANUS ATROPOLIS + Karen Weiser’s TO LIGHT OUT
Filip Marinovich’s AND IF YOU DON’T GO CRAZY I’LL MEET YOU HERE TOMORROW + Julien Poirier’s EL GOLPE CHILEÑO
Kristen Kosmas’ HELLO FAILURE + Ellie Ga’s THREE ARCTIC BOOKLETS (save $37.50!)
David Cameron’s FLOWERS OF BAD* Rachel Levitsky’s NEIGHBOR + Christian Hawkey’s VENTRAKL [*distributed by SPD not UDP, so not eligible; Cameron's book is deserving of its own post; it will get it; you should get it, too]
M. Kasper’s OPEN-BOOK + Nancy Kuhl’s LITTLE WINTER THEATER
Trey Seger’s DEAR FAILURES + Noah Black’s USELYSSES
Gregg Biglieri’s LITTLE RICHARD THE SECOND + Clark Coolidge’s THIS TIME WE ARE BOTH
Vito Acconci / Bernadette Mayer, 0 TO 9: THE COMPLETE MAGAZINE + Robert Fitterman / Vanessa Place, NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS
Ammiel Alcalay’s NEITHER WIT NOR GOLD (FROM THEN) + Yván Yauri’s FIRE WIND (tr. Nicholas Rattner / Marta del Pozo)
+ PS, a thirteenth, UDP HOFers Jen Bervin & Eugene Ostashevsky
http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/
LEVITATE
You can still float. UDP titles are carried by Flying Object and all the best bookstores, which are carried by you.
Chiasmus Press is Looking For a Managing Editor
chiasmus press is slowly unfurling out of hiatus. we have a big idea about our reincarnation and they want you.
YOU
want to run a nationally recognized micro indie press. like head honcho big mamma jamma.
want to work with Lidia Yuknavitch.
want to reinvent online, print publication, and cross genre media projects.
YOU HAVE
big time digital savvy and skills, including web, blog and podcasting.
large experience with alternative press world–all facets.
impeccable literary and media counter culture taste.
crazy good organization skills.
a relentless desire to correct culture.
alternative forms of marketing do not frighten you. in fact, they turn you on.
you have big ideas everyone else thinks are nutso.
it’s likely you drink and enter altered states on occasion.
OTHER
compensation negotiable. if you know what “micro indie press” means then you have realistic expectations.
it is not mandatory that you live in Portlandia, though it would be helpful. We have heard of Skype and shit before though, so you know, we are down.
if this is YOU, send a 500 word description detailing your experience and desire and why we should pick YOU to: lidiamiles at yahoo.com by April 15.
yes, really.
Sampson Starkweather Strips it Down to Just Chapbooks
The 2012 Chapbook Festival starts tomorrow. I call it “the good AWP.” In preparation, this year I’ve asked Sampson Starkweather, 1/5th of the Birds, LLC braintrust and chapbook enthusiast, some questions about the form. Go get a blanket–he links up some great stuff that is way worth the read.
Hey Sampson, what’s the deal with chapbooks?
Funny, that’s how I start all my stand-up comedy gigs. It kills of course. So I wanted to start with a quote from James Haug’s Why I Like Chapbooks (Factory Hollow, 2011), who waxes lyrical “Chapbooks are stealth books./ They can slip under a door./ They don’t impose. They suggest./ They’re not one thing or another. They don’t take much time. They’re sly and easy to ignore. They imply, insinuate, inquire./ They don’t expect an answer./ They have a long history; they have no history.” READ MORE >
3 New from Action Books: Burning City, Cronk, Hyesoon
If you don’t own every title Action Books puts out, I’d say you’re slipping. Here are three new just released units for that library of teeth:
Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity ed. by Jed Rasula & Tim Conley [like 400 pp full of insane shit discoveries]
Skin Horse by Olivia Cronk [I've already read this twice, it's wow]
All the Garbage of the World, Unite! by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi [Which after Hyesoon's first book, Mommy Must Be A Mountain of Feathers, also from Action, I'm ready to be killed again]
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands
SPD had a sale I learned about the day it was ending so I never got around to buying anything (discounted). The list of their 100 top-selling books of 2011 is worth a look, however. Hovering the cursor over covers to see titles takes too long so I opened 10 tabs, copied and pasted the info, inserted a number, a period, and the word “by” between author and title, repeating this process 10 times. Except I ended up with a list of only 99 books, so I had to go back and find the omitted book and redo the numbering![!!] I was also going to insert links to everything but decided against it. Enjoy.
1. Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar
Publisher: Ibis Editions
2. Girlvert: A Porno Memoir by Oriana Small
Publisher: A Barnacle Book
3. Devotional Cinema by Nathaniel Dorsky
Publisher: Tuumba Press
4. Barrio Bushido by Benjamin Bac Sierra
Publisher: El Leon Literary Arts
5. Up Jump the Boogie by John Murillo
Publisher: Cypher Books
6. The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field by Tara L Masih, Editor
Publisher: Rose Metal Press
7. Clamor by Elyse Fenton
Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center
8. The Trees The Trees by Heather Christle
Publisher: Octopus Books
9. Gully by Roger Bonair-Agard
Publisher: Cypher Books
10. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
Publisher: Dorothy, a publishing project
11. Humanimal: A Project for Future Children by Bhanu Kapil
Publisher: Kelsey Street Press
12. Divorcer by Gary Lutz
Publisher: Calamari Press
13. The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford
Publisher: Lost Roads Publishers
READ MORE >
A Book Prescription For Your Reading Pleasure
I often stumble across unique ways of exposing readers to new books. Chin Music Press (which I’ve discussed before here and here), has a pretty cool new program, BooksRx, where each quarter, a writer or artist curates a selection of independently published books and/or magazines around a theme. Their third installment, the Mardi Gras collection, will be available on the 21st and looking ahead, they want to incorporate titles from other presses. One installment is $40 and a yearly subscription is $100.
This seems like a great idea for indie publishers, who could band together and sell their books in curated, thematic packages. It will be interesting to see if this idea succeeds.What presses would you like to see participating in a venture like this?
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.
