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).
I was inspired by Jacket Copy’s classic literature web movie and so put together one of my own using the simple (and free) online animated moviemaking tool xtranormal. Below is a video featuring part of a scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet–with the titular characters as robots. Xtranormal only has sterile, computer-generated voices to provide the dialogue, but in this context I’m thinking it kind of works.
After the jump, watch Jacket Copy’s Pride and Prejudice web video. Read more »
You don’t have to look too hard to find free fiction online these days, which is great, but it is slightly harder to find free contemporary fiction actually worth reading. So in the spirit of the holidays, here are 12 sources (because 12 seems to be the magic holiday number) for free, quality lit:
1. Featherproof Books‘ free mini-books are stories meant to be downloaded, printed out, and put together origami-style at home. Featherproof offers short stories as well as excerpts from larger works such as Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas and Amelia Gray’s AM/PM.
2. BlazeVOX is a free online journal of innovative fiction and wide-ranging fields of contemporary poetry. They also offer a catalog of “weird little ebooks,” also available for free.
One of the cool things about the arts is that they all complement each other. Dance and music are each arts unto themselves, but the results are transcendent when they are paired together. Music is also an integral component in film and television, which in turn makes use of screenwriting and visual arts. Everything overlaps.
But with the exception of the rare book soundtrack, the printed word tends to stand alone from the rest of the arts. Maybe that will change as new technology gives us interactive books with synchronized soundtracks and accompanying video. And while we’re at it: maybe new technology will give us books with holographic characters jumping out of every page.
Until then, there’s STFUAJPGM, a miniature micro-music mixtape magazine that marries literature with its long-lost friends: music, visual arts, and video. Each “episode” is centered around a central theme inspired by video game culture (think heroes, love stories, and travel) and involves a smorgasbord of multimedia to illustrate the theme: pixel art, video, short stories, and an overarching soundtrack that neatly weaves all the components together. STFUAJPGM is focused on freely distributed music within the chiptune community, so each episode is also available for download.
They’re only up to episode #5 so far, with new episodes coming out every month or so. An uncommon thing in today’s daily updated culture, but very much worth the wait. To get a better idea of what STFUAJPGM is and what they have to offer, hit the jump for Episode 0 (Pilot): A Love Story. Read more »
An old writing teacher of mine once said to my class, “I read because I’m secretly a peeping Tom. I want more than just a glimpse of someone else’s life–I want to be a full-on voyeur. I want to step into someone else’s skin and see the world from their eyes. Because when else would I ever get to do that?”
So maybe that explains part of the pleasure I get from watching documentaries on Veoh. A user named simply “documentaries” (is it the BBC? an avid documentary fan? the film gods themselves, digitized and uploaded for our mortal amusement?) has hundreds of documentaries online, for free, and I’m starting to worry if my fascination with them has become something of a problem. The documentaries are a veritable sampling of the (intensely) varied human experience and include such titillating titles as “My Car is My Lover,”“The Man With No Past,”“Child Chain Smoker,”“Prostitution Behind the Veil,” and “The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off.” Lest the titles might lead you to believe I’m directing you to a collection of Jerry Springer-esque romps: all of the documentaries (or those I’ve seen, anyway) are both intriguing and refreshingly fair-minded. And most of them are less than one hour long, which means that when you finish one, it doesn’t seem so indulgent to start another, and then another, and then another… Read more »
I have a new addiction. Oh, and it’s so delicious. I just can’t seem to get enough. Each fix is only temporary and leaves me wanting more. But thankfully this addiction is free and doesn’t harm my body in any way. And it’s so simple, you’d never guess: The Moth podcasts. See, I spend a lot of time on trains. And while I am a voracious reader, I had the misfortune of inheriting severe motion sickness from my grandmother. Just like Granny, if I try to read more than a page or two while on a moving vehicle I break out in a cold sweat and feel like I’m about to hurl. So I’m left with hours and hours on trains with nothing to do but to listen to my iPod. Well, recently a dear friend of mine recommended that I download The Moth podcasts. And this dear friend opened me up to a whole new world of awesomeness. The Moth is kind of like a drug. Storytelling crack. Yes, The Moth is storytelling crack. And I urge you to partake. Read more »
Take Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, rearrange the images, insert new captions, and what do you get? Persepolis 2.0, a prime example of transformative storytelling by 2 anonymous Iranian exiles who reimagined Satrapi’s novel in the context of the recent election and protests.
Persepolis 2.0 begins its story on voting day and continues to include the shocking results, the subsequent protests, and the use of Twitter and other social media in the dissension. The story’s final frames depicts a godlike figure cradling Neda Agha-Soltan in his arms as he croons, “Don’t cry Neda. Your death will not be in vain.” The final frame begs the reader to support Iran by forwarding the graphic novel and spreading the word.
This is by no means the first time someone has used the arts to further a political cause, nor is it even the first time someone has reinterpreted Marjane Satrapi’s art, but Persepolis 2.0 is particularly moving in that the remix so eerily resembles the original. In a recent interview with the Guardian, one of 2.0’s editors says that “the updated cartoon was intended to show how history was repeating itself in Iran.” He continues: Read more »
Part fantasy, part word-play, the fragementary narrative comes alive when read aloud.
This collage novel follows the classic format: images culled from nineteenth century sources, painstakingly rearranged and reassembed into entirely new, seamless tableaux.
This is the first chapter from the novel, complete with Betancourt’s artwork and story. It is a riff on Ernst’s 1926 painting “Two children are menaced by a nightengale,” taking up the story years later from were Ernst left it.
The story chronicles the adventure of Rose, her sister Marcella, the insane landscapes they travel through (including a sea where mothers drown their naughty sons), and the eponymous Nightengale on their way to the Moon.
The sheer lunacy of the tale is accentuated by the strangeness of the images.
The tale features magical mops, flying fish, and mocking sea turtles. And plenty of mind-bending imagery, like the image at left. And yes, that’s a wolf’s head on that little girl’s body, trying to force her way through an elaborate gate (with fire?). Delicious!
In the documentary Before the Music Dies, a bevy of accomplished artists including Ray Charles, Erykah Badu, Elvis Costello, Dave Matthews, and more weigh in on the steadily commercialization of the music industry. I’ve had my eye on the film for a while now, mostly because of this clip:
Just be butt-naked somewhere. Butt-naked somewhere with glitter and a beeper.
Yes it’s ridiculous, and yes it makes Badu seem batty, but what she says rings true. And the rest of the film is just as eye-opening and engrossing. I’m not a music industry-type at all, or even much of a music-y person, but this doc really moved me. Maybe that’s because the core issue isn’t exclusive to the music industry. In a commercial world, how can you a) create art and b) succeed? At what point does the creative work end and the corporation begin?
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An old writing teacher of mine once said to my class, “I read because I’m secretly a peeping Tom. I want more than just a glimpse of someone else’s life–I want to be a full-on voyeur. I want to step into someone else’s skin and see the world from their eyes. Because when else would I ever get to do that?”
I have a new addiction. Oh, and it’s so delicious. I just can’t seem to get enough. Each fix is only temporary and leaves me wanting more. But thankfully this addiction is free and doesn’t harm my body in any way. And it’s so simple, you’d never guess: 
