Smoke Ghosts & Other Outré Tales - Anthony Wright (Moon Willow)

In Smoke Ghosts & Other Outré Tales - a collection of dark but humorous short stories - Anthony Wright weaves his past travels in Australia, South East Asia, Mexico, and Central America to create a lively pattern of outré tales, interlaced with the supernatural, in which the author’s outsider philosophy is central to the thread of existence. A sample story: Banano's Bar

“In an extremely imaginative and well-written collection of vignettes from travels to adventurous non-tourist destinations, Australian Anthony Wright has invoked Burroughs, Bowles, Dostoyevski, Kerouac, and even to some degree Joyce as he searches out the sacred and profane of conemporary society." - Tom Hibbard

Anthony Wright was born in Melbourne, Australia, graduated in film production at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and was employed in various occupations and traveled through 20 countries before settling in Mexico City in 1993. He lived and worked as a journalist before returning to Melbourne in 2001, where he completed an education diploma at the University of Melbourne and began work as a teacher. He returned to Mexico City in 2008. His fiction, journalism, poetry and photography have been published in Australia, China, England, Mexico and the United States. (Anthony Wright on Facebook)

About Moon Willow Press
Moon Willow Press is a small, independent publisher helping to sustain arboreal ecosystems while celebrating the written word. MWP publishes novels, poetry chapbooks, and non-fiction titles that explore science and nature. First-time authors are given consideration.

Anthony Wright: Smoke Ghosts & Other Outré Tales short story collection
e-book
ISBN: 978-0-9813924-4-8

The Last Jewish Virgin - Janice Eidus (Red Hen)

The Last Jewish Virgin is Lilith Zeremba, a vibrant young woman in rebellion against her emotionally complex feminist mother. Lilith is determined to make her own way—on her own terms—in the world of fashion, but she unexpectedly finds herself in a place where mythology and sexuality collide. She meets two men to whom she is drawn in ways that feel dangerous and yet inevitable: the much older, wildly mercurial and mesmerizing Baron Rock, and Colin Abel, a young, radiant artist determined to make the world a better place, one socially progressive painting at a time.

The Last Jewish Virgin, an innovative, humorous, and universal tale of longing and redemption, refreshes and reinvents the classic vampire myth for a contemporary world in which love, faith, and politics are forever intersecting and evolving.

Janice Eidus two-time O.Henry Prize winner, author of The War Of The Rosens, lives in Brooklyn, New York and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. An interview with her about the novel is online at Fiction Writers Review: Vampires are People, too.

About Red Hen Press
The mission of Red Hen Press is to discover, publish, and promote works of literary excellence that have been overlooked by mainstream presses, and to build audiences for literature in two ways: by fostering the literacy of youth and by bringing distinguished and emerging writers to the public stage.

Janice Eidus: The Last Jewish Virgin
160 pages
ISBN-10: 1597093939

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

Two Weeks (Linebreak)

Two Weeks is an ebook and audio book anthology that was compiled, edited, designed, coded, and recorded in only 14 days. The editors of Linebreak took public submissions for the first week (reviewing more than 1,000 poems), and spent the second week editing and producing the book. For the audio book, each poem was read and recorded by a contributor other than the author.

The final result includes 58 poems. One of the goals was to prove that you can preserve line breaks and other formatting in ebooks, which a lot of poetry ebooks to date have not done. The book is available at the Linebreak website, and will also be listed in the Kindle store. More infos: Two Weeks.

Two Weeks includes new poems from Bruce Bond, Geoffrey Brock, Dorianne Laux, Seth Abramson, T.R. Hummer, Oliver de la Paz, Joe Wilkins, Hannah Miet, Jazzy Danziger, Randall Mann, Jeffery Bahr, Matthew Henriksen, Mary Meriam, Amanda Auchter, Ernest Hilbert, Matthew Zapruder, Brian Spears, Rachel Richardson, Christina Stoddard, Kimberly Grey, David Roderick, Josh Kalscheur, Kerry Krouse, Benjamin Glass, Rose Hunter, Lauren Camp, Jon Tribble, Patricia Lockwood, and more.

About Linebreak
Linebreak is a weekly magazine with a bias for good poetry. "We look for poems that we wish we had written, poems that take us somewhere we didn’t even know we wanted to go." Submissions of both poetry and prose are welcome throughout the year. In addition to text, Linebreak publishes audio recordings of all poems. Each poet’s work is read and recorded by another working poet selected by the editors.

Two Weeks
anthology of contemporary poetry
58 pages, download: 4.99$

related links: poetry, e-books

Valentine Day Massacre (Cervena Barva)

It all started in February 2010, when author Susan Tepper put up a note in the fictionaut writing forum for a Valentine Writing Challenge with an egde. Here's the short version of it: "Get your Feb. 14 (V-Day Massacre) stories or poems ready to post. Only criteria: use the word "heart" or "hearts" somewhere in your piece."

The first stories and poems trickled in, more followed, and at some point, the challenge started to snowball. "Just wading through the challenge submissions - what I particularly like is how the pieces all present a dense network of heart & intellect - pure joy to read all of it on this special day," Marcus Speh commented.

More submissions kept arriving, sparking the idea for a printed collection. Which now, for Valentine 2011, came together: Valentine Day Massacre, edited by Susan Tepper, and published by Cervena Barva Press. The collection includes Valentine Massacre stories and poems by Meg Pokrass, Nora Nadjarian, Frank Hinton, Sheldon Lee Compton, xTx, Sam Rasnake, Susan Gibb, Ajay Nair and many others.

Susan Tepper is the author of Deer & Other Stories (Wilderness House Press, 2009) and the poetry collection Blue Edge. Over 100 of her stories, poems, interviews and essays have been published in journals worldwide. Susan hosts the reading series FIZZ at KGB Bar, and is Assistant Editor of Istanbul Literary Review.

Cervena Barva Press was inaugurated in April 2005. In a mere 5 years, Publisher Gloria Mindock has released 52 chapbooks and 20 full length books. Projected for this year are 7 more books. Cervena Barva Press has published authors Gary Fincke, Lucille Lang Day, CL Bledsoe, Nancy Mitchell, Kathleen Aguero, Linda Nemec Foster, George Held, Eric Greinke and many other unique voices.

Valentine Day Massacre
49 pages, $7.00

Asymptote - issue 1

Asymptote is a new journal dedicated to literary translation, run by an international team of editors: "We are interested in encounters between languages and the consequences of these encounters. Though a translation may never fully replicate the original in effect (thus our name, “asymptote”: the dotted line on a graph that a mathematical function may tend towards but never reach), it is in itself an act of creation."

Issue Jan 2011 features original essays by Mary Gaitskill and Alain de Botton, fiction by Thomas Bernhard and Yoram Kaniuk, poetry by Aimé Césaire, Tan Chee Lay, and Ko Un, drama by Toshiki Okada, and nonfiction by Masahiko Fujiwara and Pablo Martín Ruiz. In total, Asymptote presents more than thirty-five authors via some of the finest translators working today, including Clayton Eshleman, Forrest Gander, Soren Gauger, Rika Lesser, Pierre Joris and Howard Goldblatt.

Included in the debut issue are stories, poems, visual works, critical essays, and reviews of the latest books. Some recommended links:

• Himalaya Poems by Ko Un, translated from the Korean
• Höpöhöpö Böks by Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, a video poem from Iceland
• Alain de Botton on La Rochefoucauld - a review
• Literature and Mathematics by Masahiko Fujiwara - an essay from Japan

All of it is available free online at the Asymptote website, which features not only the translated texts, but also, when available, the works in their original languages, audio recordings of those originals, and accompanying artwork specially curated for each issue.

About Asymptote
The editorial team of Asymptote presently comprises the following editors: Chief/Fiction/Visual: Lee Yew Leong(Singapore/Taiwan) ; Poetry/Criticism: Brandon Holmquest(USA); Drama: Nathalie Handal(Palestine/France/USA); Nonfiction: Aditi Machado(India/USA); Special Feature: Anthony Luebbert(USA); Contributing Editor: Sayuri Okamoto(Japan). Asymptote is now inviting submissions for their next issue, feature theme: "encounter between languages" - guidelines.

related links: bilingual authors, international, first issue

70 faces: Torah Poems - Rachel Barenblat (Phoenicia)

The poems in 70 faces are written in response to the weekly Torah portions in the Jewish lectionary. One by one they converse with the texts in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy -- the legal material alongside the narrative parts of the Torah, the texts which are easy for moderns to relate to alongside the texts which may challenge us and our theologies. An excerpt of the collection is available online: 70 faces.

"Rachel Barenblat’s Torah poems open the doorway into sacred text so that we can walk in and make it our home. She invites us to bring all of our passion, doubt, humor, humility and chutzpah as we encounter these ancient words and bring them to Life.” - Rabbi Shefa Gold, author of Torah Journeys

Rachel Barenblat holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is a Jewish Renewal rabbi, ordained in January of 2011. Since 2003 she has blogged as The Velveteen Rabbi; in 2008, her blog was named one of the top 25 blogs on the internet by TIME. This is her first full-length poetry collection.

About Phoenicia Publishing
Phoenicia Publishing, located in Montreal, publishes poetry, non-fiction, fiction, and photography, and is interested in "words and images that illuminate culture, spirit, and the human experience." The press's founder, Elizabeth Adams, says that a particular interest is on writing about travel between cultures — whether literally or more metaphorically — with the goal of enlarging our understanding of one another through experiences of change, displacement, disconnection, assimilation, sorrow, gratitude, longing and hope.

Rachel Barenblat: 70 Faces: Torah Poems
100 pages; $13.95

related links: human condition, philosophical, poetry

Elevate Difference

Elevate Difference is a forum for thoughtful critique that aims to embody the myriad—and sometimes conflicting—viewpoints present in the struggle for political, social, and economic justice. The forum features reviews of books and films, with a focus on indie publishers and producers. The forum also features music reviews, interviews, etc.

2 selected book reviews from Elevate Difference:
"My Sisters Made of Light" by Jacqueline St. Joan (Press53), a book that is "traversing the diversity of Pakistan’s distinct cultures and classes" (review by Alicia Simoni).

"Each and Her" by Valerie Martínez (University of Arizona Press), a poetry collection that "bestows a quiet honor on the lives of nearly 500 victims ... many females, often students or factory workers, who have been (and continue to be) murdered in or around Juárez anc Chihuahua, Mexico. Justice often comes through awareness and empathy, and the way that Valerie Martínez reverently and tenderly handles her collection of meditations about this terrifying cultural pattern buoys the possibility of justice, and hopefully, a remedy."(review by Julie Ann Brandt).

About Elevate Difference
Elevate Difference is a volunteer-run publication, the Editorial Collective includes: Alicia Izharuddin, Andrea Dulanto, Annette Przygoda, Barbara Barrow, Brittany Shoot, Elizabeth Stannard Gromisch, Farhana Uddin, Gita Tewari, Gwen Emmons, Mandy Van Deven, Payal Patel, Priyanka Nandy, Tina Vasquez. There also is a call for contributors up: "Elevate Difference seeks writers who subscribe to our mission and want to write reviews and feature interviews with activists and culture-makers." - Contribute

Related links: gender and race, web projects