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 »
Let’s be real, here: grief sucks. It sucks so, so bad. On the list of Emotions That Are Hard To Deal With, grief is at the top, florescent and harsh and without a hint of remorse.
When you’re drowning in grief, it’s like the world stops, the air goes out, and all you can see and hear is the echoing of your own pain. Running from it is impossible, and it clings to you for much, much longer than it should. It grabs your neck and punches your heart and laughs while you shrink down onto the floor or collapse onto the bed; grief doesn’t give a shit.
Which is why it’s so hard to write when you’re not directly feeling it. Read more »
There is a place where great screenplays go to die. Dialogue that had been analyzed for days – three or four words that had been written and rewritten to get the feeling just right – can meet its gruesome death on the lips of an unprepared actor that wasn’t right for the role to begin with. That beautiful moment between the protagonist and his mother (a pivotal point in their relationship where they realize they can get along after all) dies in the arms of a gaffer who is also the assistant director and script supervisor and doesn’t know how to light a scene for shit. An emotional monologue meant to soften our views of a villain isn’t even given the chance to live because it seems the audio file was deleted when the stressed director/editor realizes he is out of memory and formats a hard drive prematurely.
While I’ve seen many screenplays that were terrible on their own before it hit the set of a student film, I find that even some of the best scripts I’ve read can suffer under the often stressful and hectic conditions of a student shoot.
So, when a student film comes out that was not only able to preserve the integrity of the original screenplay but goes so above and beyond that it should really no longer be labeled a student film, a nice round of applause isn’t really enough.
Adriano Valentini graduated from NYU’s undergraduate film program in 2008 – the same year he produced his short film, Clubscene, about a turning point in the life of twenty-something Montreal bartender, Gabe. I had the pleasure of reading the script before it went into production and held my breath in hopes that the shoot would do the script justice. Adriano turned out to be as good at directing as he is at writing and the movie went on to receive the Wasserman/King Finalist Award and NYU’s First Run Screenwriting Award the following year, allowing Adriano to present his film at the DGA Theater in Hollywood. He chose not to abandon the project upon graduation like many film students do and continued to work with the characters of Clubscene, releasing even shorter short films focusing on one character at a time – specifically “The Bartender” and “The Underager.” His hard work was rewarded with The Bartender becoming an official selection at the Brooklyn International Film Festival this year and becoming a finalist for The Chris Columbus/Richard Vague Fund to pursue directing a feature.
Perhaps it’s envy or perhaps it’s awe, but something was needling me and prompted me to find out what goes on in that brain of his. What set Adriano apart from the other students (myself included)? Below, we talk a little about inspiration, the writing process, cultural influences, and how the characters make the story: Read more »
Ships that pass is a Tumblr of “fake, imagined, and literary missed connections posted to Craigslist and then re-posted here with real and actual responses to fake, imagined, and literary missed connections.”
An interesting note on who reads bestsellers from The Rumpus:
“A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.”
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 MRG for getting a free copy of The Cat’s Pajamas and Other Storiesby James Morrow.
The Word of God is the only tome ever written by God Himself! In this compelling memoir, the first and hopefully the last of its kind, America’s most divine author reveals the intimate and shocking details of His sudden elevation to the most coveted and least understood position in the universe. In early 2005 (A.D.), wearying of the world’s religious schisms, doctrinal heresies, and manifold editorial sins, Thomas M. Disch took matters into His Own hands and became the Deity. As controversial as it is incontrovertible, the moving true story of His awful transformation and its awesome aftermath reveals, at long last, the hidden web that links Disch, Philip K. Dick, Western wear, the Leamington Hotel, and Eternity itself. Read it in fear and trembling. But read it, or else.
Following the breakout novel, The Word of God, the surreal, satiric stories in The Wall of America pay a mesmerizing visit to the shadowy zone that lies between everyday life as we now know it and a perilous near future that is frighteningly tangible. In “The Wall of America,” the Department of Homeland Security has put up a border wall between the U.S. and Canada. But the NEA has plans for the wall as well, turning it into the world’s largest art gallery. After the Rapture, working-class life for “A Family of the Post-Apocalypse” is not as different as one might imagine, despite the occasional plague of biker-gang locusts, Between addiction and art is “Ringtime,” where a criminal is trapped in a recursive compulsion to visit other people’s memories while he is forced to record his own for an eager audience. A Somali schoolgirl living in post-WWIII Minneapolis goes on a bloody crusade to rid her town of a familiar predator, one who might just be a monster, in “White Man.” Vivid, starkly imagined, and strikingly articulate, this disquieting collection is a journey that skillfully straddles the line between playful absurdity and pointed irony.
Every time his Photoshop crashes, filmmaker/developer Garrett Murray emails an original (and bitter) piece of flash fiction to the company instead of a crash report, spawning a genre which Mediabistro has dubbed “crash report fiction.”
The Great Gatsby: classic novel and video game. I’m embarrassed to say I’m geeking out about this:
Join Nick Carraway as you explore the mansions and bungalows of Long Island, the parlors of New York City, and the heart and soul of the Roaring Twenties. Attend extravagant parties and lush gatherings as you dance the Charleston with a happy couple harboring scintillating secrets. Sip bootleg gin with a mysterious millionaire desperate to bring the passions of the past into the present in Great Gatsby, a fun Hidden Object game.
Aaaand to get you through the rest of the week, here is the Old Spice Guy (or someone who looks a lot like him, anyway) promoting libraries: Read more »
I just taught creative writing for a summer session to a group of very bright and talented 11th and 12th graders. It was a very intensive program, a five-day-a-week gig for three weeks, in which the students studied and wrote poetry, short fiction, dramatic scenes, and long prose (both fiction and nonfiction).
It was very rewarding but also absolutely exhausting.
I got to teach the students a variety of forms, which reminded me that I need not pigeonhole myself only as a nonfiction writer (I started a short story yesterday!). I also got young writers excited by new genres and authors (they loved the idea of prose poetry!). That was totally gratifying.
I would love to teach creative writing at the high school or university level as a career in the future. However, this teaching position took up all my time even though I was only teaching for about an hour a day. My personal projects got pushed to the backburner. I was tired after leading class and trying to remain energetic all the time and then prepping for the next session each afternoon.
This got me thinking about the future again. Since I’m going to need a day job after I finish graduate school (no $200,000 book deals in my future), why not teach creative writing and do journalism to keep my mind involved in writing-related tasks and exercise my writing muscle? 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 winners Scott and Terri for getting a free copies of Walking Manby Tim W. Brown.
This week, we are giving away a copy of the book The Cat’s Pajamas and Other Stories by James Morrow. An integrity gene is harvested from the brain of an unwilling schoolteacher. Christopher Columbus lands in modern day Manhattan. John Wayne seeks treatment from a cinematic oncologist. Sports fans save the universe every day. The Cat’s Pajamas is a provocative collection of satiric short fiction from Nebula and World Fantasy award winning author James Morrow. Included is Auspicious Eggs, in which ritual procreation and compulsory abortion are mandated by the Catholic Church. Two original pieces were written specifically for The Cat’s Pajamas: the play, Come Back, Dr. Sarcophagus, and the short story, Fucking Justice.
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 winners Claudia and Ben for getting a free copies of The Ballad of the Two Tom Moresby Corey Mesler.
This week, we are giving away TWO copies of the book Walking Man by Tim W. Brown. From the same metafictional universe as the films Best in Show and This is Spinal Tap, Walking Man documents the life and times of Brian Walker, publisher of the zine Walking Man. Through a fateful encounter between his foot and a yuppie’s BMW, Brian becomes the most famous zine publisher in America and an ardent defender of pedestrian rights. Meanwhile, he must juggle the ambitions of his sexy actress girlfriend with his own soaring celebrity. Written in the tradition of the scandalous tell-all biography, Walking Man satirizes so-called “alternative” culture while it fondly recollects the 80s and 90s zine scene.
Let’s be real, here: grief sucks. It sucks so, so bad. On the list of Emotions That Are Hard To Deal With, grief is at the top, florescent and harsh and without a hint of remorse.
There is a place where great screenplays go to die. Dialogue that had been analyzed for days – three or four words that had been written and rewritten to get the feeling just right – can meet its gruesome death on the lips of an unprepared actor that wasn’t right for the role to begin with. That beautiful moment between the protagonist and his mother (a pivotal point in their relationship where they realize they can get along after all) dies in the arms of a gaffer who is also the assistant director and script supervisor and doesn’t know how to light a scene for shit. An emotional monologue meant to soften our views of a villain isn’t even given the chance to live because it seems the audio file was deleted when the stressed director/editor realizes he is out of memory and formats a hard drive prematurely.
I just taught creative writing for a summer session to a group of very bright and talented 11th and 12th graders. It was a very intensive program, a five-day-a-week gig for three weeks, in which the students studied and wrote poetry, short fiction, dramatic scenes, and long prose (both fiction and nonfiction).
