A good flick once in a while can do you some good

There are a lot of ways in which college students spend their free time. Personally, I watch films. There’s nothing better than a good flick on a boring day. Last year, I probably rented out half the selection in the library and paid a ton of late fees (and accordingly got a Netflix account this year). I love films because they take me away for a couple hours, like a good novel. They inject fear, inspiration, laughter, knowledge and a whole bunch of other things into my day. And as a writer, they teach me a thing or two.

Before I jump into the benefits of watching good films, I really need to define what I mean by a film, or better yet, what I don’t mean. A film is not the summer box office hit you took your girl to. It’s not the action flick with explosions every two minutes and it’s not the drama with the played-out lines any half-conscious person can see coming a mile away. Don’t get me wrong, I dig those movies too––I’d watch Megan Fox in Transformers any day of the week––but that’s not what I’m talking about. Read more »

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner DT for getting a free copy of One Story Issue #137, “The Puppet” by Reif Larsen.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Attempts at a Life by Danielle Dutton. “An important new literary voice” crafting “expert, miniscule language slips that make us slide down the surface of her narratives like raindrops” (Rain Taxi), Danielle Dutton operates somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises, constantly pushing out towards something new. In “S&M,” a marriage suffers from the words you were always missing: sky, loft, music, dogs, pipes, puppets, war. In “Mary Carmichael,” a woman with a pair of scissors and the need to cut out her insatiable desire slices a veiled hat from a fern in a pot and a river out of a postbox. In stories that find movement wherever they turn, in every phrase and cadence, each sentence a small explosion of images and anthems and odd juxtapositions—”alluring puzzles where the pool is overflowing and emptying at the same time” (Robert Glück)—Danielle Dutton “writes with a deft explosiveness that craters the page with stunning, unsettling precision” (Laird Hunt). Attempts at a Life is “serious, but as many dramatists celebrate: comedy orbits a dark sun. Which is to say, this is also a very funny book” (Selah Saterstrom, American Book Review).

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tarpaulin Sky Press. Read more »

Jealousy scares me.  It scares me in relationships, and it certainly scares me when it’s connected to my career.  It’s a sneaky emotion; silently climbing into my chest and then sticking it’s claws in when I least expect it.  I’ll be walking along, enjoying my goodness and my dedicated moral compass, when all of sudden I’ll read about someone else’s success and feel my knees buckle under the weight of envy.

I was born with a nice, thick jealous streak.  But you know what?  Jealousy can be undone. It can’t be un-felt, but it can be lessened.  Because after all, isn’t jealousy just a quick way of saying insecure?

As artists, we’re freely entering into a world full of people who can do it better.  They can schmooze better, they can land deals better, they can just plain write better and will most assuredly become successful before us.  Now that we know the slight craptasticness of this world, let’s allow a thought to seep into our brains: just because someone else achieves their dream, doesn’t mean there isn’t room for us. Read more »

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Kaylah for getting a free copy of Steampunk, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

This week, we are giving away issue #137 of One Story, “The Puppet” by Reif Larsen. Check out an excerpt:

When Valise first checked in to the Holiday Inn, the lovely receptionist in the oversized sweater gave him the key to his room and said very kindly, “Please, M. Retour, if you will avoid windows at all times. Or else sniper will shoot you dead and…” She sighed and parted her hands to indicate the predicament they were all in. Valise stared, struck by the restrained elegance of this gesture, the hovering kiss of palms into a weary bloom of fingertips. The air in the lobby was damp and sour; he could smell the faint paw-back stink of cordite entwining with the scent of the single, despondent lily in the vase on her desk. Suddenly, he was overcome with the electric, almost toxic, sensation that he had already experienced this precise pairing of pantomimed resignation with the lingering scents of damage and inflorescence. He had never been to Sarajevo before, of course, nor had he ever met this woman, but the sense of déjà-vu was so violent and true that Valise shivered, and without thinking, tapped the call bell in front of him.

Ding!

“Yes?” the woman said, blinking. This, too had happened before.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by One Story. Read more »

Fall of the House of Usher, feat. Lil John, Kafka on the Jersey Shore, and other deliciously awful literary mashups.

A wonderful essay over at The Millions on where we write and on making do with what you’ve got.

Introducing the Facebook novel.

Here’s John Waters’ secret to reading a lot.

What reading challenging books does to your brain. (All good things, I promise.)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s eponymous Quasimodo may have actually been based on a real person.

Would you be seen in public reading science fiction? This lady wouldn’t mind, but then again, I think she’d prefer to read it in private. If you know what I mean. Har.

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Rachel for getting free copies of The Dog Said Bow-Wow and Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures by Michael Swanwick.

This week, we are giving away Steampunk, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Steampunk is Victorian elegance and modern technology: steam-driven robots, souped-up stagecoaches, and space-faring dirigibles fueled by gaslight romance, mad scientists, and oh-so-trim waistcoats. It’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Wizard of Oz, and The Golden Compass. Replete with whimsical mechanical wonders and bold adventurers, this riveting anthology lovingly collects classic steampunk stories, pop-culture fueled discussions of steampunk, and essential recommended reading lists for the discerning steampunk fan.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tachyon Publications. Read more »

Mandelstam's arrest photo

Russia is on fire. The unprecedented heat wave in much of the Northern Hemisphere means that temperatures in and around Moscow this summer have reached record highs. On top of that, much of the Russian lands are covered in peat (due to natural vegetation but also bad Soviet agricultural practices) which is now lighting on fire along with the dried-out trees.

Voronezh, a city several hundred miles south of Moscow known for its fertile black earth, is now partially charred (see a photograph here).

I can’t help but think about the concept of poetic justice right now. Here’s why:

Voronezh is the city to which Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was exiled to from 1935-1937 after his poem, the “Stalin Epigram,” got him into trouble with the Soviet authorities. At first he was crushed (he had even tried committing suicide), but later managed to write some of his most brilliant poems, collected in the “Voronezh Notebooks.” In 1938, he died on the way to a Soviet GULAG (prison or labor camp).

Mandelstam tried to write honestly under a totalitarian regime and was repressed. He almost lost faith in the power and role of poetry (his ironic prophecy before his death: “Only in Russia is poetry respected — it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”). But he still managed to write poems that are now celebrated and translated for their bitterness and their eventual idealism.

Here is one of his Voronezh poems, written in 1935 (translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin):

You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.

(Another great one is called “Black Earth” but I can’t find it online).

Voronezh is the place of exile for one of the 20th Century’s greatest poets, where he managed to write despite deprivation.

The Soviet government irresponsibly drained these lands in the 1960s for agriculture and mining.

Now they’re burning.

I’m certainly not insensitive to the tragedies of the raging wildfires (much of my family lives in Moscow), but I just had to point this out. It’s too weird when life and poetry meet.

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner ARP for getting free copies of Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, and The Secret History of Science Fiction, edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel.

This week, we are giving away The Dog Said Bow-Wow and Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures by Michael Swanwick.

In The Dog Said Bow-Wow, great literature has never been this much fun before. The reigning master of short fiction reinvents science fiction and fantasy in a dazzling new collection unlike anything you’ve ever read. Time-traveling dinosaurs wreak havoc on a placid Vermont town. An ogre is murdered in a locked room in Faerie. An uncanny bordello proves as dangerous as it is alluring. Language is stolen from the builders of Babel. Those strangely loveable Post-Utopian scoundrels and con men, Darger and Surplus, swindle their way through London, Paris, and Arcadia. The Dog Said Bow-Wow includes three Hugo Award-winning stories and an original novelette of swashbuckling romance and adventure, “The Skysailor’s Tale.” Ranging from the hardest of science fiction to the highest of fantasy, this irresistible collection amuses and enlightens as only Michael Swanwick can.

Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures is a work of masterfully-sustained whimsy for adults unlike anything you’ve ever read. Cigar-Box Faust contains over seventy stories in fewer than a hundred pages. Often humorous, sometimes chilling, always entertaining, these are the works that have resurrected a moribund literary form and made it live and breathe again. The title piece is a five-minute condensation of a classic of Western literature, featuring a cigar-cutter as Mephistopheles, a box of matches in the roles of Helen of Troy, an Angel of the Lord, the Light of Ontology, and a cigar as Faust himself. Though it has previously been performed live by the author, this is its first appearance in print. There is also an abecedary showcasing Swanwick’s bravura imagination with a separate story for every letter of the alphabet, another set of tales for every planet in the Solar system, and a series of pieces that the author literally wrote in his sleep! To say nothing of a clutch of alternate autobiographies, a novella of decadence and corporate politics in a future Venice that has been boiled down to 416 words, Picasso and Philip K. Dick as existential heroes … and a rhyme for “orange.”

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tachyon Publications. Read more »

A young city bandit

I don’t know if this is a universal experience, but back when I was in the early years of high school I remember having to dismantle various fragments of literature and scrounge in their remnants for “literary elements.” This term was a loose euphemism for things like metaphors, similes, etc. – basically any concept that could be easily defined and tested on the state Regent exam. As ‘teach explained it, if the selected passage we were given employed enough of these syntactical devices, it must be considered advanced literature. I mean, come on, just look at that enjambment!

I don’t know though. I mean, what if you brought this exercise to bear on something other than fragments of Macbeth? How about, oh, Nas’s seminal rap album Illmatic (1994). Would it past the test? Is it “literature”?

Let’s see.

Read more »

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Mary Ann for getting free copies of The Word of God and The Wall of America by Thomas M. Disch.

This week, we are giving away THREE books (holy crap!) thanks to the good folks over at Tachyon Publications. They are: Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, and The Secret History of Science Fiction, all edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel.

In Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, sixteen extreme stories reveal a government ninja routed by a bicycle repairman, the inventor of digitized paper hijacked by his college crush, a dead boy trapped in a warped storybook paradise, and the Queen of England attacked with the deadliest of forbidden technology: a working modem. You’ll meet Manfred Macx, renegade meme-broker, Red Sonja, virtual reality sex-goddess, and Felix, humble sysadmin and post-apocalyptic hero. Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel have united cyberpunk visionaries William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Pat Cadigan with the new post-cyberpunk vanguard including Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, and Jonathan Lethem. Including a canon-establishing introduction and excerpts from a hotly-contested online debate, Rewired is the first anthology to define and capture the crackling excitement of the post-cyberpunks.

If it is true that the test of a first-rate mind is its ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time, then we live in a century when it takes a first-rate mind just to get through the day. We have unprecedented access to information; cognitive dissonance is a banner headline in our morning papers and radiates silently from our computer screens. Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, poised between literature and popular culture, embraces the dissonance. These ambitious stories of visionary strangeness defy the conventions of science fiction. Tales by Michael Chabon, Karen Joy Fowler, Jonathan Lethem, Carol Emshwiller, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, George Saunders, and others pull the reader into a vivid dreamspace and embrace the knowledge that life today is increasingly surreal.

Exploring an alternate history of science fiction, The Secret History of Science Fiction showcases eighteen brilliant authors leading the way to a new literature of the future. These award-winning stories defy trends, cross genres, and prove great fiction cannot be categorized. Two strangely-detached astronauts orbit Earth while a third world war rages on. A primatologist’s lover suspects her of obsession with one of her simian charges. The horrors of trench warfare dovetail with the theoretical workings of black holes. A dissolving marriage and bitter custody dispute are overshadowed by the arrival of time travelers. An astonishing invention that records the sense of touch is far too dangerous for Thomas Edison to reveal. The Secret History of Science Fiction includes stories by Margaret Atwood, T. C. Boyle, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem, and George Saunders. Read more »