The five stories from “Yard,” “Salt,” and “Stay” struck me as especially sharp. “Yard” starts off:
I dreaded it when Russ, our yardman, pulled up in front of our house on Thursday mornings. His crew piled out of his truck and began taking lawn equipment from the back of his trailer. They were in the yard with all their machines roaring within a couple of minutes. But it wasn’t the noise from the machines that bothered me. It was the noise from Russ.
Gulf Coast magazine will donate all subscription proceeds after costs to the Gulf Restoration Network:
an organization committed to uniting and empowering people to protect and restore the natural resources of the Gulf Coast Region for future generations. Officially begun in 1995, the Network works to ensure that the Gulf of Mexico will continue to be a natural, economic, and recreational resource that is central to the culture and heritage of five states and several nations.
Use coupon code GLF and receive a free back issue of your choice in addition to your subscription.
The current issue includes the fiction debut of my former Tin House classmate Tracy Guzeman, poetry by UMass alum Heather Christle, and a conversation with Heather Christle, Hannah Gamble, Matthew Rohrer, Zachary Schomburg, and (UMass alum) Matthew Zapruder about surrealist- and absurdist-influenced poetry (and much more):
MZ: the stumbles and cracks in language—if they feel authentic and true in the poem—are a great part of what can draw me so much to reading and writing poems too, because, as you say, they are “unique to poetry.” I think this does have something to do with surrealism; I think the unfortunate or easy version of this is a smug nonsense speech that justifies itself by its very inaccessibility to a reader. Obviously that’s extremely fucked up.
Gulf Coast’s original name, back in the ’80s? Domestic Crude.
Here’s the remarkable end of [Barthelme’s] story “Porcupines at the University”: “The citizens in their cars looked at the porcupines, thinking: What is wonderful? Are porcupines wonderful? Are they significant? Are they what I need?”
Of the journals in this Independent piece on new UK literary magazines, I’d only heard of one, Pen Pusher, which has published two pieces by my friend Pia Chatterjee, who gets a mention in the Independent piece for having gone on to secure an agent (yay, Pia!).
Great-looking magazines, some free and/or downloadable, and lots of writers I haven’t seen in Stateside journals. Time to explore!
A good discussion on Annalemma magazine’s blog—spawned from a discussion about editor/writer/journal relationships on HTML Giant and continued on Big Other—about indie lit community and (lack of?) connection to readers who aren’t also writers.
‘Small’* magazines, online and in print, are having a blog-powered renaissance, turning out beautiful publications with smart writing, yet, Annalemma Editor Chris Heavener writes:
the writing that we produce and publish, the stuff that all this wall head beating is for, is being marketed by us, right back to us. We are the audience and we are the producers. It’s created a very clear niche…
[…]
The problem: We, as an indie lit community, aren’t connecting to readers. Independent film has had its boom, and was shortly followed by a boom in independent music. It’s time independent literature had a boom of its own.
If you’re not a fiction writer or poet (aspiring or otherwise), do you read ‘small’ magazines, online or in print? Do you find yourself dissatisfied with The New Yorker and maybe Esquire or Granta but wonder where to find alternatives? (The Faster Times guide to literary magazines is a good starting point).
Amelia Atlas reviews three newish Berlin novels:
It is easy, in Berlin, to find oneself in the grip of an uncommon inertia. The city’s topography, at once absorbing and alienating, makes for a distracting plaything. It’s hard to capture the physical strangeness of Berlin, but I’m confident that it’s the only cosmopolitan European capital where you can get lost in a sandpit for several blocks in the middle of the city on the way to a party. This bizarre openness—the feeling of expansive space in an urban environment—has the additional effect of distending time. There is none of the compressed bustle that keeps a city like New York moving forward.
Read the first chapter of Chloe Aridjis’s Book Of Clouds.
- Annie Dillard
An upside to Facebook: apparently you don’t need to “like” The Massachusetts Review (though why wouldn’t you?) to view Annie Dillard’s 1980 letter to the editor.
My (very short) story “State Trooper” is up at Matchbook.
Publication and news from UMass folks:
fiction
humor
language
lit/media crit
the writing life
music
photos
video
amherst
new york
new jersey
northampton
STORIES
Open City #28
Matchbook
wigleaf (2 forthcoming)
Writing Site
A Bright Wall
In A Dark Room
Being John Malkovich
Bell, Book and Candle
and The Lady Eve
The Bourne trilogy
A Month in the Country
Our Daily Bread
Rear Window
Sequels, Series,
Adaptations
and Reboots
Starship Troopers
Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf
Most-viewed posts
Anti-epiphanies
late Flannery
laughing at Downfall
fine restaurant, cookie jar
fav fiction of the 00s
the spine of the story
Renminbi vs Yuan
la Folia
reading Grace Paley
must-not see TV
Old favs
the Gawker decade
she chose a quiet street
another continent
fever to tell
deconstruction of the fable
the iceberg revisited
like fashion it's a passion
you look really good in skirts
use an emdash today
her corporate fridays
