Mike Young—
Have you ever had a dream with characters from a book you read? Do you want to talk about this dream and win a free copy of Dennis Cooper’s Smothered In Hugs for doing so? Go here. Making dreams up is > okay.
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Obituary Prize
We’re posting obituaries throughout Mean Week and wanted to invite you to email us your own or post in comments. Kill us, kill your favorite press, kill an author you hate, do whatever. We’ll post some of the ones we like, sure sure, and whoever writes our favorite will receive a few books for the trouble: Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball, The Pharmacist’s Mate by Amy Fusselman, and Ghost Machine by Ben Mirov. Deadline, Thursday at 11:59 PM CST.
For Your Reading Pleasure…
Way back in the spring, we had a little contest so someone could win 100 books from Dalkey Archive. There was a winner (Kristi McGuire) and finalists. Their words are now available for your reading pleasure on a kick ass site designed by our very own Gene Morgan. We hope you enjoy the work of the winner and finalists as much as we did.
GIANT’s Backwards Birthday Party!!!!!!!!!
We’re giving away some free stuff to you, our birthday party guests. We already ate the cake, so we can’t give that back (well, we could…), but we do have books & other stuffs. How this works:
We’re going to award a few random winners, and split up the stuff randomly. To throw your name in the hat, email us at our house (htmlgiant@htmlgiant.com) by October 10th!
If you’d like to add stuff to the prize pool, list it in the comments and we’ll add it below. THE GIFTS:
- 1/2 rotation in one of the top book cover ad spots for the month of November
- 1 copy of From Old Notebooks, by Evan Lavender-Smith
- 1 SIGNED copy of the new Light Boxes, by Shane Jones
- 1 copy of Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever, by Justin Taylor
- 1 copy of AM/PM, by Amelia Gray
- 1 copy of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, by Christopher Higgs
- 1 audiobook version of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney
- some random back issues of The Believer
- a couple of new books from HarperPerennial
- 1 copy of The Evolutionary Revolution, by Lily Hoang
- 1 copy of Changing, by Lily Hoang
- a random assortment of random books from Lily Hoang’s bookshelf
- 1 copy of In the Devil’s Territory, by Kyle Minor
- 5 collector’s itemish backissues of Frostproof Review #2 (includes Kevin Wilson’s story “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth,” novellas by Christopher Coake and Jennifer Spiegel, excerpt from Mark Svenvold’s book-length poem Empire Burlesque, a Molly Peacock sonnet, and reading lists from Stephen Elliott, Jim Shepard, Lee K. Abbott, Steve Almond, Aimee Bender, a water witcher, a Methodist minister, etc., etc., etc.)
- READ MORE >
To get free books you have to read the whole thing, sorry
Bump bump go the books on the top of the site. This site, I mean. When you roll your mouse over one of these books, they leap. When your mouse departs, they crunch back into the title banner like some old Atari obstacle. O obnoxious HTMLGIANT, where the hustle never sleeps. A recent commenter said, in fact, that she actually refrains from buying stuff recommended here because of all the “nepotism and over-hype.”
I mean, that’s fair. We’re probably not friends, dear reader. Statistically, you probably don’t know who I am, and I probably don’t know who you are.
READ MORE >
Mike Young’s All Good for Free
Dennis Cooper said (our own) Mike Young’s collection of poetry, We Are All Good if They Try Hard Enough, is an absolute stunner, and that even though they’re just great poems, he “can’t think of a paragraph anywhere that can match them for style or cover their emotional distance.”
One element of the emotionality of Mike’s poems, which is evident from the funny but sincere video I’ve posted below the fold, is his interest in the way humans communicate and miscommunicate. The book’s epigraph is from Martin Buber, after all, and says, “When they sang of what they had thus named, they still meant You.”
I’ll be giving away three copies of Mike’s book. To win one, leave a comment below describing a miscommunication that was funny or ended up with a positive outcome, or just anything about a miscommunication. Mike and I will select three winners based on a complicated set of guidelines this Friday, so please make sure to leave a way I can get in touch with you.
WORD RIOT HAVIN’ A CONTEST
contest!
Yo! Word Riot, publisher of me (oh and some other folks, like Mike Young and Paula Bomer and Kevin Sampsell), is having a contest. THREE contests. Poetry, flash fiction and short story. The winner of each will receive half the contest money (from their respective individual contest, I assume) and be published in the WR 10th anniversary anthology. They’ve also opened up submissions for the WR 10th anniversary anthology from authors previously published on the site. More info here: http://www.wordriot.org/archives/2019. I just got a galley of Paula Bomer’s book Baby this week and I’m gonna read it ASAP, like as soon as I finished this amazing Aldous Huxley book The Devils of Loudun that I got from the library. (Read this shit, it’s so good!)
Phone is ringing, oh my gawd, it’s a giveaway
Telephone is a new journal. Here’s their introduction:
The first issue features poems by Uljana Wolf which are translated by Mary Jo Bang, Christian Hawkey, Susan Bernofsky and more (a damn impressive list; that “more” doesn’t mean “friends of the publisher”). They all translate the same poems, so you can contrast and compare (samples here).
Paul Legault and the editorial crew of Telephone are offering 5 copies of this first issue to htmlgiant readers with a contest. Here’s the game, according to Paul:
I think it would be a good idea to get people to mis/un/dis-translate Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone message:
“Watson, come here! I want to see you!”
And give 5 books to the best five, as judged by the editors.
I take that to mean: translate Bell’s first message any way you want. Do it in Spanish or Klingon or English or whatever. Translation is hip, as Lord Buckley showed Groucho Marx. **UPDATE: Entries must be posted by 12pm Eastern on Friday the 17th.**
And set your cell to vibrate this Friday at their release party:
Time: September 17 · 7:30pm
Place: 177 Livingston, Brooklyn, NY
Freaking NYC man. This looks like a great reading.
Win Kate Zambreno’s O Fallen Angel
The wonderful Kate Zambreno has offered to give three copies of her book O Fallen Angel to HTMLGIANT readers. In our recent interview with her Kate said:
“I had these three characters haunting me—Maggie is in many ways a grotesque carciature of another character I had written before, Ruth in an unpublished novel Green Girl, a sort of postfeminist libertine who’s also quite passive and tragic, sort of like if a Jean Rhys heroine was alive now or Clarice Lispector’s Macabea.”
As such, we’d like to hear about your inspirations, or stealings. Comment with a brief confession of something you’ve manipulated or stolen, language-wise or other. Kate will pick three winners sometime late Wednesday.
[Also, this week a new limited edition and only briefly available piece from Kate has been published by Legacy Pictures: I AM SHARON TATE.]
Richard Yates Contest
Tao Lin’s Richard Yates contest, encouraging entries of video or chats about his forthcoming novel, ends tomorrow. Alongside this, Tao has offered to give away copies of Richard Yates to the first 5 people who comment here with 200+ words about one of the people appearing in one of the video entries so far (below). Comment with your email included so prizes can be received. Also, entries to Tao’s contest, with cash prizes and such, remains open until 10 PM Eastern Tuesday.
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3