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 Hansenl1 for getting a free copy of Prayer and Parable: Stories by Paul Maliszewski.
This week, we are giving away Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Enter the Scintillating Clockpunk Gear-o-Torium: Herein dwell the breathless adventures that you secretly seek. Gaze upon the rebellious Mecha-Ostrich, the seductive Steam Dancer, the intrepid Mssrs. Balfour & Meriwether, and the hithertofore undefeated Cast-Iron Kid. Experience the Delights of the Chrononaut Odditorium: An esteemed panel of self-appointed experts, under pain of ridicule, will reveal Top Secret Historical Enticements. Be dazzled by the first English translation of the quintessential Steampunk story: “Flying Fish Prometheus” by Vilhelm Bergsoe. It’s Steampunk – and it’s Reloaded.
When you meet someone, before anything comes out of their mouth, appearance is what you judge them by. It’s the reason why Mom nags you to tuck in your shirt, to shave, to floss, to brush your teeth and attempt to smell nice –– it makes a difference. In fiction, appearance isn’t nearly as dire as in real life because often times you can introduce a character without having to describe him or her. You can just have them talk. But, there is always room to add some color to that person.
When used right, appearance is a subtle of way of revealing character in fiction. Everything someone wears presents some aspect of his or her inner selves. Body types, clothing and jewelry all lend hints to a character’s values and when molded correctly, allow readers to better understand a character, to see him or her clearly in their minds.
When constructing a character, you should consider how you want them to dress, what they would look like if you saw them walking down the street. Say your protagonist is a man. Does he wear a suit or jeans? If jeans, are they baggy or skintight? Are the rips in the jeans stylish or do they scream he needs a new pair. Are his eyes narrow or wide? Too big or too small? Scars? Tattoos? Piercings? 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 Andy Harrod for getting a free copy of When Fenelon Falls by Dorothy Ellen Palmer.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Prayer and Parable: Stories by Paul Maliszewski. At a campground, a divorced father confronts a man he believes hurt his daughter. A devoted student traces a winding path through the snow, searching for the next most beautiful thing. Two brothers watch their father tinker lovingly with his homemade robots. In Paul Maliszewski’s debut story collection, men and women struggle to do right. They argue. They think. They think again. They have odd dreams. Often they fail at being good, and yet, on occasion, they realize moments of true kindness. In language that is at once simple and supple, plain-spoken and arresting, these twenty-eight stories describe complete lives in sharp detail, lives we may recognize as not unlike our own.
This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Fence Books.
Last month I was invited to participate in Piethos, a competitive and totally sweet (literally) reading hosted by Brooklyn’s own Slice Magazine. The terms of the game:
Five representatives of various New York City area literary establishments (blogs, publications, online mags, bookstores) are given a writing prompt 48 hours before the event and have to write something to be read out loud and please a crowd. After anonymous audience votes are cast (and the host C.A.B. Fredricks admits that it’s only somewhat of a popularity contest for whoever can bring the most of their friends to the reading), the winner gets a freshly-baked pie made by Brooklyn’s own (I’ll stop saying that soon) Fat and Flour.
The prompt I received via email a day and a half before the event:
“Write a story based around a movie you have never seen.”
Mind you, anyone who knows me knows that I hate movies. Not only that but I am a nonfiction writer (mostly) and haven’t taken a real stab at short fiction since…probably…high school (that was almost a decade ago). But it turned out to be a wonderful literary challenge and I was actually pleased with the outcome.
While Lauren Spohrer very much deservedly so got the pie (she’s a repeat winner and wrote on a prompt about an older building falling in love with a younger building), I still took this business very seriously and had way more fun doing it than I could have anticipate. (Her piece was totally brilliant; it mixed architectural jargon with highfalutin romance in a way that was more sexually euphemistic than anything I’ve ever heard.)
The piece I wrote (in one sitting of about three hours!) weaves a story about a middle-aged Italian man living in Bay Ridge Brooklyn with the plots of a handful of movies I’ve never seen (or what I guess the plots of those films to be!). Whoever guesses the films included below wins an e-cookie. Enjoy!
A not-so-recent episode of South Park contained a reference to Shirley Jackson’s amazing short story “The Lottery.” I spent the rest of that night scouring for other references; some new to me and some rekindled childhood memories. That initial discovery ultimately led me to create a category at my blog which would focus on literary references in cartoons. Why is this blog-worthy? I generally waste my internet hours refreshing my perpetually empty email inbox and crafting Facebook statuses to appear off-the-cuff and witty. I was suddenly struck by the inherent, and intended, contradiction: the idea of books—the icon of intelligence—existing within cartoons—the long-accepted symbol of stupidity—appealed to my sense of irony. Even more, if these mediums are so far removed, what gives cartoon makers the balls to assume an overlap in audience enough to appreciate the references? Something special had been happening in cartoons, and I was too busy laughing at the fart jokes to see it.
The Simpsons has a long history of literary allusions, and to a lesser degree, Family Guy and the aforementioned South Park. Why? Surely this meshing of worlds serves more than to tickle the cartoon creators’ personal farty bones (ha, fart joke). Do cartoons feel the need to legitimize themselves for a public that has for so long, and continues to, hold books to such high esteem?
Perhaps the book-nods reveal the cartoon creators’ own narrative acumen. Novels represent pure narrative, in that they are not supported in any way by outside effects, i.e, CGI, audio, and actor baggage (though it would be hard to argue that James Frey’s fame didn’t help the sales of his post-Oprah novel, Bright Shiny Morning). Interest in novels, enough to incorporate allusions into a cartoon, implies a lot about a creator’s passion for story. “Yes, that’s a fart joke,” might say a Matt Groening or a Seth McFarlane, “but it’s a fart joke with sophistication.” There’s a reason the aforementioned big three cartoons have lasted so long: intelligent humor. A viewer can only be impressed with bright colors and funny voices for so long before he needs substance. Books are the signposts, marking such substance.
What is even more interesting than the simple presence of these allusions is their often modesty and brevity. Rarely is the audience confronted directly with a source and rarely is the reference extended beyond a few frames for a sight gag (the exceptions to both rules would include The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror episodes and South Park’s Charles Dickens retelling. The cartoons aren’t trying to convert anyone. They are tapping into an audience that I think most people don’t realize exists: the literate cartoon viewer.
But to be truly legitimized, allusions need to go both ways. Are there examples of novels or short stories that contain cartoon references? Tell us in the comments.
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This is a gust post by Caleb J. Ross as part of his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. His goal is to post at a different blog every few days beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin in November 2011. If you have connections to a lit blog of any type, professional journal or personal site, please contact him. He would love to compromise your integrity for a day. To be a groupie and follow this tour, subscribe to the Caleb J. Ross blog RSS feed. Follow him on Twitter: @calebjross.com. Friend him on Facebook: Facebook.com/rosscaleb
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 Rubydog for getting a free copy of Monocerous by Suzette Mayr.
This week, we are giving away a copy of When Fenelon Falls by Dorothy Ellen Palmer. A spaceship hurtles towards the moon, hippies gather at Woodstock, Charles Manson leads a cult into murder and a Kennedy drives off a Chappaquiddick dock: it’s the summer of 1969. And as mankind takes its giant leap, Jordan May March, disabled bastard and genius, age fourteen, limps and schemes her way towards adulthood. Trapped at the March family’s cottage, she spends her days memorizing Top 40 lists, avoiding her adoptive cousins, catching frogs and plotting to save Yogi, the bullied, butter tart-eating bear caged at the top of March Road. In her diary, reworking the scant facts of her adoption, Jordan visions and revisions a hundred different scenarios for her conception on that night in 1954 when Hurricane Hazel tore Toronto to shreds, imagining her conception at the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital or the CNE horse palace, and such parents as JFK, Louisa May Alcott, Perry Mason and the Queen of England. But when bear-baiting cousin Derwood finds the diary and learns everything that the family will not face, the target of his torture shifts from Yogi the Bear to his disabled and haunted adopted cousin. As caged as Yogi, Jordan is drawn to desperate measures. With its soundtrack of sixties pop songs, swamp creatures, motor boats and the rapid-fire punning of the family’s Marchspeak, When Fenelon Falls will take you to a time and place that was never as idyllic as it seemed, where not belonging turns the Summer of Love into a summer of loss.
Deckfight Press is at it again. Out now: Everything That Dunks Must Converge by Bryan Harvey, a (free!) literary e-chapbook of complex NBA fan fiction. Stories about Blake Griffin as Houdini, Rajon Rondo as an astronaut, Hakeem as a butcher and more features on Isiah Thomas, Amare Stoudemire, Dwight Howard, Danny Granger, Bill Walton & Kareem.
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 Jessica M. for getting a free copy of The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn by Sean Dixon.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Monocerous by Suzette Mayr. A seventeen-year-old boy, bullied and heartbroken, hangs himself. And although he felt terribly alone, his suicide changes everyone around him. His parents are devastated. His secret boyfriend’s girlfriend is relieved. His unicorn- and virginity-obsessed classmate, Faraday, is shattered; she wishes she had made friends with him that time she sold him an Iced Cappuccino at Tim Hortons. His English teacher, mid-divorce and mid-menopause, wishes she could remember the dead student’s name, that she could care more about her students than her ex’s new girlfriend. Who happens to be her cousin. The school guidance counsellor, Walter, feels guilty – maybe he should have made an effort when the kid asked for help. Max, the principal, is worried about how it will reflect on the very Catholic school. And Walter, who’s been secretly in a relationship with Max for years, thinks that’s a little callous. He’s also tired of Max’s obsession with some sci-fi show on tv. And Max wishes Walter would lose some weight and remember to use a coaster. And then Max meets a drag queen named Crêpe Suzette. And everything changes. Monoceros is a masterpiece of the tragicomic; by exploring the effects of a suicide on characters outside the immediate circle, Mayr offers a dazzlingly original look at the ripple effects – both poignant and funny – of a tragedy. A tender, bold work.
While reading Karen Russell’s stellar hit, Swamplandia!, I did a double take.
I know the book is intended to be a novel and it certainly reads like one. It has a story: a beginning, a middle, an end; a protagonist, a climax, etc. Despite these facts, Swamplandia! reads, to me, like one big, epic poem.
Nowadays we rarely see long poems in the poetry world. What happened to those epics, like the Iliad, which frame western literary history as we know it? I think perhaps they’ve dissolved into a certain kind of novel —one that reads like poetry and presents as a novel. One of the reasons for this “re-formatting” may be the publishing industry’s preference for novels over shorter forms of writing, and all of poetry, in general. Writers know it’s certainly more lucrative to write 300 pages then to write 100, and to produce full-length novels rather than novellas. This preference is uniquely contemporary, and for that reason, I seem to stumble upon true poetry in the novels of certain modern and contemporary writers.
A not-so-recent episode of South Park contained a reference to Shirley Jackson’s amazing short story “The Lottery.” I spent the rest of that night scouring for other references; some new to me and some rekindled childhood memories. That initial discovery ultimately led me to create 
