Crispin Best Needs Stuff about 1492
Crispin Best is editing a great project called For Every Year. Here’s a bit from his first post in October of 2008, in which he introduces the site:
A story for every year since 1400.
The story just has to be in honour of that year, it doesn’t have to be set then.
So. For example. Chaucer died in 1400, so that explains that. And. The first written record of whiskey appears in 1405, so that explains that.
Pick a year since 1400.
Write a story dedicated to that year.
Uncategorized / 20 Comments
April 15th, 2009 / 5:22 pm
April 15th, 2009 / 5:22 pm
I am buying one of these with my six figure advance
Visit terrafugia.com for more information on this experimental carplane.
‘A story about reluctant vikings’
Wells Tower reads “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” for The Guardian Books Podcast thingy they have going on at their thing.
(via Anthony Luebbert’s twitter thingy)
Adam Peterson’s Untimely Death
Adam Peterson, coeditor of The Cupboard and author of My Untimely Death, visited Houston today. He flew into Houston this morning. He walked into my office around, like, 1:30pm or something. We talked about stuff. Then I went to teach my intro lit class, and he checked into his hotel room. Then we met up again after my class and drove to The Menil to look at art. Then we met Gene Morgan for burgers. Then we drove with Gene Morgan to Poison Girl for a few drinks and met up with Brian Rod of The Joanna Gallery. Then I drove Gene Morgan home, and then I dropped Adam Peterson off at his hotel, and I drove myself home.
This is a quick review of Adam Peterson’s chapbook My Untimely Death from Subito Press. Thank you for reading this post.
Adam Peterson’s My Untimely Death is a small, perfect-bound chapbook of 43 pages. The cover design is minimal, simple, and exciting: a block of something (lead?) crashes downward across the front page, smoke and fire billowing behind it, to strike Adam Peterson on the face, if he were standing just off the page.
The fifteen texts in the chapbook tell of various ways that the narrator has arrived at an untimely death: death by block of lead falling from the sky, death by long fall, death by bubble bath, death by malfunction, death by roo-roo.
Death by ex-lovers.
10 Comments
April 10th, 2009 / 2:02 am
April 10th, 2009 / 2:02 am
Mean Thursday: #VALUE!
I don’t know if you’ve read about this anywhere, but via Galleycat a few weeks ago I clicked on a link to a downloadable story written in an Excel spreadsheet. It’s author, David Nygren, wrote a story and typed its various parts into columns.
Reactions on the internet have been, um, confusingly positive, based on my lazy web browsing. 10,000 people have downloaded the story. The comments section at his blog is full of praise. Other blogs and sites link to it. Even a blogger for The New Yorker picked it up, though she was deadpan in her post:
A writer has “built” a short story using an Excel spreadsheet divided into three columns: one for action, one for dialogue, and one for internal monologue.
I wonder how tempted she was to put those quotation marks around writer.
Sorry, David. I’m just teasin’ ya!
HTMLGIANT Wants to Know (a contest):
Greetings dear readers of important literature,
I am trying to clean up my dirty frathouse look so that people can take me seriously.
What should I do with these hairs that are coming up out of my shirt?
Like, they aren’t quite chest hairs and they aren’t quite neck hairs? So do I shave them? Or clip them? Or pluck them? Something else? Another thing?
Turtlenecks are not an option, because I live in Houston, Texas, and summer is coming soon.
I am really serious about being taken seriously here. I need to be taken seriously so that I can one day get a job in the real world and make money for my family, because I’m going to have a family one day, and probably a mortgage :( so yeah.
So any grooming tips are welcome and encouraged. If you want, post in the comments section those grooming tips. Person who submits best grooming tip (funniest? most succesful? creativest? meanest? i dont konw) will receive a really old copy of Barry Yourgrau’s Wearing Dad’s Head and maybe some hair clippings or something. So be sure to include a real email so I can email you.
Okay, bye, thank you!
Now I’m going to go make a resume.
***UPDATE***
Wearing Dad’s Head goes to Joe Young, because he made me remember how much I loved watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as a kid. Thanks, Joe, for the memories.
Tattoo Lit?
The print form is dying. Online publishing is diluting good literature.
What’s next?
Maybe we could learn something from this Swedish tattoo magazine, Tare Lugnt, which ‘published’ its latest issue on some guy’s leg.
I give you Tare Lugnt Nummer Tre.
See the rest of it here.
(via Chunnel.tv)
Welcome Back
Please welcome back from the dead, dispatch litareview.
Mike Young’s story ‘Ball of Dooshie Levitation’ makes up the first dispatch.
Remember magic tricks? Those are fun.
You can read the story here.
Payment is $10 per piece. Submission guidelines pasted below:
-checklist
- Fiction or meritorious non-fiction between 1,200 and 3,000 words
(multiple yet cohesive flash/micro fictions are fine)- Cover letter with author photo and biography of less than 75 words
- Simultaneous submissions allowed, multiple submissions not
- Submissions go to moonpunter+dispatch@gmail.com as attachments in RTF, ODT, or DOC format.
Enjoy!
Uncategorized / 18 Comments
April 1st, 2009 / 9:44 pm
April 1st, 2009 / 9:44 pm
Free Words from Jason Jordan
Hi everyone, quick note here.
Jason Jordan, editor of decomp magazine, has been giving away free stuff over at his blog. This week’s free bag of freeness is full of Ninth Letter Vol. 4, No. 1. Jordan says:
To enter this contest, post something in this blog entry within forty-eight hours. I’ll put the names into a hat and draw one out.
So click over to the post and start commenting for a chance at the issue.
Word Spaces (9): ‘Details’ by Alexandra Chasin
I’m happy to share the ninth post in our Word Spaces feature: ‘Details’ by Alexandra Chasin. Alexandra Chasin is the author of Kissed By (FC2 2007), a beautiful collection of unique texts, as she likes to call them, well worth your time. Her writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, sleepingfish, West Branch, Phoebe, and online at DIAGRAM, Exquisite Corpse, and elimae. She currently teaches at The New School. For more about her, please see her bio at the FC2 site.
A few notes before the feature: ‘Details’ is Alexandra Chasin’s response to our standard prompt: take a picture of your writing area and write a couple paragraphs about it. In her email to me, Alexandra had said she wanted to try something a bit different. Great, I said.
Then I received the twenty-five photos and the accompanying text a few weeks later. As I clicked through the emails, looked at the photos, read the text, I could not help but think about Kissed By. The book made more ‘sense’ to me, at least my reading experience of it. Looking at ‘Details,’ I feel as though I know Alexandra Chasin a little more, which is a nice feeling, I think.
So I hope you enjoy the post as well and give some serious thought to picking up Kissed By. Reviews can be read at The Quarterly Conversation (my review), and here at The Short Review. You may also watch a video of Alexandra Chasin from the 2008 &NOW Festival of Innovative Literature and Art here.