HTMLGIANT | the internet literature magazine blog of the future | Page 627

Hey, here are those links you asked me for

The new issue of Gigantic magazine now exists! UPDATED: Though I’m not seeing much evidence of #2 on the site right now. The launch party for #2, the “Gigantic America” issue will be at PPOW gallery in NYC on 2/27, and will feature readings by favorites-of-ours Deb Olin Unferth and Sasha Fletcher, among others. The issue itself has interviews with Sam Lipsyte and Lydia Millet, plus new fiction from Robert Coover and Leni Zumas, plus “collectible biographies of famous Americans” written by the likes of Michael Kimball and Clancy Martin. Holy awesome!

Also, check out their exclusive preview of Paul Willerton’s Little Big Cremaster 3.

Meehan Crist’s review of John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay is now up at Powells.com. Crist, you may or may not know, is the reviews editor at The Believer. Her review originally ran in the February issue, to much acclaim, and was selected for publication on the Powell’s site by the NBCC. Cheers!

The Rumpus has an interview with the poet Gary Young. How often do you see a poet-interview at the very top of a general-interest culture website? Good God, I love these guys. While you’re over there, check out “Sexually, I’m More of a Denmark: A Highly Subjective Book Review” by Chelsea G. Summers, and then, if you like, get linked (via them) to Javier Marias’s KCRW Bookworm appearance, which went live yesterday.

It’s Derek Jarman Day at Coop’s Place. Re the photo above-

Jarman is also remembered for his famous shingle cottage-garden, created in the latter years of his life, in the shadow of the Dungeness power station. The house was built in tarred timber. Raised wooden text on the side of the cottage is the first stanza and the last five lines of the last stanza of John Donne’s poem, The Sun Rising. The cottage’s beach garden was made using local materials and has been the subject of several books

Speaking of which, do you know that Donne poem? It’s one of my favorites of his. Here are my favorite lines from it:

Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.

But you really should read the whole thing. Happy Friday!

Random / 8 Comments
February 19th, 2010 / 11:40 am

Sean Lovelace

5 blars (or brain cattails, put in your head-vase)

1.) The University of Indiana’s main library sinks one inch per year. Why? The engineers forgot to calculate the weight of? [Go ahead, lovers, guess]

2.) Badass Pub Crawl in LA. What do you say to Aimee Bender while drunk? “Yo! Can I stumble into, vomit on every reviewer so lazy as to compare you to Ray Carver, Aimee? ? Can I be like your anklet monitor, Aimee? Just near you? I like the way you spell your name.” Crash.

3.) “true originality doesn’t exist anyway, only authenticity” Bullshit meter?

4.) An interview with Carole Maso (Brian Evenson on the inquiry machine). This is old, OK. “HTML is a blog, what is this old shit, yo?” Blah blah. Go lift weights in the shower, so you can sweat yourself and clean yourself simultaneously. Now you’re in the future. So chill-axe.

5.) This Heide Hatry shit is bloody and controversial so just be careful and don’t swoon on me. (We all know pigs are smarter than dogs [don’t get me started on cats] but pigs taste great, right?] Etc. Etc. Yawn. Slurp. Etc.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyHq26xJ5as

Craft Notes & Web Hype / 32 Comments
February 18th, 2010 / 7:11 pm

Roxane Gay

We’re Getting On: A Conversation With James Kaelan

We're Getting On Covers

James Kaelen’s We’re Getting On, a collection of interconnected stories following five people as they relocate to the Nevada desert intending to abandon technology, will be published by Flatmancrooked on July 2, 2010. The project is being billed as a Zero Emission book. In addition to sending his writing out into the world, Kaelen also plans on going on a West Coast bike tour without leaving a carbon footprint to promote the book and, in many ways, the ideology behind the book. He took some time from his busy schedule to talk with me about the book and the book/bicycle tour.

CALLING ALL HEARTS: Buy this book now.

Looking, now?

Okay. So Justin Taylor’s debut book with HaperPerennial–Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever–was recently reviewed in the NYT. It will not be that hard, with that bump, to make this book a NYT Best Seller, which would obviously be a monumental event for Justin and these stories. I implore you: if you haven’t already, but this book from Amazon.com or your local bookstore THIS WEEK. Even if you have a copy already. I bought two more. This could be huge for Justin, this community, and good literature.

Behind the Scenes / 74 Comments
February 18th, 2010 / 4:08 pm

Blake Butler—

I read the first 60 pages of Joshua Cohen’s 800 page forthcoming Witz last night on my sofa. Holy fuck. Put your pants on. Mark your calendars. More on this later, but I just had to…

Adam Robinson

People think if a book is at Amazon it is somehow more “legitimate”

Below is an excerpt from a paper I wrote about some of the business aspects of publishing. Let me know if you have any questions.

As the buzz on Light Boxes picked up last spring, I found it increasingly difficult to keep up with fulfillment. Even Amazon, who had previously been sending Purchase Orders for 2-3 books at a time, started to send orders in the dozens every week, and for shipment to multiple distribution centers. This policy of theirs is extremely frustrating, because for one thing, they don’t pay for shipping even while they demand a 55% discount. For a publisher participating in their “Advantage” program, this structure is backbreaking. Having to mail books to four places, in special packaging (since they’ll destroy any book they deem unsellable), eliminates the already-tiny margin and drives up the cost to the user. For instance, a paperback book like Light Boxes, at 167 pages, stretches product value with a $14.95 price tag. At that amount, though, PG is paid $6.73 per copy. Okay, that isn’t too bad. Subtract from that the cost of production (including printing, design, art rights, cataloging numbers, promotional items and copies and so on), the amount PG earns is closer to $2.25. Now consider Amazon’s tendency to order books to four different locations, which means that shipping has to be paid four times, and the result is that it actually costs about $.30 to sell a book with them. Separately, Amazon charges the customer (or enduser) $3.99 for shipping, which means that the cheapest Light Boxes will sell for through them is $18.94. Having paid this kind of money can cause readers to have certain expectations, and I am always afraid that the shortness of the book will disappoint them. READ MORE >

Behind the Scenes / 142 Comments
February 18th, 2010 / 1:33 pm

Jimmy Chen

Power Quote: Kafka on writing

“It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also with one’s own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one letter corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness.”

— Franz Kafka, from a letter to Milena

I suspect by “letters” he means, generically, the written word, though he could also be referring to letters, the medium with which he is writing to Milena — or, and this is my fancy, he could mean the letters which make up words themselves, thus dramatically altering exactly what is “[in]between the lines” and their respective “corroborations,” a funny yet telling invocation which hints at some complicity, as if writing is a shameful lie. His “intercourse with ghosts,” short of necrophilia, simply tells of a man who replaced love with words. (One should see desire in the pulp of paper.) Think about Kafka long enough, and you enter a dark tunnel. Don’t think about him, and your world too perfect, untouched.

Power Quote / 8 Comments
February 18th, 2010 / 12:52 pm

Sean Lovelace

Duck in a Basket

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBmjGV2Kb8k

Random & Technology / 2 Comments
February 18th, 2010 / 9:11 am

Adam Robinson—

Whoa, you’d be crazy not to read “Object,” by Richard Wehrenberg, Jr over at Slingshot, then say something about it somewhere on the Internet. These “please help” campaigns are risky, but I appreciate the faith, passion and sacrifice that goes into them. Sacrifice? Well, damn, Josh Kleinberg is giving away a bunch of (20) really great books to people who do him the kindness of promoting the stories. 75% of the books, he says, will be hard for him to part with. Go take a look. (Google alerted me to this deal because one of the books he’s giving away is mine. Thanks Josh!)

Roxane Gay

Q & A #4

If you have questions about writing or publishing or whatever, leave them in the comments or e-mail them to roxane at roxanegay dot com and we will find you some answers.

If you withdraw a story, is it appropriate to immediately send another story to that lit. journal? What if you have multiple withdrawals from that publication? (And I’m talking the kind of place where you have to email them to withdraw your piece, not just pull it out yourself and they never even knew it was there.) Are they going to get pissed at some point? When does your good/bad luck become a reason to basically stop submitting to a journal?

Sean Lovelace
Yes, they get pissed eventually. Numerous withdraws? I am already souring your name. What are you doing? If you are continually getting accepted by multiple journals, bless you. But why not stop the simultaneous submissions? You obviously know how to write a great story lit mags want. Cut the shotgun approach at this point.

Lily Hoang

I don’t submit enough to journals to withdraw, but I have withdrawn book ms from presses. I do ask if they’ll consider another ms in the future, unless I have a spare lying around (which I never do). Usually, they’re nice, but with one press in particular, I’ve pulled two or three ms from them (one just a week or two after I submitted it). That’s just embarrassing. With journals though, I don’t think it’s a big deal.

Ryan Call

I don’t think it’s bad to immediately send another story to take the place of a withdrawal. It doesn’t bother me when I read submissions for NOÖ. I just mark the previous story ‘withdrawn’ and the new story goes at the end of the queue. As a writer, I tend not to send an immediate replacement. I don’t often have a story to replace another story, so it takes me a long time to figure out what to send to that editor if I had to withdraw another story that I thought was perfect for him or her.

Roxane Gay

Multiple withdrawals gets annoying. To go on a tiny tangent, I get irritated when people withdraw stories the same day or the same week. I realize that cannot be helped at times, but it is aggravating. When you find yourself in the position where you’re always withdrawing stories, it’s time to stop simultaneously submitting or at least submitting to no more than two or three markets for each story. To really answer your question, I don’t mind a writer immediately sending another submission immediately after they withdraw a piece but if it happened four or five times in a very short time span, I would start to get testy about it.