Friday, April 30, 2010

McSweeney's Best American/National Magazine Award Bundle

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern publishes on a roughly quarterly schedule, and each issue is markedly different from its predecessors in terms of design and editorial focus.

Stories of the issues 30 and 32—"Memory Wall," by Anthony Doerr, "Raw Water," by Wells Tower, and "Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events," by Kevin Moffett—have brought home a National Magazine Award:
"National Magazine Award 2010 FICTION - Recognizes excellence in fiction published in magazines - Winner: McSweeney’s Quarterly: Dave Eggers, Editor for “Memory Wall,” by Anthony Doerr, October 1; “Raw Water,” by Wells Tower, October 1; “Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events,” by Kevin Moffett; March 3"

In addition, both Kevin Moffett's and Wells Tower's stories, as well as Jim Shepard's "The Netherlands Lives With Water," have been selected for the 2010 edition of the Best American Short Stories.

To mark the event, McSweeney's has bundled issues 30 and 32 together at a special price, and has put the award-winning stories online.

About McSWEENEY'S
McSweeney’s began in 1998 as a literary journal, edited by Dave Eggers, that published only works rejected by other magazines. But after the first issue, the journal began to publish pieces primarily written with McSweeney’s in mind. Today, McSweeney’s has grown to be one of the country’s best-read and widely-circulated literary journals, with an expanding subscriber base and strong independent bookstore following. As a small publishing house, McSweeney’s is committed to finding new voices — Gabe Hudson, Paul Collins, Neal Pollack, J.T. Leroy, John Hodgman, Amy Fusselman, Salvador Plascencia and Sean Wilsey are among those whose early work appeared in McSweeney’s—and promoting the work of gifted but underappreciated writers, such as Lydia Davis and Stephen Dixon.

McSweeney's Best American/National Magazine Award Bundle
Product Code: BABDL
click here to read "The Netherlands Lives With Water" by Jim Shepard
Regular Price: $39.00
Sale Price: $26.00

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Gristle (The New Press)

More than ever before, people are increasingly concerned about the impact of our factory-farming system of raising animals for food - and rightfully so. Gristle is for the growing number of people - from ominvores to vegans - who are thinking twice about the consequences of our industrial farm animal prodcution practices on workers, our health, the environment, communities, the animals, and more.

Multi-platinum musician Moby and leading food policy activist and expert Miyun Park have brought together fifteen of the country's leading voices on this issue--an eclectic group from such diverse backgrounds as farming, workers' rights activism, professional athletics, science, environmental sustainability, food business, and animal welfare advocacy--who together eloquently lay out how and why industrial animal agriculture unnecessarily harms workers, communities, the environment, our health, our wallets, and animals.

In the tradition of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Gristle combines hard-hitting facts with a light touch and includes fascinating charts and illustrations depicting the stark realities of America’s industrial food system

About the New Press
Established in 1990 as a major alternative to the large, commercial publishers, The New Press is a not-for-profit publishing house operated editorially in the public interest. It is committed to publishing in innovative ways works of educational, cultural, and community value that, despite their intellectual merits, may be deemed insufficiently profitable by commercial publishers. The New Press publishes about fifty titles each year.

Gristle
on factory farms & food safety
paperback, 160 pages, $14,95
ISBN: 978-1595581914

Monday, April 26, 2010

Letters Patterns Structures - Andrew Topel (avantacular)

In Letters Patterns Structures, Andrew Topel treats his viewers to an architectural purity in which positive and negative spaces become interchangeable. These precise arrangements of letters and punctuation build forms that function equally as lattice works of theory, as finite sculptures, and as art. Topel ‘s craftsmanship locates and then captures the richness of individual angles superimposed on one another, yielding large, musical constructs that undergo successive phases of preparation, suspension, and resolution.

"Andrew Topel’s hand is sure, his eye is clear, his vision, superb. Within these creations, delicacy and boldness are not incompatible, but progress through mutually celebratory elements within successive pieces. When viewing Topel’s art, I do not have to work at loving what I see and feel. My admiration is inevitable. His masterful constructions enhance my own capacity for sensory awareness, melding discoveries that inform each new moment of joy in finding what is present and continually reconfiguring itself into conceptual possibilities that hold, for all their majesty, within a greater actuality space." - Sheila E. Murphy

About avantacular press
Andrew Topel founded avantacular press in 2002. The press specializes in books of visual poetry & other-stream writing as well as one-of-a-kind artists books.

Andrew Topel: Letters Patterns Structures
visual poetry collection
paperback, 50 pages + after words by Geof Huth
$12, which includes shipping

Thursday, April 22, 2010

The Feathered Masks - John Swain (Full of Crow)

John Swain writes with an elegant, simple style that is free of many of the typical distractions. He condenses his thoughts into few - but powerful- words. This was something that appealed to us at Full Of Crow. Eight of his poems now turned into The Feathered Masks - a short poetry collection, available both as pdf-download, and as online Isuu version with flipping pages.

John Swain is an American poet who lets his work speak for itself. He will also have a poetry chapbook in print this spring from Full Of Crow.

About Full Of Crow:
Full Of Crow Press produces and promotes both print and web based content, including fiction, poetry, art, interviews, art columns, reviews, audio, flash fiction, zines, chapbooks, ebooks, and more. We distribute a number of zines and will soon have audio cds available of poetry/ spoken word. Many of our collaborative zines are developed at our community ning site, The Sphere.
Our most widely distributed collaborative zine, "MUST" has been printed thousands of times, all over the world. We are now on issue #10. Other Full of Crow eBooks include: Mexico 2009 by Edwards Wells II, Variant Tongues of the Conjunctive Application by Felino A. Soriano, village idiot by Ross Vassilev.

John Swain: The Feathered Masks
poetry collection
e-book, 8 poems
available as pdf-version or as Isuu version

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Tinkers - Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary)

Harding's short novel Tinkers is the story of a dying man, George Washington Crosby, and his relationship with his father, who suffered from epilepsy and eventually abandoned his family because of the affliction.

Tinkers won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in the past week. This is the first time a book published by a small independent press has won the Pulitzer for fiction since 1981 - back then, John Kennedy Toole posthumoulsly won the award for his picaresque novel A Confederacy of Dunces, published by Grove Press.

Paul Harding studied at the University of Massachusettes from 1986 to 1992 while drumming in the grunge band Cold Water Flat. Tinkers is his first novel. An interview with Paul Harding is up in Open Source: Paul Harding's Magical Tinkers.

About Bellevue Literary Press
Bellevue Literary Press, founded in 2005, publishes literary and authoritative fiction and nonfiction at the nexus of the arts and the sciences, with a special focus on medicine. Their authors explore cultural and historical representations of the human body, illness, and health, and address the impact of scientific and medical practice on the individual and society. The mission of Bellevue Literary Press is to bring together medicine, science, and humanism through literature: "The common starting point for understanding most things is a story.”

Paul Harding: Tinkers
novel
paperback, 192 pages, $14.95

Friday, April 16, 2010

The HiStory of Santa Monica - Michael J. Atwood (Aqueous)

Michael J. Atwood's debut collection is thematically linked by both the characters—who are struggling to realize their Hollywood dreams and the setting—Santa Monica, California. A seemingly peaceful seaside city, Santa Monica is also a purgatory where the characters must face failure and loss—as well as their demons and ghosts. Family and ritual are consistent motifs throughout the collection, as are the themes of escape, addiction, redemption, reparation, religion, and death. Whether it is a young couple looking to buy their first home or a man returning to his hometown for a funeral or a baptism, readers will find the everyday rituals in these stories identifiable in many ways.

Michael J. Atwood is a fiction writer and weekly opinion columnist for the North Attleborough Free Press. His work has appeared in a number of literary magazines and online journals.

About Aqueous Books
Aqueous Books is the print arm of Prick of the Spindle, an online literary quarterly journal also available as a Kindle magazine. Staff include Prick of the Spindle Editor-in-Chief Cynthia Reeser as Publisher, and Prick of the Spindle Managing Editor Erin McKnight as Editor. Upcoming books include novels and novellas published serially on Prick of the Spindle, as well as works of literary merit, memoirs, magical realism, and speculative fiction. Look for forthcoming publications by Heather Fowler, Alec Bryan, Mel Bosworth, and others.

The HiStory of Santa Monica
short-story collection, thematically linked
190 pages, paperback, $14
ISBN: 978-0-9826734-0-9
pre-order now at Aqueous Books / Store, and safe shipping costs.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Expectations - Gary Beck (Rogue Scholars)

Expectations is a passionate exploration of people struggling to cope with a difficult, demanding life. Using a diversity of styles, Beck depicts the human condition in the challenging urban environment, as well as various other settings. There is a constant undercurrent of striving for more than we’re given, or can accomplish. Yet the anguish of disappointed expectations pervades the extravagant hopes and simple day to day desires of individuals who aspired to something better. Several long poems push the envelop of individual experience in differing formats, from the lyric to harsh threnodic rhythms.
This most recent addition to the Rogue Scholars Press poetry catalog is a bold and “unexpected” toss into the sublime.

Gary Beck's poetry, fiction, one act plays and essays have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines. Chapbooks published include Rembrance (Origami Condom Press), The Conquest Of Somalia (Cervena Barva Press), and The Dance Of Hate (Calliope Nerve Media). A full length poetry collection, Days of Destruction, was published by Skive Press.

About Rogue Scholars Press
A modest little enterprise, Rogue Scholars Press is supported by the current members of the Rogue scholars Collective, a literary organization based in the East Village, New York City, dedicated to the promotion of poetry and the arts, in print and on the world wide web.

Gary Beck: Expectations
poetry collection
paperback, 104 pages, $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-9840982-0-0

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

in transit - Dorothee Lang (blueprint)

in transit is a mosaic of encounters, departures and arrivals; a journey in widening circles. Dorothee Lang merges the short story collection and travel diary format to explore recent global changes and undercurrents, and their influences on personal life. Geographically, the transit route starts in Berlin, moves through Europe, heads west towards the States, and then eastwards to Asia. Core themes include: globalisation / digitalization and the increasing interconnectedness of the world; the reunification of Germany and the hopes of a new millennium; the enhanced pace of life - often juxtaposed by the longing for a time-out; the drama of 9/11 and its aftermath; the mercurial nature of value systems.

"Dorothee Lang's in transit uses sense as sonar, bouncing waves off the natural and manmade world to image the fluidity of our existence. Like Dogen's Moon in a Dewdrop, in transit quietly feasts on the beauty of minutiae, showing time and again that what often goes unnoticed represents a microcosm, a history, an indelible connectedness that deserves our attention." - Mel Bosworth

Dorothee Lang is founding editor of the literary online journal BluePrintReview, and author of the travel novel Masala Moments. Her writing has appeared in numerous online and print magazines, among them: The Sunday Herald (India), The Mississippi Review (USA), Zeit Online (Germany), Dublin Quarterly (Ireland), Word Riot (USA) and others. She holds a degree in economics and advertising, and lives in the South of Germany.

About blueprintpress
Founded in 2006, blueprintpress is the print side wing of BluePrintReview. The current focus is on new and experimental formats: upcoming are 2 "micro novels" - hand-made books that fit in an air mail envelope. Blueprintpress currently is looking for fitting micro novel manuscripts (4000-5500 words, details).

Dorothee Lang: in transit
story collection / travel diary
64 pages
paperback

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Too Young to Fall Asleep - Sally Weigel (CCLaP)

Why would a poetry-writing high-school emo girl from suburban Chicago volunteer for the Iraq War? And when both of her legs are blown off in a non-combat IED explosion, how will she ever recover?
The Chicago Center for Literature and Photography is proud to present its newest original novella, Too Young to Fall Asleep, the literary debut of talented local up-and-comer Sally Weigel. Originally written when she was still in high school, Asleep is one of the first-ever adult character dramas concerning the so-called "Millennials," a prescient and eerily mature look at the generation of youth just now entering college -- an entire nation of idealistic sincerity-seekers within a maelstrom of suicidal Gen-X parents, a nation of kids who have no problem getting wasted on weekends but feel horribly guilty when smoking cigarettes while doing so.
Weigel takes a razor-sharp look at this generation here, through the filter of the two events that have so far most influenced them -- the rise of the dark post-9/11 supergroup Radiohead, and the decimating of their numbers by Bush's 'war on terrorism' -- delivering at the end a haunting and thought-provoking snapshot of our current zeitgeist, in a sophisticated way that can only be done by an actual member of that generation.
A "pay what you want" experiment which can be downloaded for free if one chooses, Too Young to Fall Asleep marks the debut of a rising voice in the American arts, and you are sure to be both informed and moved by what she has to say.

Sally Weigel is a sophomore at Chicago's DePaul University. This is her first book.

About CCLaP
CCLaP Publishing is an imprint of the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, an organization dedicated to promoting the best of the underground and cutting-edge arts. On top of the seven books it has put out since 2008, the center also maintains a popular website, produces a bi-monthly podcast, and hosts a growing amount of live events all over the city of Chicago.

Sally Weigel: Too Young to Fall Asleep
novella
37 pages, electronic book (EPUB, PDF, MOBI, Kindle)
"Pay what you want" at website, or US$4.99 at Amazon

Monday, April 12, 2010

Gaze - Marthe Reed (Black Radish)

In the de-stabilized intersection of fashion, the war on terror, and cultural constructions of the feminine, Gaze explores the resulting tensions in a series of dichotomies central to an increasingly isolate and adversarial condition: Christianity/Islam, ancient/modern, sacred/secular, sexuality/spirituality, feminism/fundamentalism, power/resistance, self/other.
Rikki Ducornet says this about these intersections in Gaze: “In these moments the world is given breath, heat, and voice. All at once it approaches, and the beloved's unfettered body is revealed as the antidote to tyranny.” What we see and what we fail to see are constantly juxtaposed, exposing a flawed desire to “become.” Kate Bernheimer says of Gaze, “Too beautiful to articulate’—dressed, undressed, terrorized, and entrancing. These unveilings, these poems, how they haunt me. Riding Angela Carter on a poetry-horse, Reed hallucinates language with certain and dissolving rhythm. Gaze at them; go blind inside this mentalist’s mind. Marthe Reed is unrelenting, unrelentingly kind.”

Marthe Reed’s publications include Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink) and two chapbooks (em)bodied bliss and zaum alliterations (Dusie Kollektiv). Her poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Golden Handcuffs Review, New Orleans Review, HOW2, MiPoesias, Exquisite Corpse, and Big Bridge, and is forthcoming from Ekleksographia and Fairy Tale Review.

About Black Radish Books
Black Radish Books was founded as a collective in 2009. Our editorial focus is to publish and promote innovative writing. Because we operate as a collective, our goal is to allow members to dictate the aesthetic. As such, our bent is best described as eclectic, with focus on the difficult and the surprising. Black Radish Books has two other books forthcoming this spring: Occultations by David Wolach, and Spectre by Mark Lamoureux. This summer look for The Incompossible by Carrie Hunter, Herso,- An Heirship in Waves by Susana Gardner, and The Dead Love Everyone by Jared Hayes. Ten more volumes of poetry are in the pipeline, coming out later this year and 2011.

Marthe Reed: Gaze
Poetry collection
94 pages; paperback; price $15.00
ISBN 978-0-9825731-0-5

Friday, April 09, 2010

A cappella Zoo - Spring 2010

Promiscuous clouds and kitchenware, characters escaping their plots, a man holding a six-month breath, a contemporary Sisyphus, a refreshingly darker Cat in the Hat, and stories in Hebrew and Latvian—this and more fill the pages of the latest edition of A cappella Zoo.

Issue 4 was released in print this April and is being released online in daily morsels throughout the month. The artwork of Sarah Walko, Meagan Jenigan, and Peter L. Scacco make the print version a particular treat. This issue features a play, 16 short stories, 10 flash stories, and 14 poems by the following authors: Rob E. Boley, Rae Bryant, Eric Burke, R. Matthew Burke, Matt Carney, Maria Deira, Francis DiClemente, Gabe Durham, Greg Gurke, Joseph Harrington, Lois Beebe Hayna, Kyle Hemmings, Robert Hinderliter, Crystal Hoffman, Jennifer Koe, Larry Lefkowitz, Ben Loory, Ieva, Melgalve, Christina Murphy, Kurt Newton, Justin Petropoulos, M.P. Powers, Amy Rollinson, Robin Rozanski, Christopher Ryan, Eric Schaller, Randolph Schmidt, Noel Sloboda, Audri Sousa, Amber Sparks, Laura Spencer, Patrick Sugrue, Pedro Tejada, John Thornton, J.A. Tyler, Karen Marie Vaughn, Chris Wiewiora, and Catherine Zickgraf.

About A cappella Zoo
Colin Meldrum founded A cappella Zoo in 2008 with the help of three friends. The Zoo has since grown to include a board of a dozen editors and readers across the US, UK, and Canada. The journal emphasizes magic realism and slipstream, with room for other explorations of perspective, reality, and genre.

A cappella Zoo · Issue 4 · Spring 2010
182 pages, paperback, single issue $7
semi-annual journal
ISSN: 1945-7480

Thursday, April 08, 2010

In This Alone Impulse - Shya Scanlon (Noemi)

Show me how to look forward to these things. To see them and pursue. It is something to bark like a dog barks. It is something to wade in the snow like a chicken, lost. My hands don’t feel their fingers, and so my answers come but do not grasp the reason for their caring. Still they care. They take long baths and watch the mud run without spinning down a drain dead center between a world where I breathe under water, and a world where water is the substance of my skin....

"In This Alone Impulse bends syntax way back for maximum impact. Poetry or prose? You're reading." - Terese Svoboda

Shya Scanlon received an MFA from Brown University in 2008, where he won the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction. His prose poetry collection In This Alone Impulse is now available for pre-orders, his novel Forecast - a serialized online project, more about it here: Project Forecast 42 - will be published by Flatmancrooked later in 2010.

About Noemi Press
Noemi Press is a 501(c)(3) literary arts organization based in Las Cruces, New Mexico, dedicated to publishing and promoting the work of emerging and established authors and artists. Forthcoming from Noemi Press are: Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies by Danielle Pafunda (poetry); Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneffand (fiction); Three Plays by Norman Lock (drama); and several chapbooks.

Shya Scanlon: In This Alone Impulse
prose poetry collection
72 pages, $15
ISBN 978-1-934819-10-4

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

How To Escape From a Leper Colony - Tiphanie Yanique (Graywolf)

The inhabitants of an island walk into the sea. A man passes a jail cell’s window, shouldering a wooden cross. And in the international shop of coffins, a story repeats itself, pointing toward an inevitable tragedy. If the facts of these stories are sometimes fantastical, the situations they describe are complex, and all too real. Lyrical, lush, and haunting, the prose shimmers in this nuanced debut, set mostly in the US Virgin Islands. Part oral history, part postcolonial narrative, How to Escape from a Leper Colony is ultimately a loving portrait of a wholly unique place—and an unforgettable, heartbreaking, hilarious, and mesmerizing collection.

Tiphanie Yanique is from the Hospital Ground neighborhood of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing and Caribbean Literature with Drew University and an associate editor with Post-No-Ills. She lives between Brooklyn, New York, and St. Thomas.

About Graywolf Press
Founded in 1974, Graywolf Press is an independent, not-for-profit publisher dedicated to the creation and promotion of thoughtful and imaginative contemporary literature essential to a vital and diverse culture. A commitment to quality, and a willingness to embrace or invent new models, has kept Minneapolis-based Graywolf at the forefront of the small press movement. Today, Graywolf is considered one of the nation's leading nonprofit literary publishers, publishing fiction, memoir, essays, poetry, literary and cultural criticism, and literature in translation. Forthcoming this August is I Curse the River of Time by international bestseller Per Petterson, and out in November is Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems from President Obama’s Inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander.

Tiphanie Yanique: How To Escape From a Leper Colony
a novella and stories
200 pages, $15.00
ISBN 978-1-55597-550-0

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Elegy for the Builder's Wife - Nick Courtright (Blue Hour)

If maps are documents of distance, then Nick Courtright’s Elegy for the Builder’s Wife is an atlas. Each poem in the collection can complete a chronicle the surveyor’s work cannot — the territories of fog, how trees can become landmarks, the continents chipped from paint. Courtright, navigating the same terrain as Lorca, finds icons of longing, passion, and sacrifice in the liminal spaces, and in the process, he charts what, for the mapmaker, is impossible — the incomplete, the rended, and the influence of time on everything, still or in motion.

Nick Courtright, an Ohio native, lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a music critic and interviewer for the Austinist, and teaches at Southwestern and St. Edward’s Universities. His poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in The Southern Review, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review Online, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among numerous others, while his Levis Prize-finalist manuscript, Likely Fates, is currently seeking a publisher. In his real life, he recently entered fatherhood.

About Blue Hour Press
Blue Hour Press is dedicated to bridging the gap between the beauty and tradition of print with the accessibility and possibility of the web, releasing digital chapbooks that are satisfying, respectable, and innovative. The press publishes eight to ten collections a year, exclusively online, by renowned and emerging poets like John Gallaher, Emily Kendal Frey, Andrew Zawacki, and Alexis Orgera. The aim is to provide compelling, visually arresting books, for free, to anyone.

Elegy for the Builder's Wife by Nick Courtright (direct e-read link)
poetry collection
e-chapbook, 38 pages, free read
released February 23rd, 2010

Monday, April 05, 2010

Where the Dog Star Never Glows - Tara L. Masih (Press 53)

In her debut collection, Tara Masih shows an intimate sense of understanding her characters' innermost feelings, creating a memorable map of diverse characters that span the globe and several eras. Ghosts dance, butterflies swarm, men crystallize, the sun disappears, and water plays a role in both destruction and repair of the soul.
With an unflinching eye, a mythical awareness of the natural world, and poetic, crafted prose, Masih examines the dark recesses of the mind and heart, which often leads to a small or great triumph or illumination that will resonate long after the last page is turned. Publishers Weekly says: “Striking and resonant . . .”

Tara L. Masih is a graduate of Emerson College’s Writing and Publishing Program. She has won awards for her fiction and received Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and Best of the Web nominations. She is editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction (a ForeWord Best Book of the Year finalist).

About Press 53
Press 53 is an independent literary publishing house located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and was founded in October 2005 by Kevin Morgan Watson. Press 53 publishes 4-6 short story collections and 4-6 poetry collections each year. They also publish 1-2 novels or memoirs; the every-odd-year anthology series Surreal South; the annual Press 53 Open Awards Anthology; the new annual Press 53 Spotlight, which features 5 poets and 3 short story authors; and 1-2 out-of-print treasures under its Press 53 Classics imprint.
Other offerings for 2010 include Miracle Boy and Other Stories by Pinckney Benedict; the 1971 Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel Journey for Joedel by Guy Owen; the 2009 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction-winner Strange Weather by Becky Hagenston; and Rattlesnakes & The Moon by Darlin’ Neal.

Tara L. Masih: Where the Dog Star Never Glows
story collection
164 pages, $14
ISBN 978-0-9825760-5-2

Friday, April 02, 2010

Mutating the Signature (qarrtsiluni)

Mutating the Signature is the Winter 2009 issue of the online literary magazine qarrtsiluni. The title refers to the issue's theme: all the writing, images, and multimedia works included were collaborations. Issue editors Dana Guthrie Martin and Nathan Moore, longtime poetry collaborators themselves, wrote in their call for submissions that they wanted "to emphasize the gnarly, brilliant, iterative, process-oriented mess that is the heart of any collaborative artistic endeavor."

The print edition couldn't include music or video and one set of image-poem collaborations for which color was necessary, but it contains all the other poems, essays, and stories that were published online. One of its most intriguing aspects is the inclusion of "process notes" by each pair or group of collaborators, explaining how they worked together and how the collaborative process not only mutated each person's original ideas into something new, but changed their concept of authorship itself.

After editing the collaborate qarrtsiluni issue, Dana Guthrie Martin and Nathan Moore continued the concept in their own online magazine, also called Mutating the Signature, each issue of which features real-time collaborations between two poets, or a poet and an artist.

About qarrtsiluni
As online literary magazines go, qarrtsiluni, at five-and-a-half years old, is positively venerable -- but retains the edginess, openness, vitality and editorial responsiveness that have set it apart from the beginning. Qarrtsiluni offers cutting-edge electronic delivery of original, thematically organized poetry, prose, and art, and its almost-daily posts are available online both as text and audio, read by the authors; the magazine can be accessed via browsers, email, feed readers, portable music listening devices, and through the print editions. The title comes from an Iñupiaq word that means “sitting together in the darkness, waiting for something to burst.” Qarrtsiluni's managing editors are Dave Bonta and Beth Adams; three of the four issues each year are guest-edited by teams of two invited editors and the magazine sponsors an annual chapbook contest.

Mutating the Signature (qarrtsiluni vol. 1.2)
Dana Guthrie Martin + Nathan Moore, editors
146 pages; 6 x 9", $13.95
March 2010.

Thursday, April 01, 2010

Further Adventures in the Restless Universe - Dawn Raffel (Dzanc)

When Dawn Raffel was a very small child, her father used to read to her nightly from The Restless Universe--a layman's guide to physics by the Nobel Laureate Max Born. Although she loved the time spent with her father, she didn't--despite his statements to the contrary--comprehend a word of the physics. it was her first recognition that love so often comes with imperfect understanding.
The 21 stories in Further Adventures in the Restless Universe are about fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters, husbands, wives, strangers, lovers, sons, neighbors, kings, death, faith, astronomical phenomena, and the way the heart warps time. Of her previous work, one reviewer stated, "Raffel takes conventions and smashes them to bits" and another called it "extreme literature." Of Further Adventures, Publishers Weekly says, "Raffel's stripped-to-the-bone prose is a model of economy and grace."

Dawn Raffel's previous books are Carrying the Body (a novel) and In the Year of Long Division (stories). Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including NOON, the Mississippi Review, Conjunctions, Unsaid, and the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. She is completing a memoir in vignettes.

About Dzanc Books
Dzanc Books was created in 2006 to advance great writing and champion those writers who don't fit neatly into the marketing niches of for-profit presses. As a non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, Dzanc Books not only publishes excellent books of literary fiction, but works in partnership with literary journals to advance their readership at every level. Dzanc is also fully committed to developing educational programs in the schools and has begun organizing many such workshops and Writers In Residency programs. Upcoming from Dzanc are: The Taste of Penny by Jeff Parker, Love Doesn't Work by Henning Koch, and Best of the Web 2010 - the third edition of Dzanc's annual print compilation of the best online fiction, poetry and non-fiction (link: Dzanc Best of Web series).

Dawn Raffel: Further Adventures in the Restless Universe
short story collection
100 pages, perfect bound paperback with french flaps, $14.95
ISBN 978-0-9767177-9-9