This site gets a lot of spam, but thanks to spam-catchers and fancy coding I don’t understand, very little of it slips through to the comments section. Most gets caught in our spam filter, and usually I give whatever’s in there a cursory glance before deleting.
But the other day, for whatever reason, I looked at the spam with a fresh eye. If you ignore the hyperlinked sex-related keywords, some of it sounds like it could be poetry. Really, really awful poetry, mind you, but we all know I’m a fan of the bad stuff anyway.
Here are a few of my favorite spam poems (sexy links removed):
She was in the frame emma watson
teetering on her highheels.
The bedstand, would not see.
She was emma watson pics abusive, writhing naked in the street he was in, reaching out.
I was the most wonderful person on the wall.
Sam asked. I couldnt say it was getting their knees licking
Of my daughters youthful body
Youre thinking of their ideas in her hips erotic stories
jerk and squirm.
Take it was growing.
I almost made celebrity stories you something
to stop it anymore. Jason shook his friends
during.
She favored jeans and sheryl all the suggestion mild bondage stories
Ben, like when you so.
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 Angela Kowalski Katterhagen for getting a free copy of Widow: Stories by Michelle Latiolais.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Epiphany Magazine’s Fall/Winter 2010-2011 issue, Persistent Labyrinths: Analogue Antidotes to the Digital Morass, vital new writings that, disparate as they are, all bring readers to engrossing and unexpected places in the mazes life perennially holds in store. We’ve tracked down some of the best work out there, and assembled it in a mix that is guaranteed to satisfy even the most demanding readers. The new Epiphany includes a richly comic story by Dale Peck (“Not Even Camping Is Like Camping Anymore”) that luminously desentimentalizes children and teenagers and is sure to arouse very fruitful controversy about the nature of fiction itself; an excerpt from Lisa Dierbeck’s hip new novel, The Autobiography of Jenny X, that strips the façade off the private life of a powerful senator’s son; two further chapters from Keep This Fortune, silver-spoon adoptee A.B. Meyer’s witty and moving memoir of reuniting with her birth mother; and much more, including débuts by promising and original new writers you won’t find anywhere else.
The new e-chapbook Supercomputer, containing “four stories of goodness” from Jordan Castro, is now out via Deckfight Press. Get it for free in PDF or ePub format (donations are accepted).
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 Sara Crow for getting a free copy of Missed Her by Ivan E. Coyote.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Widow: Stories by Michelle Latiolais. The stories of Widow conjure the nuances of inner sensations and conflicting desire as if hitting the notes of a song, deftly played across human memory. Like the memoirs of Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates, these meditations were largely written after the tragic death of Latiolais’ husband, and they bravely explore the physiology of grief through a masterful interweaving of tender insight and unflinching detail—reminding us that the inner life is best understood through the medium of storytelling. Whether writing from a widow’s perspective, a girlfriend’s, an aunt’s, a wife’s, or a student’s, Latiolais exquisitely distills the anguish, longing, humor, and strange grace that accompanies life’s most transformative chapters.
The Guardian’s William Skidelsky claims that fiction based on real-life events are “meagre offerings that cannot escape the confines of their reality-bound aspirations.” The two purposes of storytelling, those which have endured since the art was born, are 1) to entertain and 2) to reveal some truth about the human condition. But I fail to see how fact-based fiction doesn’t satisfy both those points.
Obviously, not all fact-based fiction is the same, and I’d tend to agree that a film or book or what-have-you that essentially recreates a real-life experience scene-for-scene, taking very few creative liberties in the process, could hardly be considered art. But a work of fiction that takes a real event and seeks to tease out motifs, metaphors, and hidden meanings? That works to elevate fact? Sounds like proper storytelling to me.
We now have a Tumblr blog acting as a virtual multimedia slush pile. Use it to post stories, videos, comics, text, etc, that you either created yourself or found online. We’ll post 99% of submissions on the Tumblr blog, and the best stuff we’ll republish here, with full credits. You can submit here.
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 dogboi for getting a free copy of Sub Rosa by Amber Dawn.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Missed Her by Ivan E. Coyote. Ivan E. Coyote is a master storyteller and performer; her beautiful, funny stories about growing up queer in the Canadian north and living out loud on Canada’s west coast have attracted big audiences whether gay, straight, or otherwise. Missed Her is Ivan’s fifth story collection, following 2008′s Lambda Literary Award-nominated The Slow Fix, 2004′s Ferro-Grumley Award-nominated Loose End, and 2006′s Bow Grip, her novel that was named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association (now in development as a feature film). In her passionate and humourous new collection, Ivan takes readers on an intimate journey, both literal and figurative, through the experiences of her life: from her year spent in eastern Canada,to her return to the west coast, to travels inbetween. Whether discussing the politics of being a butch with a pet lapdog, or befriending an effeminate young man at a gay camp, or revisiting a forty-year old heartbreak around her grandmother’s kitchen, Ivan traverses love, gender and identity with a wistful, perceptive eye, and a warmth that’s as embracing and powerful as Ivan herself.
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 hrbeck for getting a free copy ofGabriella Goliger’s Girl Unwrapped.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Sub Rosa by Amber Dawn. In this stunning debut novel, Amber Dawn subverts and transgresses the classic hero’s quest adventure to create a dark post-feminist vision not for the faint of heart. Sub Rosa‘s reluctant heroine is known as “Little,” a teenaged runaway unable to remember her real name; in her struggle to get by in the world, she stumbles upon an underground society of ghosts and magicians, missing girls and would-be johns: a place called Sub Rosa. Not long after she is initiated into this family of magical prostitutes, Little is called upon to lead Sub Rosa through a maze of feral darkness, both real and imagined―a calling burdened with grotesque enemies, strange allies, and memories from a foggy past. Written with a kind of gasping urgency, Sub Rosa is a beautiful and gutsy allegory of our times, a fairy-tale-like fantasia imbued with a grave, unapologetic realness.
A Shore Thing, literary equivalent of Comic Sans and the debut novel of popular circus show reality show star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, heralded in 2011 last week with its release, among other signs of the apocalypse.* If you haven’t read an excerpt, trust that it’s far from a work of literary genius. She appeared the other night on the David Letterman Show to present “top ten reasons to buy the new Snooki book.” I thought of some other reasons.
(The Real) Top 10 Reasons to Buy the New Snooki Book
