Contests

THOUGHT CONTEST: Which artists do you suddenly randomly care about?

On the way back from buying an overpriced kombucha drink because I was concerned about my daily green intake, I did two things:

1) thought of and executed the tweet “I put a bottle of kombucha next to a tree and the tree got very offended.”

2) thought “I wonder what Charlie Kaufman is working on,” then thought “Hmm, there’s a very short list of artists/filmmakers/poets/writers whose current projects I randomly get curious about out of the blue. It doesn’t mean they’re my favorites. Actually I don’t know what it means.”

CONTEST: Which artists/filmmakers/poets/writers/musicians/c’monyouknowit’s
allthesamething do you get randomly curious about?

Like you think out of nowhere, “Hmm, I wonder what ______ ______ is working on.”

Tell us in the comments. A winner will be selected at random and will win any book they want under $25 from Small Press Distribution.

Contests / 17 Comments
August 14th, 2014 / 11:21 am

Book Giveaway — Ravi Mangla’s “Understudies”

Understudies-RMangla-promo

Comment in the thread here for a chance to win a copy of Ravi Mangla’s Understudies:

“a deadpan, sharply-observed novel about the sadness pervading a contemporary world fixated on simulation and celebrity. Like so much of America, the small town where Understudies takes place exists under a mediated, televisual spell. Everyone’s chasing fame, desperate for that particular brand of social capital endemic to the internet age.” – Michael Jauchen (3 AM)

A winner Ravi chooses from the comments will receive:
 
 
 
 

1) Signed copy of Understudies
2) ARC of James Franco’s Palo Alto (which may or may not be signed by Ravi pretending to be James Franco)
3) and probably some other stuff

so, comment away (& I’ll notify the winner in a few days)
 

Contests & Random / 12 Comments
December 9th, 2013 / 7:05 pm

SWARMALERTswarmalert

 

“Swarming, in other words, maximizes the advantages of formlessness over form…Because such action is self-organizing and self-producing…it is liable to occur spontaneously at all levels of social organization…Not only does Swarm threaten Empire’s monuments and armies…At the level of language, swarming is a sign of poetic activity.”

–Andrew Joron, “Terror Conduction,” The Cry at Zero

Over at Big Lucks, there is a Mike Young poem flapping open with some blankspaces that need filling. The poem is from a chapbook SOON TO COME called Who Can Make It. Maybe it’s a title about survival. Maybe it’s a title about creation. Either way, Big Lucks and Mike Young want you to go visit those blankspaces in Mike Young’s poem with your stormwords, with your birdclouds. Go to the website and fill in the blankspaces and maybe you get a glow shout in the acknowledgments / a chance to be in the newest issue of Big Lucks. Yeah? I think it seems like the kill rhythm. I think it seems like the way to get some colored fumes around here. Winners will be announced on the Big Lucks FB page in January. 

Many of these footprints were in large numbers close together and, just by looking quietly at them, men, who themselves originally lived in small hordes, were made aware of the contrast between their own number and the enormous numbers of some animal herds. They were always hungry and on the watch for game; and the more there was of it the better for them. But they also wanted to be more than themselves. Man’s feeling for his own increase was always strong and is certainly not to be understood only as his urge for self-propagation. Men wanted to be more, then and there; the large numbers of the herd which they hunted blended, in their feeling with their own numbers which they wished to be large, and they expressed this in a specific state of communal excitement which I shall call the rhythmic or throbbing crowd.

-Elias Canetti, “Rhythm,” Crowds and Power  

 

Author News & Contests / 2 Comments
December 3rd, 2013 / 11:05 am

Win free books to celebrate three years of Flying Object. Also watch a pie video.

Y’all y’all y’all what if they made pumpkin spice American Spirits, I would shut down my self-governance, I would sit inside buying raffle tickets, like buying a million, and winning all the books. All the books? You can win the books. That’s real.

Flying Object is a wonderful place in Hadley, MA where lots of sweet things happen. They’re teaching young writers, they’re hosting residences, they’re throwing pies on faces.

They are three years old and they’re throwing another huge party and even if you can’t go, you can win an insane amount of books for a simple raffle ticket of $5. Remember last year? You maybe did this last year too and maybe won some great stuff. Buy a couple tickets. Shroud your luck in more luck. Support Flying Object! Win books! Smoke out of a pumpkin! Do at least three of these things!

Press release after the jump with embedded pie video. READ MORE >

Contests & Events / Comments Off on Win free books to celebrate three years of Flying Object. Also watch a pie video.
October 3rd, 2013 / 11:00 am

“All duty is dream all you are is wildfires”

skinteam_mediumwebHi, y’all. In June, I and my helicopter friends in our helicopter hats released a lovely weird novel called The Skin Team by a Canadian gentleman named Jordaan Mason. I haven’t told you about it yet, but now I am telling you about it. There’s a way you can get it for free at the end of this post. First read the post to see if you’d like it, right?

The novel is about three people, two boys and a girl, turning into each other and out of each other. Also touching. There are sick horses and a Power Company on fire. Sad dads and gone moms. Also some rivers and games of tag and lightbulb vomit.

What I’ve been telling people is that it’s like if Dennis Cooper re-wrote The Virgin Suicides, and Dennis himself was all “Reading The Skin Team, you would never suspect how difficult it is to write even fairly about such things, much less with Jordaan Mason’s radiant emotional grace and super-deft detailing and flawless style.”

So far it’s been called “a psychedelic, haunting, genuinely queer experience of adolescence” (Xtra!and an “incendiary novel, impressive in both style and its poetic language” (Largehearted Boy) and that it’s “carried in sentences that together feel close to the same long slow gravity you might have felt exploring a strange relative’s house as a child” (our own Ryan Gosling at VICE). My favorite new lit blog Actuary Lit says “The Skin Team brims with flesh made electricity, of sick bodies warped by technology into health.” And Vol. 1 Brooklyn says that it reminds them of a guy the FBI thought was the Unabomber: “Like William T. Vollmann, Mason tears apart familiar relationships and conflicts to illuminate them in some newfound fashion.”

And you know it’s real, because some people have said negative things too! They think it has too many metaphors or the prose purples or it gets too confusing (“when every sentence strives for preciousness, they risk monotony” from the Heavy Feather Review), which could also be true, who knows! Let it not be said that our helicopter isn’t into dodging rockets. Evasive maneuvers are fun! Criticism is good. Hype is soda.

I tried to explain in a sincere and full disclosure way about why I love this book over at The Lit Pub in an interview with Jordaan. During his answers, he gives a great primer about the three characters, talks about bipolar disorder, destroying the logic of science through unnaming, and “trying to describe this complete separation of my body from everything around it and from itself. ”

The reason I’m telling you about The Skin Team now is because you can get it for free if you want to play a little game where you get a map in the mail and you draw on it. Otherwise, you can get it the normal way, which would also be awesome. If you feel like it’s weird we have bodies, especially when they’re in the woods and inside other bodies, and you want to read about bodies in a book that makes their weirdness feel like it kind of works (like how a singing saw sounds), I’m guessing you’ll like The Skin Team. Thanks!

Contests & Web Hype / 2 Comments
August 26th, 2013 / 12:03 pm

STARK WEEK CONTEST: Win a free book by talking about a crazy place you’ve lived

starkweek

TIME FOR YOU TO WIN STUFF

For our final two installments of Stark Week, we’re going to turn things over to you guys. Thanks for reading all this stuff about this book, which as I said a long time ago (last Monday) I really do feel is worth checking out and talking about in a big way. I hope you have felt the same and have enjoyed these posts! I asked Sam to do a video where he read a poem and came up with a contest idea. One of the least shy people I know, Sam felt paradoxically shy about making a video (maybe because he is an old ghost man), but I think he did a good, spookily red job.

Here’s how the contest works: check out Sam’s poem from the last book of The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather, which is about a crazy place he lived, and then talk about the craziest place you lived in the comments. Craziest place—as judged by Sam and maybe his girlfriend or his friends or his pizza delivery guy—will win a free copy of The First Four Books. If you don’t feel like watching Sam’s poem or watching him make fun of me in the beginning of the video (cuz, like, you have really busy Sundays in your life), just leave a comment! Win a book!

Deadline: 11:59 PM Wednesday July 24th

Contests / 14 Comments
July 21st, 2013 / 2:38 pm

Do You Want to Win Frank Stanford’s Beautiful Short Story Collection Because You Yourself Write Good Stories?

You can do that. You can also win a copy of The Minus Times Collected (I’ve got one, it’s amazing) signed by three of its authors: Hunter Kennedy, Sam Lipsyte, and Jeffrey Rotter.

What, what’s going on. What’s going on is: The Short Forma site that stylishly celebrates good-ass stories by excerpting them and asking guests to talk about their favorites—is giving away these books in its first ever short story contest. Three finalists will get featured on the site and all will win a copy of Stanford’s Conditions Uncertain and Likely to Pass Away, which is pretty much just as good as his poems except it’s stories, so—I was about to do that Gawker thing where they just end a sentence with “so” or “because” but then I wondered if Frank Stanford would do that and I decided he would probably beat me to death with all the empty Smartwater bottles littering my carpet if he showed up, like, in my living room, reincarnated, risen, made of carpet dust.

The point is one grand prize ultimate winner will also receive The Minus Times Collected, signed. I like The Short Form, they’re good in people ways, this contest seems fun, do it if you like contests. Deadline: March 31st. Details: this is the third time I’ve linked to the same link in this post which can’t be good for SEO. Also above us there is a picture because pictures!

Contests / Comments Off on Do You Want to Win Frank Stanford’s Beautiful Short Story Collection Because You Yourself Write Good Stories?
February 28th, 2013 / 5:28 pm

GIVEAWAY: I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying

Last weekend, I invited Matthew Salesses to show up and rock out at this reading series in DC. The room was poorly lit, and the readers had to stand on a rickety wooden stage. The venue made the whole thing feel like we were at some sort of half-assed comedy show, but Matt and the other readers (Laura van den Berg, Dan Gutstein, and Sarah Burnett) were utterly incredible—especially considering that there was this obnoxious improv group stomping on the floor above us because they thought they were at basketball practice, or something.

Anyway, there’s nothing all that funny about Matthew’s new Book, I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying. At its surface, Matthew’s book is about the predicted failures and slow learning curve of a nameless new father. But deeper down, it explores how our actions and desires are intrinsically linked to our identities and our understanding of ourselves. I’m personally a big fan of Matthew’s terse, controlled prose, which almost always looks this beautiful:

Who would have thought white people would eat sushi rolls with no sushi in it? Though I knew better than to call it sushi—it was kimbap—even if the menu said sushi. Being Korean was like that. The boy had probably lived unsushi sushi since his mother died. By which I mean, what do you call that? When the world isn’t ready to call something what it is?

I’m Not Saying is a short book with short chapters, but it’s worth reading slowly. I’m always inspired by how dutifully Matthew matches tone and subject matter in his writing, and there’s more than enough proof out there that I’m not the only one inspired by it.

But I’ll stop gushing and get to what’s important: Matthew has agreed to give away two signed copies of I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying. Quote the weirdest/funniest/strangest thing your father has ever said (and try to avoid being offensive) in the comments by Tuesday, March 5th and Matthew will pick two winners. Get’it’gurl.

 

Contests / 27 Comments
February 28th, 2013 / 11:46 am

Giveaway: MY PET SERIAL KILLER

MyPetMJSeidlinger

Michael Seidlinger is giving away 5 copies of MY PET SERIAL KILLER, which is out today. Comment to enter, check back in a week to see if you won, you know the drill:

If any serial killer could “be yours”, who would it be?

Contests / 36 Comments
January 21st, 2013 / 9:12 am

More Heroine Talk, Plus Book Giveaway!


I recently interviewed Kate Zambreno about her new book Heroines (Semiotext(e) Active Agents, Nov. 1st) for The Paris Review Daily; but before we got to the conversational style of that interview, we began our discourse differently: more theoretically, I guess you could say. After the jump you can read this earlier version of the interview. In addition, Kate has generously offered to give away one of her author copies of Heroines to one lucky person who answers the question at the end of the interview.

(And for those of you in Philly, Kate will be reading at Penn Feminism/s November 1, and then in New York sponsored by The New Inquiry at BookCourt November 2 and Segue series November 3, Meghan Lamb’s reading series with Suzanne Scanlon November 4, and many other readings you can find out about on her website katezambreno.com)

Ready, set, go…

READ MORE >

Author Spotlight & Contests / 39 Comments
October 24th, 2012 / 11:20 am