June 6th, 2009 / 2:19 pm
Web Journals
The Chapbook Review
We’re chock full of writers, right, and there are more and more presses starting up every day. Hallelujah. Like check out North Punk Press and their new thing, the nicely titled story by Paula Bomer called “An Important Day in the Joyful Life of Marjorie Wallace.” It’s a teaser for a future chapbook, and it’s put together handsomely on blogger and as a downloadable PDF. The story concerns Marjorie, an administrative assistant who runs into an old friend and chastises her for not calling, and then ends up feeling kind of bad but kind of hopeful, or maybe she has sunstroke. Read it, get it.
But anyway, what I was saying is that there are plenty of writers and presses starting up all the time, a bunch of people and publishers I’ve never heard of even. I can’t keep track.
So that’s why I’m really excited about The Chapbook Review, which as founder John Madera puts it, is “a monthly online literary journal focused on the critical examination of the venerable chapbook.” Just as the list of novellas Madera put together is massive (not to mention, holy geez, his gorgeous and flabbergasting review of Light Boxes), so shall be The Chapbook Review. The first issue features a conversation that Pig Babi Blake Butler had with academe Chris Higgs, and then that conversation in reverse. It’s got reviews by Sean Lovelace and Tobias Carroll and Kimberly King Parsons and tons of people about books by Matt Bell, Mike Heppner and Aaron Burch and so much more I’m not saying it right. There’s reviews of Willows Wept books and Sunnyoutside books. I mean, there’s like two reviews of the same book from The Cupboard for crying out loud. I’m as excited as a squirrel on fire about The Chapbook Review, for real, because to go along with the shit ton of writers and editors, now there is more inquiry to legitimate it, lightening the burden some for the precious few outlets (New Pages, Rain Taxi, The Quarterly Conversation) that are taking critical reviews of small press fare as a serious and sole objective.
Tags: John Madera, The Chapbook Review
Pig Babi is my new favorite personal ID
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Thanks Adam! And thanks for posting about North Punk Press. I hope they’ll send me copies of Bomer’s chapbook when it comes out.
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I’m excited about this too. Looks to be another great way to spread the word about those pesky little books with staples that 99% of bookstores won’t carry. Chapbooks will never die despite this obscurity. Long live chapbooks!
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Hey! Thanks for the NPP shout out, it is very much appreciated.
And, John, just yesterday I was looking over guidelines for sending chapbooks to the review. NPP has one coming out probably late July and Bomer’s in the fall/winter. We’ll definitely send copies on.
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June 6th, 2009 / 10:21 pmJohn Madera—
Thanks Ryan. Looking forward to them.
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how did they do their blogger html like that. its genius. and prolly time consuming
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June 7th, 2009 / 1:35 amryan—
which part?
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all of it really. chock it up to me being html deficient, but I cannot understand how they fixed everything to suit their needs. like, the main page, then click on the (read) and it takes you to the page where its nothing but text, no photos, no sidebars, everything clean and friendly. I used to have blogger and… I have no clue how that was done. Only thing I do know is that I’m guessing each section is its own individual post under the same blog?
Whatever the case, this is how blog-based online journals should be.
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June 7th, 2009 / 12:45 pmryan—
yes, each section is an individual post. honestly the look doesn’t come from some html mastery, more from willingness to spend hours experimenting. each time i work on a site i learn a lot more about how to manipulate the templates that i start with.
i’m very glad other people think it looks good!
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