Best of 2010

some end-of-year-s-press reflections, inspired by the "Popular Posts" in the sidebar, and a stroll through keywords and country lists. the most visited blog posts of 2010 are:

Frankfurt Book Fair - themes, sights, links
photos and notes from the Frankfurt Book Fair, with feature South America + thematic hotspots

author talk: Daniela Elza + Arlene Ang
poets Daniela Elza and Arlene Ang talk about poetry, collaborations, materialism and loss, the process of putting a manuscript together, and .. birds.

A Year of Flash This Summer
a feature on the flash writing challenge 52/250: A Year of Flash. the feature was included in the daily summer special

it's interesting that of the most visited blog posts in this blog that is basically about books - none is actually a book post. same goes for the current popular posts:

current popular posts:
NaSmaStoMo (january writing challenge), The Enpipe Line (poetic resistance project) and I Fucked A Girl and I Liked It - Eventually (essay)

the visitors of this blog come from:
the United States, Canada, Germany, UK, India, Italy, Russia, Netherlands, Cyprus, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand ...

& some highlights of the keyword statistic of searches that led to daily s-press
- "book that ends with the word mayonnaise"
- "catchy book fair phrases"
- "daily naked blogpost"
- "i am here and you are gone"
- "aquarium thunderclap"

blog birthday:
this blog started on March 8, and will have its first birthday in about 3 months.

The Enpipe Line

The Enpipe Line is 1,173 kilometers of collaborative poetry written in resistance to Enbridge's Northern Gateway Pipelines proposal and projects like it around the planet.

Initiated and hosted by Christine Leclerc, this project started on the 1st of November and keeps growing continually at the Enpipe Line Project Page.

Christine Leclerc says: "The resistance of communities, activists and cultural workers to socially and environmentally destructive projects, like Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway Pipelines, inspire this project. I'm lucky to be able to collaborate on a project of this scale with so many inspiring people!" (there also is an interview in Geist on the project).

To contribute to the Enpipe lines, send new or existing work with date and place of creation. You can submit several times. For details, visit the guidelines.

Christine Leclerc is a Vancouver-based author and activist. She teaches Creative Writing at Langara College Continuing Studies, you can listen to her reading at the summer dream literary arts festival.

related links: other literary web projects (a river of stones, Glass Woman Prize,  >language >place blog carnival, #storysunday, 52/250 - a year of flash..)

Black Nature (UGA)

Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. The anthology is edited by Camille T. Dungy, who selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics.

"Dungy enlarges our understanding of the nexus between nature and culture, and introduces a 'new way of thinking about nature writing and writing by black Americans.'" —Booklist

This collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements. A preview is available online at googlebooks: Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry

Camille T. Dungy is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. She is the author of two poetry collections, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison and Suck on the Marrow, and has helped edit two other poetry anthologies.

About UGA
The University of Georgia Press is the only scholarly publisher within the University System of Georgia. A full member of the Association of American University Presses since 1940, the Press is also the oldest and largest book publisher in the state. With a full-time staff of 24 publishing professionals, the Press currently publishes 75-80 new books a year and has 1000 titles in print.

Black Nature
poetry collection
432 pages

related links: nature, gender/race, international, anthologies, poetry

NaSmaStoMo - National Small Stone Month

You might have heard of NaNoWriMo, where participants are encouraged to write an entire novel in a single month. There now is a new event, taking place the first time in January 2011: NaSmaStoMo - National Small Stone Month, initiated by Fiona Robyn.

The challenge, should you choose to take part, is to write a small stone - a polished moment of paying proper attention - every day during the month of January.

The idea behind NaSmaStoMo? - Fiona explains: "I’m a believer in making use of the writing process to help us connect with ourselves and with the world. Writing helps me to pay more attention, and for me this leads to feeling more gratitude and love for everything around me (including the difficult and dark bits). I think writing can be seen as a spiritual practice. I was thinking about how I could encourage more people to try out writing a small stone as a daily practice, and my fiancé Kaspa came up with the idea of borrowing ‘NaMoWriMo’ and making it our own! We’ve had a stunning response so far."

To join, visit the blog note "Welcome to a river of stones!", and post the web address where you'll be posting your small stones in the commment section - then you get added to the blogroll. To get into the mood for writing small stones, read the recent a river of stones entries, and visit the growing blog roll in the sidebar - it already includes more than 30 participating blogs.

Fiona Robyn is a novelist, blogger and creativity coach living in the skirts of the Malvern hills in Worcestershire in the UK. Her three novels are published by Snowbooks and she has also published a book of ‘small stones’. She has been writing a short observational piece at a small stone every day for several years, and she publishes other people’s stones at a handful of stones.

related links: other literary web projects (Glass Woman Prize,  >language >place blog carnival, #storysunday, 42/250 - a year of flash..) + link to NaNoWriMo

On a Narrow Windowsill (Folded Word)

On a Narrow Windowsill: written on four continents and read on six, the works in this anthology celebrate the birth of a new literary form: the tweet. The editors J.S. Graustein and Rose Auslander note: "Ironically, the 140-character limit of the Twitter platform has inspired new and veteran writers alike to stretch traditional boundaries. Some experiment with abbreviated poetic forms. Others create back-story through innuendo. All make every word—every character—count. This collection will introduce you to 43 of these pioneers who venture out each day onto text's narrow windowsill. Come, join them, and sit a spell. There's room."

This collection of poems and stories from Folded Word's twitter-zines PicFic, Form.Reborn (now closed) and unFold, features the work of Nathalie Boisard-Beudin, Eric Burke, Ben White, Kaolin Fire, Karyn Eisler, Mel Bosworth  and others - here a full list of contributors and here a windowsill preview.

About Folded Word (+PicFic + unFold +Heron)
Folded Word is an independent press that continually seeks new ways of connecting readers to new literary voices. The editors say: "though we do sell our books and chapbooks, we offer free poetry and fiction to the public in our Twitter-zines PicFic and unFold, as well as our print broadside, Heron. We also value craftsmanship, both of literary works and the medium in which they are rendered--as demonstrated by our handcrafted Signature Series chapbooks. Folded Word is managed by J.S. Graustein with the support of Rose Auslander, Ben White, and the entire Folded family of contributors."

On a Narrow Windowsill
twitter fiction and poetry anthology
(note: if you order from now until 31 December 2010 you can enter to win every 2011 title Folded Word will publish. details on the Folded blog in Loads of Windowsills)

related links: twitter fiction, international, anthologies

Last Winter’s Leaves - Michael J. Solender (Full of Crow)

What is it that ignites the fear
I don’t want to die
I just don’t want to live like this
there’s a difference

Last Winter’s Leaves is a collection of very short prose and stories, written by Michael J. Solender after his life took an unexpected turn when he became gravely ill and despondent. After several months, with the constant love and support of his wife and some very close and dear friends, the malaise he experienced lifted. Solender says: "The following works are the first pieces I wrote during my recovery. Writing has always been therapeutic for me. This is truer today than at any time during my life."

The collection is available as a printed chapbook in the Full Of Crow Chapbook Series and as free eBook.

Michael J. Solender is a freelance writer and editor of Full Of Crow’s MiCrow section, and On The Wing. He lives in North Carolina with his wife Harriet, and blogs daily at Not From Here, Are You?

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. Many of their collaborative zines are developed at their community ning site, The Sphere.Their most widely distributed collaborative zine, "MUST" has been printed thousands of times, all over the world.

Michael J. Solender: Last Winter's Leaves
collection
available as printed chapbook + free e-book

The Glass Woman Prize

The Glass Woman Prize is awarded for a work of short fiction or creative non-fiction written by a woman. Winners of the Eights Prize have now been announced: The winning story (US$500) is Wanderer by Susan Gibb - for more about this story, visit the author's blog note. 

Second Prize (US$100) winner is Star Anise by Kari Nguyen. Third Prize (US$50) is A Virgin Fire by Andrea Price Berthot. Other top contenders for the Eight Glass Woman Prize are listed on the Glass Woman Prize Website.

About the Glass Woman Prize
This prize is an ongoing literary initiative by Beate Sigriddaughter, who explains: "I want women to be able to acknowledge, transparently, who we are, and that who we are is not trivial and unimportant, despite the fact that it is not typically rewarded in a man-made and money-motivated world."

The first glass woman prize was awared in March 2007, previous winning stories include: Sanctuary by Julie Innis, Notes from the Night by Louise Beech, The Story of My Life (So Far) by Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz, Vicky's Secret by Mary Saracino and Only the Homeless Find the Divine by Nanette Rayman Rivera. There is detailed archive page with more previous prize winners and links to their stories: Past Prize Winners. 

Beate Sigriddaughter grew up in Nürnberg, Germany and is now a resident of North Vancouver, British Columbia. She has published short stories and poetry, and has written several books. For more about her and her work, visit her biography page.

The Ninth Glass Woman Prize reading period is now in effect, from September 22, 2010 through March 21, 2011. For guidelines, visit the webpage: Glass Woman Prize.

related link: web projects, gender and race, prize winners

Detailed Still - Karen Neuberg (Poets Wear Prada)

Imagine if we could look at that first moment about which all our future decisions on the way the world responds to us have been incrementally based.

Detailed Still is the debut poetry collection of Karen Neuberg, a preview is available online at Isuu: Detailled Still. "These poems seem not written, but conjured, as if imprinted by a mind alive to the 'tiny, Zen-bell voice,' insisting that questions reveal more than answers." - Dean Kostos, author of The Sentence That Ends with a Comma,

"Karen Neuberg’s marvelous accomplishment in Detailed Still is that each poem is like a tiny mirrored room that reflects and refracts experience, evoking all the complications of memory and desire. Time is this poet’s subject, and how desire is quickened or lost over time, and how we understand that only through memory." — Molly Peacock, author of The Second Blush

Karen Neuberg’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Boxcar Poetry Review, Diner, and The Same, among others. She’s a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, holds an MFA from The New School, and is associate editor of Inertia Magazine.

About Poets Wear Prada
Poets Wear Prada / PWP Books is a small press based in Hoboken, New Jersey devoted to introducing new authors through limited edition, high-quality chaplets, primarily of poetry.

Karen Neuberg: Detailed Still
ISBN: 0981767869
28 pages, 10.00$

>language >place blog carnival #1 (blueprint)

> Language > Place is a joined blog cyber journey featuring international perspectives on language and place.

The key to this web project is its decentral structure: a blog carnival. All participating authors put up their text in their own blog, and then forwarded the link to the current host of the carnival – who then put together a central page that branches out into the web. The result is a colorful and diverse collection of themes and voices, a virtual journey through different aspects of language in different regions and continents in changing places.

Edition #1 includes 24 participating blogs from all over the world, and is hosted by BluePrintReview editor Dorothee Lang in virtual notes. The themes of this first edition range from "Crossing Borders" to "(M)other Tongues", from "Home, Abroad" to "The beauty of language" and from "City Storie" to "Identity and Language" - here the direct link to the edition: > language > place edition #1

Edition #2 of > language > place will be hosted by author and journalist Nicolette Wong in her blog Meditations in an Emergency. Submissions are now open for edition 2: guidelines.

About blueprint
>language >place is a blueprint project - the base of blueprint is BluePrintReview, an international literary online journal with theme issues. The currently issue is #25: "two²", upcoming in December is #26 "identity". Other blueprint projects include blueprintpress, the print side wing of BluePrintReview, the latest publication are 2 micro novels: "The Republic of Love" by Nora Nadjarian and "My Apartment" by Michael K. White.

> language > place edition #1
a web project

Making Good Use of August - Sherry O'Keefe (Finishing Line)

Sherry O'Keefe is a descendent of Montana pioneers and grew up in a remote power camp. Making Good Use of August is her first poetry chapbook.

"Making Good Use of August announces Sherry O'Keefe as a strong new voice in the poetry of place. Each poem in this collection while unique, builds a unified narrative image vast and detailed as a mural or tapestry. We vicariously see through O'Keefe and her people the small details remembered from a rural childhood, the bitterness of seduction and regret, and the difficulties and pleasures of navigating this modern life." -  Justin Evans, author of Working in the Bird House

"Sherry O'Keefe tells the stories of a world that "city kids won't know." Riding in the front seat of her pickup truck, the reader is treated to a tour only a lifelong resident can provide. Expertly navigating the back roads, she guides us through a vivid and idiosyncratic landscape, pointing out where all the best secrets are kept. O'Keefe has a wonderful eye for detail, a vision both quirky and deeply human." - Nina Corwin, Fifth Wednesday Journal

Sherry O'Keefe's most current work has appeared or is forthcoming in Switched-on Gutenberg, THEMA, Terrain. Org., PANK, Avatar Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Two Review, Babel Fruit, The High Desert Journal and Main Street Rag. Her full collection of poetry, Loss of Ignition, is making the rounds while she works on the editorial teams for Fifth Wednesday Journal and The Centrifugal Eye. She is the Poetry Editor for Soundzine.

About Finishing Line Press
Finishing Line Press is an award-winning small press publisher. New Releases: The Bracelet by Lou Amyx, Tropical Diagnosis by Virginia Aronson and Cracklers at Night by Rita Banerjee. Finishing Line Press is currently calling for manuscripts for teir 2011 New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition, details.

Outside Voices - Jake Berry & Jeffrey Side (Otoliths)

Outside Voices is the protocol of an 18-month transatlantic email correspondence between poet, musician and artist Jake Berry and Argotist-editor Jeffrey Side, it ranges across and intertwines a variety of topics that include: poetry and music; film and TV; the changes in culture over the past few decades; the differences in regional U.S. and U.K. accents; the difficulty of reaching the famous in order to interview them; the songwriter as poet and vice versa. Two excerpts of the book are online in Jeffrey Side's blog: Published Email Correspondence.

Jeffrey Side is the editor of Argotist Online, a magazine that it is devoted entirely to poetry and poetics and has an own Ebooks-section.

Jake Berry is a poet, musician and visual artist, and the author of Brambu Drezi, Species of Abandoned Light, Drafts of the Sorcery, and numerous other books. He has been an active member of the global arts and literary community for more than 25 years. Recently, he created a cut-up long poem with Craig Hill, which is available as free dowload: SIXIXSIX

About Otoliths
Otoliths is a magazine of many e-things, published by Mark Young, Australia. The online issue of Otoliths appears quarterly, the current issue is: southern spring, 2010. The publishing arm of Otoliths began as print editions of the e-zine Otoliths, but has since expanded to include books & chapbooks by authors associated with the journal. Recent publications include Unable to Fully California by Larry Sawyer and A Marzipan Factory by Grzegorz Wróblewski.

Jake Berry & Jeffrey Side: Outside Voices
Print: $13.45

Qantum Genre in the Planet of Arts (Paraphilia)

Quantum Genre in the Planet of Arts is an E-thology dedicated to the Quantum Genre in literature and art. Beautifully designed and illustrated, the e-thololgy offers a “weird-weird” fiction whose “quantum” quality lies in a way of representation of characters and their “obscure” world. It has nothing to do with sci-fi or the mainstream plot-oriented fiction. Both literary works and artistic images included in the anthology reveal a universe of diversified possibilities and characters whose quantum multiplicity and uncertainty would make one.

The anthology presents short stories by Tantra Bensko, Tom Bradley, Rachel Kendall, Dorothee Lang, Kyle Muntz, j.a.tyler, D. Harlan Wilson, and others. An article by an acclaimed film critic, Betty Jo Tucker, a founding member of the San Diego Film Critics’ Society, opens the door to the QG in cinema. It is followed by a script by Misha Chariton. Last but not least, we are proud to present an excerpt of a truly fascinating novel, Scaraboccio, quantum in essence, written by Grace Andreacchi. You can read this anthology online or download and read at your leisure: PDF.

The e-thology is edited by V. Ulea (Vera Zubarev), Ph.D., teaches decision making in chess literature and film in the University of Pennsylvania. She has published books of literary criticism, poetry and prose, including most recently, a collection of short stories, Snail (previously featured in s-Press). She writes in Russian and English, and recently become a poet laureate of Paustovsky Municipal Prize (Odessa, Ukraine).

About Paraphilia
Paraphilia is an unlicensed, underground enterprise that renounces established and arbitrary rules, regulations, guidelines, genres, categories, and all other manmade shackles. Paraphilia publishes Paraphilia Magazine and books.

Quantum Genre in the Planet of Arts (scroll down a bit)
direct links: online-version / pdf
e-anthology
189 pages

naked beauty - John C. Goodman (Blue Yellow Dog)

In his poetry collection naked beauty, John C. Goodman's navigates through the real, the subconscious and the abstract "like a seasoned ship’s Captain... pushing us overboard (“there always seems to be a further place to fall”) then fishing us back up (“in a baptism of beginning”) to continue on this disturbing yet enlightening voyage toward the “wreckage of the future” - Frances Ward, editor of HammeredOut and Asphalt Tree Press

"John C. Goodman finds his poems in the quotidian objects, people and experiences of modern life. His poems capture the oscillating perspective of the poet's shifting italicized "I" - the transient flux of the experienced poet's identity - in which his "stream of experience" finds the extraordinary in the mundane, music amid the white noise of traffic, and beauty in the modern urban metropolis." - Mark McCawley, Fresh Raw Cuts, Urban Graffiti, Greensleeve Editions

John C. Goodman lives in St John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada. His novel, Talking to Wendigo (Turnstone Press) was short-listed for an Arthur Ellis Award. He is the editor of ditch, an online poetry magazine.

About Blue Yellow Dog
Blue Yellow Dog is a small press that is building on strong manuscript submissions from both young and experienced poets. Also available at Blue & Yellow Dog: Realities of Bifocal Translations by Felino A. Soriano (previously feature on s-Press), Rien Ici by Raymond Farr, DRUNKER/holding ember by Raymond Farr, and the first print issue of Blue & Yellow Dog Spring & Summer Issues 1 &2. Available soon: Matthew Johnstone’s Let’s be close Rope to mast, you Old light, Adam Fieled’s Equations, and Richard Kostelanetz’s chap book FICT IONS.

John C. Goodman: naked beauty
poetry
62 pages
ISBN 10-098-295350X

to the river - Rose Hunter (Artistically Declined)

to the river is Rose Hunter's first book of poetry. She weaves an interlinked collection of poems ranging from Sydney to Canada, to Vienna, to Mexico, and back again.

"Hunter's poems represent a map for the landscape of our everyday actions. At times simple and others intriguingly complex, Hunter’s wide range of influences are clearly evident throughout as she manages to touch on seemingly every subject possible." (full review) - Patrick Trotti, JMWW

"to the river is more than one woman’s journey through life: it’s a series of quests, each presenting its own challenges, and the question is: Will she survive the next? Read these poems and find out." (full review) - Molly Gaudry, author of We Take Me Apart

Rose Hunter blogs at Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have to Take Me Home. At the moment she is somewhere between Australia and Mexico, with the most important parts of her in Mexico. She is also the editor of the online poetry journal YB. Her collection of short stories, Another Night at the Circus, was previously featured on s-Press.

About Artistically Declined Press
Artistically Declined Press is devoted to the pairing of fantastic writing with great design, creating complete works of art. The press publishes books of fiction and poetry, the literary journal Sententia, and ADP.PDF's, a series of free ebooks, and is run by Ryan W. Bradley, who writes and lives in Oregon with his wife and two sons.

Rose Hunter: to the river
poetry collection
96 pages, $9

Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (Oxford University)

The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry is the first anthology to present a full range of multilingual poetries from Latin America, covering over 500 years of a poetic tradition as varied, robust, and vividly imaginative as any in the world.

Editors Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman present a fresh and expansive selection of Latin American poetry, from the indigenous responses to the European conquest, through early feminist poetry of the 19th century, the early 20th century "Modernismo" and "Vanguardia" movements, later revolutionary and liberation poetry of the 1960s, right up to the experimental, visual and oral poetries being written and performed today. "The most comprehensive, representative, and up-to-date survey in English of Latin American Poetry, bar none." --Library Journal

An interesting and comrehensive review by Ken L. Walker is up in Coldfront: review link, the review includes several quotes from poems.

The editors: Cecilia Vicuna is an independent poet, artist, and editor (here'a some of her own work: "Water Writing: Anthological Exhibiton"). Ernesto Livon-Grosman is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Department of Romance Languages & Cultures at Boston College.

About Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (USA) is linked to Oxford University Press in Oxford, England, which is a department of Oxford University and is the oldest and largest continuously operating university press in the world. The first book to be printed in Oxford—the Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, attributed to St. Jerome, by Theodoric Rood—was printed in 1478, only two years after Caxton set up the first printing press in England, following the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg in 1450. Today, the OUP group of publishing companies constitutes the world's largest university press, being larger than all the American university presses and Cambridge University Press combined. Worldwide, the OUP group publishes more than 6,000 new titles a year and employs approximately 5,000 people across 50 countries.

Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry
poetry anthology
608 pages
ISBN: 0-19-512454-5

Angels Carry the Sun - Phoebe Wilcox (Lilly)

Angels Carry the Sun is the debut novel of Phoebe Wilcox. Set in the early 1980s, in a pocket of rural poverty in one of the wealthiest counties in Pennsylvania, it tells the story of Flora’s four-year obsession with Finn, her high school teacher, as revisited during the summer before she leaves for college. It is a lyrical, spirited, quirky and tender coming-of-age story.

You can listen to Phoebe Wilcox reading from Angels Carry the Sun in this book video, and here's Phoebe talking about her book.

"Beautiful, poetic, tragic. Witness the miracle of words that is Phoebe Wilcox...then back away slowly." - Matthew "Nobius" Evelsizer, Calliope Nerve Media

Phoebe Wilcox's poems and stories can be found in The Chaffey Review, Bartleby-Snopes, River Poets Journal, ginosko, Wild River Review, Gloom Cupboard, Sixers Review, and many other literary magazines. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, Recidivist (Lilly Press, April 2010). An excerpt from a second novel, Flower Symbolism for Dummies has been published in Wild Violet. Two of her short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart prize: "The Librarian and the Janitor", and "Carp with Water in Their Ears" (River Poets Journal Spring 2008, pdf journal link). Lilly Press has nominated Angels Carry the Sun for the PEN/Faulkner award.

About Lilly Press
Lilly Press is the publishing wing of River Poets Journal. The press publishes fiction/poetry chapbooks/anthologies/journals, and is interested in imaginative work that lasts in your memory long after the reading. Recent publications include River Poems - An Anthology.

Phoebe Wilcox: Angels Carry the Sun
novel
220 pages, $14.95
ISBN: 0980177561

author talk: Michael K. White + Nora Nadjarian

ABOUT THE AUTHORS + THE TALK

Earlier this year, blueprintpress put a call up for micro novels - and received a pile of manuscripts that ranged from historic to futuristic. 2 of the manuscripts turned into hand-made micro novels: "The Republic of Love" by Nora Nadjarian and "My Apartment" by Michael K. White.

Michael K. White is one half of the semi-legendary playwriting team Broken Gopher Ink, and lives in Colorado. Nora Nadjarian comes from Cyprus. Her work has won prizes or been commended in various international competitions, including the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, the Féile Filíochta International Poetry Competition, the Binnacle Ultra-Short Competition and the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize.

Now the 2 authors - who didn't know each other before - met in the virtual daily cafe for an author talk:



THE MOST REAL THING

MICHAEL K. WHITE: What is your favorite guitar solo? Mine is the one in "Cinnamon Girl." I could live my whole life inside that solo.

NORA NADJARIAN: I don’t know if this counts, but I was just listening to Sting’s “Fragile”. I love that guy, and his guitar.

MKW: Do you prefer writing poetry over prose?

NN: I started out as a poet, and the prose came later. A lot of my prose is poetic anyway; quite a few people have told me that.

MKW: I see that too. In "The Republic of Love" I like the way you write in an almost elliptical manner. I like the way you play with structure, very much like a poem, the switching of POV, etc. I really like the way you didn't explain everything. You let the story tell itself in its own way. You let it unfold.

NN: The truth is I am a person of few words, even when I speak, and so I don’t believe in writing words just for the sake of filling up a page. What you write should have some purpose, should mean something, and you shouldn’t have to fill up pages and pages just to make your point, as is the case in poetry. I loathe stories which take ages to get to the point, books full of descriptions of somebody’s fingers and toes and mango trees and 500 pages of boredom.

MKW: I agree with that. Its one thing to set the mood but it's another to kill it. I'm thinking of the first seventy pages or so of Moby Dick...the book not the drum solo, although the drum solo is just as boring.

MKW: How do you write? What is your process? Rituals? Day or night writer?

 >> click to read the whole dialogue:
>> author talk: Michael K. White + Nora Nadjarian
>> on night writing, mayonnaise, the 21st century and ice penii

revisited: Postal Poetry

Between 2008 and 2009, the webzine Postal Poetry showcased poetry postcards. The magazine was open for poems that were combined with images in the form of postcards, real or potential/digital. The site featured some amazing works, yet closed down in March 2009.

It's not unusual that online magazines close down - and it's sadly even not unusual that they fold completely, and withdraw the online pages from the web, blanking out all words and images once published. Not so Postal Poetry: here's a magazine that closed - then went ahead and created a new archive page that now showcases all published postcards! You can find it all here: Postal Poetry.

Contributor include: Tammy Ho Lai-ming, Christine Swint, Jean Morris, Fernando de Sousa, Marja-Leena Rathje, Jennifer Saunders, and many others. Make sure to click the first postcard "The Way to America"- it's the starting point of the project that now finally found a place, too.

About Postal Poetry + Videopoems
Postal Poetry was published by Dave Bonta and Dana Guthrie Martin. Read more about the story of Postal Poetry in the 'About' section of the archive - and if you are interested in digital poetry, then make sure to visit Dave Bonta's new web project Moving Poems, it features videopoems, filmpoems and animated poems from around the web.

A Note on Lost and Found Online Magazines
Online literary magazines that went offline are also one of feature themes of the BluePrintReview issue "re/visit" - some research on the theme brought a surprise back then: some of the online literary magazines that had gone offline and were considered lost together with all their content turned out to be still available in parts, in the web archives of the Waybackmachine, here's an article with 'lost' links: Lost, Found, Dead + Alive: Online Literary Magazines.

---
website: Postal Poetry.

Ten Walks/Two Talks - Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch (Ugly Duckling)

Ten Walks/Two Talks combines a series of sixty-minute, sixty-sentence walks around Manhattan with a pair of roving dialogues—one of which takes place during a late-night "philosophical" ramble through Central Park. Mapping 21st-century New York, Cotner and Fitch update the meandering and meditative form of Basho's travel diaries to construct a descriptive/dialogic fugue.

Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch have performed their dialogic improvisations across the country and internationally. They recently completed another collaborative manuscript called Conversations over Stolen Food. The audio magazine textsound (which is worth a visit itself) features 8+ hours of their solo and collaborative work in a special issue: Improvisations 2006-2010.

Fitch's critical study Not Intelligent, But Smart: Rethinking Joe Brainard is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Cotner lives in New York City. Fitch is an assistant professor in the University of Wyoming's MFA Program.

About Ugly Duckling Presse
Created by a group of artists and writers without commercial publishing experience, Ugly Duckling Presse has a unique publishing structure with a non-hierarchical editorial collective at its heart. Growing out of the Ugly Duckling zine of the early 1990s, and incorporated as a not-for-profit art & publishing collective in 2002, UDP produces small to mid-size editions of new poetry, translations, lost works, and artist’s books, averaging more than 25 titles a year. The Presse favors emerging, international, and “forgotten” writers with well-defined formal or conceptual projects that are difficult to place at other presses

Jon Cotner + Andy Fitch: Ten Walks/Two Talks
Poetry/Nonfiction
88 pages, $14
ISBN 978-1-933254-67-8

first issue: #3

#3 is a quarterly, independent not-for-profit journal bringing together art and art theory from various global contexts. The editors of #3 are interested in "collaborations with artists, designers, writers and curators from across all media and cultures."The first issue of #3 now launched - the full issue is available as pdf-download: #3 / Vol.1.

The issue features a wide range of themes: architecture, art, media, sociology, for example: "Trace & Intent" by Daniel Staincliffe, "Welcome to the Labyrinth (an excerpt from Sex, Death and Design in the Digital Culture)" by Ken Hollings, "Faces and Phases - an excerpt from "Mapping Our Histories: A Visual History of Black Lesbians in Post-Apartheid South Africa" by Zanele Muholi and
"A Constructed Conversation (between Kay Rosen and Virgina Woolf)" by Kay Rosen - if you like visuals / wordart, make sure to check out the Kay Rosen link, it leads to an online wordart exhibition room.

Also included: a thought-provoking interview with Paolo Pedercini, an artist and game designer who explores the intersection between gaming and politics - here one of the interview questions: "The anti-WTO slogan often credited to Jello Biafara, “Don’t hate the media, become the media,” is cited on your website, and you teach a course at Carnegie Mellon titled “Game Design for Artists, Mavericks, and Troublemakers.” You seem to theorize resistance to major entertainment corporations and, as you stated, are concerned with the opaqueness of more “serious” games."

#3 is edited by Josh McNamara, Neal MacInnes and Hana Tanimura.

website: http://www.journal3.org/
direct pdf-link: #3 / Vol.1

Everything Was Good-bye - Gurjinder Basran (Mother Tongue)

Everything Was Good-bye centers around Meena, a young Indo Canadian woman growing up in the lower mainland of British Columbia and traces her life as she struggles to assert her independence in a Punjabi community. Raised by her tradition bound widowed mother, Meena knows the freedoms of her Canadian peers can never be hers, but unlike her sisters, she is reluctant to submit to a life that is defined by a suitable marriage. Though a narrative moving between race and culture, it is ultimately a story of love, loss and self acceptance amidst shifting cultural ideals.

This novel won the Search for the Great B.C. Novel Contest, chosen from sixty-four manuscripts by Jack Hodgins, who described it as "a fascinating story, skillfully written, of a rebellious young woman's remarkable courage.”

Gurjinder Basran studied creative writing at Simon Fraser University and The Banff Center for the Arts. Her work was shortlisted for the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and earned her a place in the Vancouver Sun’s annual speculative arts and culture article, “Ones To Watch.” A 2006 graduate of Simon Fraser University’s award-winning Writer’s Studio, Gurjinder has read her work at the Vancouver International Writers Festival and has been both a panelist and facilitator on writing at the 2007 Writer’s Studio alumni symposium. She lives in Delta, British Columbia with her husband and two sons. This is her first novel.

About Mother Tongue Publishing
Formerly Mother Tongue Press, Mother Tongue Publishing concentrates on publishing unique, bold and stimulating books of British Columbia art history, fine art and literature. Recent publications include Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry, edited by Mona Fertig & Harold Rhenisch, and 4 Poets - this new BC poets series features emerging and established BC poets in a fresh format that explores the broader scope of the poet’s work.

Gurjinder Basran: Everything Was Good-bye
novel, 288 pages
ISBN 978-1-896949-07-9

related links: international, gender+race

The Beaufort Diaries - T. Cooper & A. Petrowsky (Melville)

The graphic novel The Beaufort Diaries tells the inspiring story of a polar bear who escapes extinction by going Hollywood. It may sound like a familiar story - boy goes to Hollywood, boy befriends big star, boy gets almost as famous as big star, boy finds fame tricky - but The Beaufort Diaries are subversively different. For one thing, the “boy” is a polar bear. For another thing, the “big star” is Leonardo DiCaprio. And together, they decide to make an action movie… about the environment.

The graphic novel is a collaboration between T. Cooper (story) and Alex Petrowsky (illustration). The illustrations are poster-like, full color images, sample pages are up on Petrowsky's Beaufort webpage, click the cover to open the illustrated pages), and just beyond the book is a book video that features Beaufort, and a story text excerpt is online in the Outlet: From “The Beaufort Diaries” by T. Cooper.

T. Cooper is also the author of two regular old novels, Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes and Some of the Parts, as well as co-editor of an anthology of short stories entitled A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing. He lives in New York with his family.

Alex Petrowsky is an enterpeneur, a nomad, an artist, an illustrator - for more of his projects, visit his webpage.

About Melville House PublishingMelville House is an independent publishing house born out of the book blog MobyLives and founded in Hoboken, New Jersey, which is also known as the Left Bank of New York City, and which is where Marlon Brando said to Eve Marie Saint (in "On the Waterfront," which was shot in Hoboken), "Come on, I'll walk you home. There are a lot of guys around here with only one thing on their mind." As it turns out, what's on the mind of a lot of those men -- and local women, too -- is good, solid literature, especially literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry. In an amazing coincidence, this is exactly what Melville House provides.

Frankfurt Book Fair 2010 - themes, sights, hotspots

Frankfurt Book Fair is on - it's one of the largest and oldest book fairs, a meeting point for over 7300 exhibitors from more than 100 countries, with a tradition that spans more than 500 years. The first 3 days of the fair are business days, the weekend is for the general public.

1) THEMES, SIGHTS, LINKS:

Galleria: the northern entry of the book fair, which directly leads to the halls of the International Publishers


technology + change: even though most books presented are print books, a lot of the forum discussions are about e-books. didn't notice it when i took the picture, but it's a collage of some of the main themes: print books, "picturing + poeting" (the yellow book), and next to it: “Massive Change” – and beyond it, upside down: "New Technologies".


contrast of eras: the fair central plaza with the circus-style"Lesezelt" (reading tent) - and in the background, the modern "MesseTurm" (FairTower) with company offices.


German books + authors: Helmut Karasek with his new book (on historic letters), interviewed at a publisher's book stall. more on current german's books, in an essay from The Millions: The View from Germany by Garth Risk Hallberg, who noted: "On the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair, it's striking evidence of a literary trade imbalance that so many American books should be prominent in German buchhandlungs when so few German writers are available in English at all."

going Asia: the Hong Kong Pavillon and a large group presentation of Chinese publishers - China was last year's (controversial) guest of honour. next year's guest will be: Iceland.


e-books: this year's unofficial controversial guest of honour: e-readers and e-books. below, one of the many presentations / expert talks on the theme - more in the book fair newsletter: "Digital heads discuss the e-book market and the challenges that face us all"



~~~~

2) SPOTLIGHT SOUTH AMERICA + NOBEL PRIZE


Argentina is this year's guest of honour, with a special pavillon. The pavillon is designed in a labyrinth-like architecture that invites the visitor to explore both the history and the literature of Argentina.


To discover new literary talents and enable publication in as many languages as possible, the Argentinian Foreign Ministry has launched a programme for the support of translations: 100 titles by Argentinian authors were translated into german in 2010. More: Literature on the Move: Argentina at the Book Fair



Nobel Prize in Literature: parallel to the book fair, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced: Mario Vargas Llosa, from Peru. He received the prize "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".



Vargas Llosa is the first South American winner of the prize since 30 years - in 1982, the prize went to his favourite rival - Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez (more: BBC article with a note on Marquez / official Nobel webpage).

Nobel Flashback: last year's laureat was Herta Müller, a german author of prose and poetry whose writing is inspired by her life in Romania under Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. She received the prize for being an author "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed".
more: the wiki list of laureats with all previous prize laureats, and here a virtual note on Herta Müller's book "Always, the fox was the hunter" + a discussion on persecuted writers. & following the theme of discussion + rivalry, a facebook thread: "But it's now been 14 years since a poet won the Nobel Prize.."

~~~~~

3) HALLS & HOTSPOTS


halls: Frankfurt book fair takes place in 6 main multi-level-halls, the halls are connected through corridors.


themes: halls and floor levels are dedicated to themes: fiction and non-fiction, children's books, internationl publishers, academic publishers; added to that, there are special areas, for example the "Comic Centre"


hot spots: the fair also includes hotspots, for example: "Storydrive": a meeting place for the international media and entertainment world, with an own conference program. photo: "Everything Free: Losing Control of Content" with Charles Glenn (aka Afrika Islam / Dr. Charlie Funk), who played a mashup of music first.


media: many tv and radio stations report live from the fair, for example the multi-lingual german/french culture channel "arte tv", founded 1991 to enhance the relationship between France and Germany: "ARTE is a European cultural television channel. Its originality lays in the fact that it targets audiences from different cultural backgrounds, in particular French and German." (more). + the fair press department runs photo pages: Day 1 / Day 2 / Day 3


money and values: as ending note, a moment from inside the reading tent: a live discussion on money and values, with a benedict monch, and the manager of puma (in an unusual collaboration, the two of them wrote a book on this theme)

4) RELATED LINKS
- editor's blog: Frankfurt book fair 2009, photos and some notes
- daily s-press: international books
- daily s-press: indie e-books (online books or pdf-downloads)

I Fucked A Girl And I Liked It – Eventually by Kirsty Logan

I Fucked a Girl and I Liked It – Eventually is an essay on the truth about lesbian sex. It's also a story of creative pdf-ing:

Logan says: "I wrote it for an anthology, but then the anthology was never published. Damn, I thought to myself, I wasted a day of writing. And then I went and had a cup of tea.

It is a little-known fact that the genetics of British people mean that tea is linked to thinking. More tea = more thoughts. It took 1,539 cups for John Logie Baird to figure out the TV. It took 2,599 cups for T. S. Eliot to write ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. It didn’t take Baudelaire any tea at all to write Les Fleurs du Mal, because he was French and needed only opium and absinthe.

Anyway, the tea fortified my brain and made me wonder if I could perhaps still get that £75 for the essay. And thus my plan was born!

If you have a spare £1 (which is US$1.50 and CA$1.60) and would like to read my personal essay, I Fucked A Girl And I Liked It – Eventually, then great! Visit my webpage, read a bit more about the essay, and if you like the idea, click the Paypal button, donate your £1, and I will email you a beautifully-designed, 1,500-word PDF."

Kirsty Logan won her first literary contest at the age of 8, and has been going mostly downhill ever since. She writes, edits, teaches, reviews books and works in a tea-shop in Glasgow, Scotland. She is currently working on her first novel, 'Little Dead Boys'. She likes coffee cupcakes and sticking pins in maps.

Kirsty Logan: I Fucked A Girl And I Liked It – Eventually
essay

related links: gender+race+age

In an Uncharted Country - Clifford Garstang

The award-winning stories that make up the linked collection In an Uncharted Country showcase ordinary men and women in and around Rugglesville, Virginia, as they struggle to find places and identities in their families and the community. They experience natural disasters, a sun-worshipping cult, Vietnam flashbacks, kidnapping, addiction, and loss. The book’s opening story, “Flood, 1978,” follows Hank, who comes to understand his father’s deep sense of grief over the death of his wife. Later, in “Hand-painted Angel,” Hank’s sons see the family spinning apart as their father ages and family secrets are disclosed. In “The Clattering of Bones,” Walt mourns the collapse of his marriage after the loss of a child, but in the collection’s title story he recognizes his emotional need for family. The concluding story, “Red Peony,” unifies the collection, as many of the characters from other stories come together for a tumultuous 4th of July Celebration.

Clifford Garstang received an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte in 2003. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Ledge, The Baltimore Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Potomac Review and elsewhere, and has received Distinguished Mention in the Best American Series. He won the 2006 Confluence Fiction Prize and the 2007 GSU Review Fiction Prize and is a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He currently lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

interlinked short story collections
Garstang's book was mentioned earlier this year in this blog, in the daily author talk: "Rose Hunter + Dorothee Lang on short stories, places... " which picked up on Garstang's blog series on linked short stories, "the missing link project" (introduction /reviews).

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. Other Press53 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.

Clifford Garstang: In an Uncharted Country
204 pages, $14
ISBN 978-0-9824416-7-1

The Short Review + #storysunday

Each monthly issue of The Short Review brings original online reviews of new, not-quite-so-new and classic collections and anthologies, written by reviewers many of whom are also short story writers themselves and who love short fiction.

The Short Review was initiated in November 2007 by Tania Hershman to fill a void she saw in terms of short story collection reviews.

Hershman says: "Readers don't know what's there and so they don't buy the books. We have over 40 reviewers around the world, I get people contacting me all the time to review books, we're always happy to have new, reliable reviewers, different perspectives. I also receive many requests from publishers and authors who want us to consider their short story collection. We can't review them all since we only review 10 per issue, older books as well as new, but the market is certainly very healthy!

We never consciously choose themes for The Short Review, I prefer to let it happen organically, with categories ranging from classics and children's to fantasy and historical as well as literary or steampunk. The current issue has, as ever, a mix of recently-published single-author collections, such as Corporate by Guy Cranswick and Lori Ostlund's The Bigness of the World, and older books, this month's being Sean O'Faolain's Selected Stories, as well as reviews of multi-author books like Qissat, an anthology of short stories by Palestinian women, and Ten Journeys from Legend Press. The October issue will be out around October 7th and will take us from zombies and dracula to rattlesnakes with single author collections by Darlin Neal, Peter Gordon, Steven Redwood, Brendan Connell, Jonny Townsend, Andrew Hurley and Lydia Davis, as well as several anthologies."

#storysunday
#storysunday is a twitter-based story exchange. The base idea: every Sunday, short story recommendations are shared on twitter - anyone can join and add a link, as long as the short story can the read online, and as long as it's not written by the poster himself/herself. Hershman explains that she came up with the idea of #storysunday on Twitter for 2 reasons: "because I wanted to get away from the "me-me-me" culture and inspire people to link to other people's short stories.... and because I wanted more recommendations of new stories to read! It's taking off well, and now if I'm stuck with a free 15 minutes, I search for #storysunday on Twitter and find myself something to read - and hope that's what other people do too!"

The Women of Nell Gwynne’s - Kage Baker (Subterranean)

Kage Bakers's novella The Women of Nell Gwynne’s was nominated for a Hugo Award and a World Fantasy Award in the Best Novella categories. On May 15, 2010, the work was awarded the 2009 Nebula Award in the category novella. Sadly, Baker didn't live long enough to receive the award.

Set in early-Victorian London, The Women of Nell Gwynne’s is a steampunk novella that tells the story of Lady Beatrice - once a proper British daughter, until tragedy struck and sent her home to walk the streets of London. But Lady Beatrice is no ordinary whore, and is soon recruited to join an underground establishment known as Nell Gwynne’s - the finest and most exclusive brothel in Whitehall; and at the same time, the sister organization to the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society. "The beautifully drawn Victorian era is neatly spiced up with futuristic technology such as mechanical eye implants. Baker’s fans will delight in this slight, bawdy and funny confection." - Publisher's Weekly

There's an excerpt up on the publisher's page, just scroll beyond the reviews: Excerpt Nell Gwynne's .

Kage Baker (June 10, 1952 – January 31, 2010) was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. She was born in Hollywood, California and lived there and in Pismo Beach most of her life. Before becoming a professional writer she spent many years in theater, including teaching Elizabethan English as a second language. Her first stories were published in Asimov's Science Fiction in 1997.

About Subterranean Press
Subterranean Press specializes in scifi, horror, suspense, and dark mystery genres, and has published Peter Straub, David Morrell, Dan Simmons, Poppy Z. Brite, Robert Bloch, and others. They also publish the online magazine Subterranean.

Kage Baker: The Women of Nell Gwynne’s
120 pages
ISBN: 1596062509