12) We can’t care about sand mutants; if you do, or think you do, kill yourself.

(#12 of Frederick Barthelme’s 39 Steps via Gary Percesepe at PANK)

Mud Luscious to print first year anthology {MLP: FIRST YEAR} featuring shane jones, brandi wells, nick antosca, james chapman, colin bassett, michael kimball, jac jemc, kim chinquee, kim parko, norman lock, randall brown, brian evenson, michael stewart, peter markus, ken sparling, aaron burch, david ohle, matthew savoca, p. h. madore, johannes göransson, charles lennox, elizabeth ellen, molly gaudry, kevin wilson, mary hamilton, craig davis, kendra grant malone, lavie tidhar, lily hoang, mark baumer, ben tanzer, krammer abrahams, joshua cohen, eugene lim, c. l. bledsoe, joanna ruocco, josh maday, michael martone, and a handful of htmlgiant contributors.

Fictionaut is officially launched. Feels like the facebook of lit: everything hyper-linking to another thing, each page view, each comment, each user, each group. You can share it, pdf it, fav it. I don’t mean to sound critical — I mean, we at htmlgiant thrive off the inertia of our comments and the other viral aspects of the web — it’s just that, well, I think we’re getting a little widget crazy. Each wonderful story feels inundated with a viral capacity that distracts me from the story.  Sorry to be a drag, and much respect to all the users/contributors, I just feel weird.

“A dream question (Hebrew: ‘She’elat Halom’) is a practice of divination whereby a person attains a prophetic state while dreaming, receiving a divine answer to a question meditated on before sleep. The early medieval master Hai Gaon notes a method for attaining a dream question involving fasting, purification, and meditation on a text. Based on comments by Abraham ibn Ezra and others, scholar Moshe Idel has identified this text with Exodus 14:19-21, each verse of which contains 72 consonants alluding to a mystical series of Hebrew letters said to represent the true name of God. In their autobiographical writings from the early 17th century, both mystic Hayyim Vital and rabbi Leon of Modena claim matter-of-factly to have asked a dream question.”

Kim Chinquee will edit the upcoming issue of the Mississippi Review Online and will judge the Flash Fiction Contest at The Collagist.

Guernica is in the process of serializing a novella by Jesse Ball titled Pieter Emily, part 1 is live now. A sentence: “If I were to go first into a house of stone, and then into a house of wood, and then into a house of straw, and then into a bare roof set upon poles, and then to lie upon the empty ground beneath the sky with a blanket, and then even to cast the blanket aside and lie in the cold on the open ground, would you not think that I was making a grave for myself?”