Evoke and awaken. Corium Magazine wants your submissions.

New Stephen Dixon story ‘Wife In Reverse,’ written at the same time as his unpublished new novel, His Wife Leaves Him, is at Matchbook, “The story originated as a compressed, reverse version of the novel, though it didn’t turn out exactly that way.”

Introductions to books are akin to the inflatable dartboard. Get rid of them all.

“If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting, it should be burned.
Said Shaw.”

— from David Markson’s The Last Novel, p. 68

You may know the backstory of Ben Marcus’s book The Age of Wire and String—that it was written with the help of Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk-Literature. Did you know the entire thing is online? If so, why the fuck didn’t you tell me?

A list of remembrances of writers who passed in the 00s, by other writers, including one of David Foster Wallace by George Saunders, plus JG Ballard, Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, W.G. Sebald, many others, at the Guardian.

“Verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm, everywhere, except on posters and page four of the newspapers. In the genre which we call prose there is verse of every conceivable rhythm, some of it admirable. But in reality there is no prose, there is the alphabet, and then there are verse forms, more or less rigid, more or less diffuse. In every attempt at style there is versification.”

–Mallarmé, “Réponses à des enquetes”

Prose-as-verse. Yes? No?

Is all poetry poetry? (I’m not asking about bad vs. good.) And are verse and poetry the same thing?

When was the last time you read a book you didn’t really want to read? How did that go?

new ROBOT MELON up.  issue ten.  (click on the N in ROBOT MELON when you get to the main page (i didn’t put the link for issue ten up because now the link will take you to the main page and you might decide that you want to read all of the issues)).

It took Sean McCarthy from Popmatters seven years to sell his copy of REM’s Monster to a used record store because a ton of people bought it and then half that ton tried to sell the damn thing back. I asked one of our used book buyers what the Seattle used book equivalent was. Care to try to guess what title every person with a box of books tries to sell to us? An envelope full of galleys to anyone who can nail it before I update this post with the answer at 7pm Eastern Pacific Standard Time. ANSWER (guessed by Lance and Jack at pretty much the same time): SEABISCUIT.