Portrait of a Modern Family - Molly Gaudry (featherproof)

Portrait of a Modern Family by Molly Gaudry tells the story of a family and a neighbourhood that is disrupted by the disappearance of a young girl.

Two interesting notes on the format: the story is published as free, downloadable, do-it-yourself featherproof mini-book. And the story itself was inspired by phrases borrowed from a Philadelphia City Paper. "I took a phrase from every single page and the task was to combine two such phrases and create a single paragraph from them," Molly Gaudry explains. " So, for instance, the final two phrases, which appear in the final paragraph, are: "Fox & Roach" and "Isabelle Meyer." Sometimes I think I'd like to write a novel inspired by a year of City Papers."

You can download the minibook here: Portrait of a Modern Family

Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart, which has been nominated for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. She is also the editor of the soon-to-be released Tell: An Anthology of Expository Narrative, founding editor of the environmental literature journal Willows Wept Review, co-founding editor of Twelve Stories, and she runs Cow Heavy Books.

featherproof books
featherproof books is an indie publisher dedicated to doing whatever they want: "This might take the form of publishing an idiosyncratic novel, design book, or something in between. We love paper, but we're not afraid of computers. Our free downloadable mini-books are an invitation to all ten fingers to take part in the book-making process. We also have an experiment in attention span: the TripleQuick Fiction iPhone app. No matter the medium, we see our authors as creative partners involved in every step of publication. We make our own fun."

Portrait of a Modern Family
a minibook

related links: experimental format, stories

Matryoshka - Jamie Townsend (LRL textile series)

Jamie Townsend's long poem Matryoshka is a delicate layering of language and sound. It just got published in the Little Red Leaves textile chapbook series: pocketbook size books that are sewn, printed, and bound with fabric covers scavenged from old curtains, bedsheets and other textile remnants. The textile format provides an intriguing physical wrap for the almost microscopic sensations in the poem, with its sutures that weave throughout the negative space. You can take a peek at the book online: Matryoshka

"In sections that move between anaphora & restraint, Townsend's material poetics charge the I and O divisions that begin each poem -- comprising a book in which the single and multiple slip in and out of each other in the "flocks of/ pelican/ un/ solvable/ sight." The title Matryoshka denotes famous Russian nesting dolls, and yet the subtle physics and physicality of such poems which attend to "sub-dermal termites scattering" reveal that such momentary nesting is in fact a station in orbit." - Ash Smith

Jamie Townsend lives in East Kensington, Philadelphia where he is organizer of the c/c reading series, and a co-founder and editor of con/crescent, a chapbook publisher & magazine focused on discursive essay / creative non-fiction. He is the author of the chapbook STRAP/HALO (Portable Press @ YoYo Labs, 2011) and recent work has appeared in various print and online publications, including Wheelhouse, Volt, Elective Affinities, Jacket2, The Poetry Project Newsletter and TRY.

About Little Red Leaves
Little Red Leaves is a collectively edited annual online journal of poetry as well as an ebook/paperback series of original books and reprints. The textile series is a special project of LRL, offering limited-edition poetry chapbooks with fabric covers and machine-sewn bindings. The LRL journal is currently taking submissions through the end of May 2011 for issue #6: The Ephemera Issue. Each poem selected for this issue will be "ephemeralized" into paper and printed objects, then mailed out to subscribers. To get a sneek peak of the upcoming issue or subscribe, visit our blog.

Little Red Leaves e-editions
Please look for forthcoming books in our e-editions series from Sarah Mangold, Hugo Garcia Manríquez, and Pattie McCarthy as well as a book length collaborative review of Michael Cross's Haecceities. An exquisite back catalog of the e-editions is available at littleredleaves.com/ebooks.

Jamie Townsend: Matryoshka
textile chapbook
$8

related links: experimental format, poetry

Pooh in Meatspace - Mel Bosworth

"Scifi, humor, fantasy, humor and romance, adventure thrillers, humor and satire" - all this and more is Mel Bosworth's Pooh in Meatspace, a story once published in a place that doesn't exist any more, and now brought back to inner and outer space as an e-book.

The story in a moonshell: When Captain Sheera and Billy discover that a Santa Claus Machine has been built on the moon of Moop, they have no choice but to investigate. Soon, they learn that the machine's builder is none other than Billy's childhood friend Drake, thus spurring a cosmic reunion filled with love, hate, violence, chocolate pudding, Cannabis sativa, old cast members of Baywatch, and an electrical storm.

The e-book is available at Smashwords: Pooh in Meatspace.

For some thoughts on e-books, technology, and the world at large - for example:  "Technology is fascinating and fun, the internet, too, is fascinating and fun. Sometimes mind-numbing. Sometimes the quintessential time-suck. Both things. Technology and the internet." - visit Mel's blog entry "fun, fascinating, and probably completely unnecessary". Hint: you might also find a Pooh coupon code there.

Mel Bosworth is the author of the fiction chapbook When the Cats Razzed the Chickens (Folded Word Press, 2009) the novella Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom (Brown Paper Publishing, 2010) and the novel Freight (coming 2011 from Folded Word Press). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in elimae, PANK, Per Contra, Wigleaf, BLIP Magazine, Annalemma, decomP, Dark Sky Magazine, >kill author, Emprise Review, and Night Train, among others.

Mel Bosworth: Pooh in Meatspace
ebook, 20 pages
available as Kindle, Epub, Pdf, rtf, PDB etc. file

author talk: for more about Mel Bosworth, writing and technology, visit the author talk with him: "Mel Bosworth + Jessie Carty on breathing, writing, the internet, scares, yielding, boxes, greed, + red, black and white."

related links: e-books, time+space

Movie Plots - Nick Admussen (Epiphany)

 

Movie Plots by Nick Admussen is an experimental chapbook, both in content and format. It features a series of disorientingly absorbing prose poems that take thirty different film genres as points of departure for riffs on identity, the imagination, the meaning and coherency of life, and even more indefinable matters. Sample plots are available online at epiphany: Read a sample. 

But that's just half of the book's unique story. The book is published as "book kit", which consists of 1) a printer-ready PDF, 2) a limited-edition letterpress cover and 3) an instruction. There is a how-to-build-your-book-pages with trailer and guidelines online at Printing your book kit.

Nick Admussen is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, currently researching contemporary Chinese prose poetry and living in Los Angeles. His poetry has most recently appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Barrow Street, the Mid-American Review, and Blackbird.

About Ephiphany
Epiphany is committed to publishing literary work in which form is as valued as content: "We look for writing, wherever it may fall on the spectrum from experimental to traditional, that is thoroughly realized not only in its vision but also in its commitment to artistry. We are especially open to writers whose explorations of new territory may not yet have found validation elsewhere."

Nick Admussen: Movie Plots (Epiphany)
short stories
book kit: 5$

related links: experimental, short stories

My Apartment - Michael K. White (blueprint)

"At one time, all of this was prairie as far as the eye could see. Imagine those tall musky weeds you yank every summer growing to their full height; an ocean of them. As far as you could see. It was here, right on this spot that the Building was erected, a breezy late 1940's brick apartment house.
The twenty apartments in the Building are spacious, high ceiling and bright, with skylights and big windows. We could go into number 3 or number 7. But no, let's go into Apartment Number 9."

My Apartment is the epic history of a certain apartment (#9) and a selection of episodes from the wide spectrum of tenants there - presented in micro novel format. Told in a surreal, non linear series of short chapters, My Apartment is a ghost book; a phantom memoir.

Michael K. White is one half of the semi-legendary playwriting team Broken Gopher Ink. His low cholesterol mega monologue play, My Heart And the Real World ran for almost two years in New York City , enabling the authors to eat at John's Pizzeria. In 2007 his story 13 Halloweens was chosen as one of the ten best stories published in 2006 by the super cool folks at Story South. Currently, a staged reading of his play I Know That You Love Me is on at The Trench, Denver.

About blueprintpress
Founded in 2006, blueprintpress is the print side wing of BluePrintReview. The current focus is on new and experimental formats, like micro novels: hand-made books that fit in an airmail envelope. There is a second micro novel that is open to pre-orders now: The Republic of Love by Nora Nadjarian. Both micro novels are offered as signed author copies, hand-made limited editions. They will be delivered with international air mail, and are available as single volumes, or as bundle (more here: blueprint micro novels).

Michael K. White: My Apartment
micro novel
24 pages, hand-made + signed copy 7$

related links: about a place, novels+novellas

48 Hour Magazine - issue zero: Hustle

"On May 7th the editors of 48 Hour Magazine announced a theme for the debut issue: Hustle. Interested writers and artists had 24 hours to produce and submit work. The next 24 hours were for the editorial team to "snip, mash and gild" the best submissions until they had a magazine. At the end of that period, the magazine was available for purchase at MagCloud. And it's beautiful." - Utne Reader

"We made 48HR Magazine over one weekend in May. From noon on May 7th through noon on the 9th, a team circled up around the original Rolling Stone conference table in Mother Jones' offices to transform 1,502 submissions from around the world into a chorus of voices, all harmonizing around the same theme: hustle. 48 Hour Magazine features 60 pages of writers and artists from your favorite magazines sharing space with previously unpublished new talent, shaped by some of the best editors in the business. You're going to love it." -The Editors

About 48 Hour Magazine
48 Hour Magazine is a raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media's old limits. As the name suggests, the concept is to write, photograph, illustrate, design, edit, and ship a magazine in two days. No long commitments. No pitches. No grinding editing process.
A representative sample of "Hustle" is available online: Selections from Issue Zero.

48 Hour Magazine - "Hustle"
60 pages
$10