Deckfight has this thing called Deckfight Press, a literary e-chapbook press. They churn out really good material, by really good writers, for free. Their latest is The Five Lost Senses of Carl by Mel Bosworth & Christy Crutchfield.
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 TNBBC for getting a free copy of All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman.
This week, we are giving away a copy of The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn by Sean Dixon. It all started with a black rose and a rich young man. And a house with a creek running through it. And then there she was, Kip Flynn, standing beside her dead boyfriend and agreeing to take a large sum of money from the young man’s father to keep quiet. As if she could have done anything else, being so scared and grief-stricken and maybe pregnant. But that’s not the end of it. You see, there’s some kind of connection between Kip and this rich developer’s son that keeps them tight in one another’s orbit. So, when Kip awakens from her grief, intent on revenge, they find themselves pursuing one another with a ferocity they can barely understand, one that spirals outward, with subway accidents and arson and drainpipes and backhoe wars, to envelop roommates, two guilty fathers, a window-cleaner or two, landlords, family secrets, Vietnamese gangsters, a standup-bass player and an activist tour guide. And concluding in the subterranean heart of Toronto itself, which, like Kip, is torn between vengefulness and growth.
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).
The Brainstormer is an innovative, free web-based idea generator for those plumb out of ideas, so now you have no excuse not to write. At the spin of a (virtual) wheel, the Brainstormer churns out a combination of objects/phrases/ideas, like “colonial dwarf in flight” or “pool hall involving fidelity and enlightenment.” Is it the stuff of great ideas? Uh, maybe. But at least it pushes you through that first hurdle of forcing yourself to actually sit down and write.
For those on the go, it’s also available as an iPhone app.
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 Zachary Cole for getting a free copy of The Universe in Miniature in Miniature by Patrick Somerville.
This week, it’s ZINE WEEK! We are giving away a copy of The Broad Set Quarterly zine from The Broad Set Writing Collective. The Broad Set releases a quarterly zine, free to those who inquire (so you can ALL be winners this week, in a way). The Broad Set Quarterly features poetry, prose, fiction, and nonfiction from its stable of authors as well as one featured author per issue. Online content will feature weekly podcasts, videos, MP3s, photos & various original material. Monthly, The Broad Set will spotlight one author, scene or magazine whose work exemplifies the imaginative will that they value so highly. Read more »
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 »
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?”
