++ LIT-CLIPS: 6S summer film festival, Electric Literature, Moving Poems, 3Cheers + more ++
Friday is for literary specials in Daily s-Press. This week's special theme: literary film clips.related links: friday specials, literary summer
Fractured West is an independent not-for-profit literary magazine, set to publish the most exciting short fiction by new and emerging writers from around the globe.
Felino A. Soriano's Realities of Bifocal Translations is dominated by jazz echoes, scatted as it were, and its idioms, as well as the personal and celebrated brushstrokes of 20th and 21st Century painting translated to poetry. Predominately one page takes, the poems, executed in a hybrid of modernist/postmodernist syntax, offer the reader a swirling look down & up at the all-important avant-garde heritage of us all. Simultaneously historic and contemporary, the poems in this volume do what good ekphrastic poetry (or music or painting) should do... dip its tongue in the honey and lay it back down, poised like the instrument all musicians/artists/poets share—experience and articulated reality.
Occultations is David Wolach’s first full-length collection of poems and the second release from the book publishing collective, Black Radish Books (BRB). This 4-part cycle plus essay engages, through procedural ritual and other poetic modes, the performativity, poetics, and politics of the body—as site of resistance, as tool of power, and as inscription of the catastrophic event of neoliberal capitalism.
In The Singer's Gun, a novel of international crime, false identities, the depths and limits of family ties, and the often confusing bonds of love, Emily St. John Mandel explores the dangerous territory between one’s moral compass and the heart’s desire.
++ TALK: author talk: Rose Hunter + Dorothee Lang ++
>> click to read the whole dialogue: 
This summer is good for writing - if you look for inspiration and motivation, there is A Year of Flash This Summer (a flash writing initiative with a weekly task), the August Poetry Postcard Fest, and now Folded Word just announced their first writing month:
and i see it
At the start of recent global economic turmoil, "economy" became the word of the moment. It was a natural choice for a theme issue - in June 2009, the qarrtsiluni guest editors Anna Dickie and Pamela Hart put a call for submissions up for an online issue. Included was a line that asked contributors to go beyond the obvious:
Had Slaves is Catherine Sasanov's third book of poems. Written out of her discovery of slaveholding among her Missouri ancestors, and the fragmented evidence left behind of the 11 men, women, and children held in their bondage, Had Slaves pieces together lives endured from slavery to Jim Crow across a landscape lost beneath big box stores, subdivisions, and tourist sites. Avoiding Gone With the Wind imagery, the book takes readers to slavery's less expected locale: where big house means log cabin and plantation is a small-grain farm with tarantulas mating in the corn. One author's look at a stumbled-upon past set in motion after finding the words, "Had slaves".
Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry provides a virtual space in which to promote and discuss the work of contemporary Asian American poets and artists, and seeks to publish expertly crafted work in a variety of forms and aesthetics, including traditional and experimental pieces, hybrid forms, multimedia work, and new translations. Lantern Review welcomes pieces from anglophone writers of all ethnic backgrounds whose work has a vested interest in issues relevant to the Asian diaspora in North America, as well as work created collaboratively in a community context.
now playing: a summer special. up already is Elephant Summer (a blog filler that turned larger than expected); The Summer of Genji (a joined summer reading project), the 100 Days Project (a creative collaboration with daily projects), and the Most Anticipated Summer Reading (a book preview list compiled by The Millions), A Year of Flash This Summer (a flash writing initiative), the greatly debated New Yorker summer fiction issue 20 under 40, and the August Poetry Postcard Fest.
Everyone loves getting postcards. And postcards with poems, all the better. That's the idea that lead to the August Poetry Postcard Fest: for 1 month, poets commit to writing a poetry postcard a day, and send it out. In return, they receive poetry postcards from fellow poets.
In June, The New Yorker released a double fiction issue. What made the headlines wasn't the release of a fiction issue, but the title and concept of it:
For some, the best summer reading comes in short bursts. If you are looking for a blast of color this summer, check out 52/250, a site that features flash fiction from a variety of authors, some published, some entirely new to the scene. It began in late May and already has a small following – devoted writers and readers both.
In January, the Millions compiled a superb book list for 2010, a compass for the upcoming months, noting: "At The Millions we’ve put together a “Most Anticipated” releases preview, with blurbs on all the books (well, clearly not all) you should be excited about in the next months. Add your own in the comments."
One Hundred Days is a summer collaborative project put into motion by artist volunteers:
The Summer of Genji is a joined approach to tackle a classic read: The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. This book is considered to be one of the world's first novels, its size: a sound 1216 pages, the author: a lady in the Heian court of eleventh-century Japan.
Elephant Summer: a collection of all things elephant, published on notimetosayit.com during the summer of 2009 by 35 writers and artists. The collection contains artwork, stories, poems and prose all centered around an elephant theme.
Shine is a collection of near-future, optimistic SF stories that portray the possible roads to a better tomorrow. Definitely not a plethora of Pollyannas (but neither a barrage of dystopias), Shine shows that positive change is far from being a foregone conclusion, but needs to be hardfought, innovative, robust and imaginative. Most importantly, it aims to demonstrate that while times are tough and outcomes are uncertain, we can still bend the future in benevolent ways if we embrace change and steer its momentum in the right direction.
