Flash Bites - Abha Iyengar

Flash Bites by Abha Iyengar is a collection of flash and micro fiction, telling stories in a few words, letting the reader in into a world and allowing her to fill in the gaps to arrive at her own interpretations. The stories are sometimes down-to-earth and sometimes surreal. They open a different door to let the light in on what may seem to be the mundane and ordinary. They give an insight into what lies beneath the surface of things, people and places.

You can read more about Flash Bites, sample a few excerpts, or buy the e-book online at Smashwords: Flash Bites.

Abha Iyengar is an internationally published writer and poet. Her work has appeared in Bewildering Stories, Dead Drunk Dublin, Danse Macabre, Conversation Poetry Quarterly and others. She is a member of the ‘Riyaz' Writer's Group at The British Council, New Delhi. Her poem film “Parwaaz” has won a special jury prize at the film festival at Patras, Greece and has been screened to acclaim at various international film festivals. She received the Lavanya Sankaran Writing Fellowship for 2009-10. She blogs at Encounters of an Everyday Kind.

Abha Iyengar: Flash Bites
story collection
88 pages
e-book: $2.99

Family Album - Sheree Mack (Flambard)

Family Album is preoccupied with migration, journeys and places. In poems full of energy and life, Sheree Mack catches the complexity of family history – ‘it was already there waiting for me’ – the pull of the past and the threads that have formed her identity.

Sheree Mack’s collection captures a sense of the migrations and changes of the last century, and shares with us, through the control and patterning of her poetry, an experience and insight that is her own. Her poems evoke images of sea journeys made from Barbados and Trinidad to England – ‘a place speckled / with a few brown faces’ – and onward travel to Bradford and Newburn on Tyneside.

"Poems that do not flinch from the conflicts and inconsistencies of family bonds." - Cynthia Fuller

Sheree Mack was born in Bradford to a Trinidadian father and a Geordie mother of Bajan and Ghanaian heritage. She has lived in Newcastle from the age of ten. She was Poet in Residence at the Durham Literature Festival in 2005. Married with two children, she works as a freelance writer and lecturer for the Open University and has recently completed her PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. She participated in a river of stones and blogs at every day creativity.

About Flambard Press
Flambard is an independent press now based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Established in 1990, Flambard publishes about ten books of poetry and fiction a year. Flambard’s list includes writers from all across the UK and abroad, yet the press remains especially supportive of writers from northern England.

Sheree Mack: Family Album
poetry collection
90 pages
ISBN: 978-1-906601-23-2

related links: poetry, about a place

Short Story Month 2011 - Links

It's Short Story Month! To join the celebration, here a collection of story links, lists, reviews, quotes, notes etc. There also are several short story initiatives that invite to participate, they are marked in red.

National Short Story Month - the history of short story month by Poets+Writers: "The concept has some history behind it. The Emerging Writers Network kicked off its first Short Story Month in 2007, and Larry Dark, director of The Story Prize, floated the idea even earlier." - Official links: Emerging Writers Network + The Story Prize Blog.

Short Stories in Daily s-Press: story collections (by Walter Bjorkman, Tania Hershman, Eric Beeny, Meg Pokrass and many others); anthologies (Writers Abroad, International Short Fiction, optimistic SF, ....); short story writing guides (Short Circuit); author talks

100 Story Links in Honor of Short Story Month 2011 - a list-in-progress by Flash Fiction Chronicles, writers are invited to share their flash story recommendations by posting on the flash fiction chronicle wall

The storySouth Million Writers Award - long list with 158 notable short stories of 2010, shortlist upcoming Friday, 20th May

#storysunday - a twitter initiative: on sundays, link to someone else's short story published somewhere online which will delight and astound readers this week. if you aren't on twitter, there's an online stream

52/250 A Year of Flash - a year-long writing initiative, now completed: 52 themes in 52 weeks, dozens of authors, hundreds of stories. (Daily s-Press feature)

The Short Story Reader - a blog about good stories on the web and other reading (Daily s-Press feature with interview)

Short Story Collection Giveaway Project - readers are invited to promote one of their favourite story collections by blogging about it and offering a copy as giveaway

The Short Review - online reviews of new, not-quite-so-new and classic collections and anthologies (Daily s-Press feature)

Short Story Month blog by Mat Bell - daily reviews of short stories published in print literary magazines

Paper House - Jessie Carty (Folded Word)

Through the 64 narrative poems in this collection, Jessie Carty illustrates one woman's coming of age in the face of neglect and unmet social expectations. However, these are not poems of woe. Instead, Carty flings open closet doors and jumps in, describing the dark recesses with an innocent acceptance of what is rather than what should be. The births of babies and love. The deaths of elders and allusions. The reconstruction of homes and lives. An unflinching honesty folds them all into "boxes in boxes like Russian dolls," waiting for us to lift the lids.

Update May 2011: Paper House won the Northern California Publishers & Authors’ 2011 Best Poetry Book Award! To celebrate this achievement, Folded Word offers a special 3 for 1 sale.

For some more notes and reflections on "Paper House", read Jessie Carty's author talk with Mel Bosworth: on breathing, writing, the internet, scares, yielding, boxes, greed + red, black and white.

Jessie Carty's poems and non-fiction have appeared in publications such as The Main Street Rag, Iodine Poetry Journal and The Northville Review. Her first chapbook At the A & P Meridiem was released by Pudding House Publications in 2009. Her print & e-chapbook The Wait of Atom was released by Folded Word Press in 2009.

About Folded Word (+PicFic + unFold + Heron)
Folded Word is an independent press that continually seeks new ways of connecting readers to new literary voices. 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.

Jessie Carty: Paper House
poetry collection
84 pages, trade paperback (e-book in Kindle & Mobipocket format available late-April)
$12 U.S. / £8 U.K. / €9 Europe
ISBN 978-0-9778167-4-3

Indefinite Space 2011

A compilation of poetry and visual images. Indefinite Space, interweaves the roll of the dice, the fragile with the strong, shuffled emotions, the clear & the unclear, connected/unconnected—birds & streams.

The 2011 edition of Indefinite Space contains work from 28 poets & artists: Andrea Moorhead, Mg Roberts, Anne Gorrick, Chad Scheel, Howie Good, John C. Goodman, John M. Bennett, Sheila E. Murphy, Guy R. Beining, Steve Brightman, Adam J. Cooper, Felino A. Sorriano, Brandon Freels, Trina Gaynon, Jennifer McBroom, satnrose, Damon Falke, Kai Laursen, Andy Roberts, John Sandoval, Jean Esteve, Ruth Berman, J.T. Whitehead, Sally Molini, David James, John Marvin, Dorothee Lang, Raymond Farr.

Indefinite Space is edited by Marcia Arrieta. Her first book of poems triskelion, tiger moth, tangram, thyme is currently available through Otoliths (+ was recently featured in s-Press, here). Her chapbook experimental: was published by potes & poets press, and another collection the curve against the linear is part of The Quartet Series— An Uncommon Accord, published by toadlily press. She has a MFA in poetry from Vermont College.

About Indefinite Space
Marcia Arrieta founded Indefinite Space in 1991 after receiving a grant for her work from the Pasadena Arts Council. She has continued to publish the journal independently for 19 years. Indefinite Space has a penchant for the avant-garde, the philosophical, the minimal (but not always), the natural, and the intangible.

Indefinite Space 2011
48 pages
single issue $7
ISSN 1075-6868

related links: poetry, art

Mercy Island - Ren Powell (Phoenicia)

The forty-one poems of Mercy Island, written by Ren Powell between 1998 and 2010, depict a coming of age that begins in a claustrophobic American trailer park and expands into the kind of borderless existence shared by all emigrants and homesick travelers.

Throughout this journey, the poet’s fears—which are the fears we all harbor—are balanced by her unflinching witness to what is real, just, true, and beautiful. Even in the face of pain and disintegration, the poet refuses to relinquish her humor or her humanity. Mercy Island: New and Selected Poems is Ren Powell's first collection to be published in North America. A preview is available online: Mercy Islands - preview.

An interview by Fiona Robyn on the collection, and on observance, routine, masculinity/femininity, routine, poems as a dialogue with the world, and the editing process, is up at: Writing Our Way Home: An interview with poet Ren Powell, and here's a new off-the-wall Woodrat podcast with Dave Bonta.

Ren (Katherine) Powell is a writer, translator, poet, and native Californian living on the west coast of Norway. She has published four full-length collections of poetry and eleven books of translations, and her poetry has been translated and published in six languages. Ren has a BA in Theater Arts and received her doctorate in Creative Writing from Lancaster University in England in January, 2011. She has taught theater and drama at a performing arts school for ten years and her dramatic works have been performed in the U.S., Canada and Norway. The founding editor of the online literary journals Protest Poems.org and Babel Fruit: Writing Under the Influence, Ren also represented Norway on the International PEN Women Writers’ Committee, and helped establish the International Cities of Refuge Network in Europe.

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.

Ren Powell: Mercy Island: New and Selected Poem
poetry collection
100 pages; $13.95
(pdf-file: 7.50)

related links: human condition, bilingual author, poetry

The Best of It - Kay Ryan (Grove)

The Best of It by Kay Ryan, published by Grove, an independent press, won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 2011.

Kay Ryan’s current appointment as the sixteenth Poet Laureate of the United States is the latest in a cascade of accolades that have finally caught up with a poet who has always found her own way—both in the poetry she writes and the quiet life she has preferred. Over the years critics have noted that each new book of poems by Kay Ryan reads like a “selected” in its intensity. Now, in the much anticipated The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, Kay Ryan further distills this supremely achieved body of work. Here is the poet’s own selection of more than two hundred poems, offering both longtime followers and new readers a stunning retrospective of her earlier work as well as a generous selection of powerful new poems. The result is a major event in American poetry.

"A body of work spanning 45 years, witty, rebelious and yet, tender, a treasure trove of an iconoclastic and joyful mind."

Kay Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress's sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2008. Kay Ryan's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and other periodicals. The recipient of numerous accolades, including awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at the College of Marin.

About Grove Press
Grove Press is an independent literary publisher, it published many of the Beats including William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. Since 1993, Grove Press has been both a hardcover and paperback imprint of Grove Atlantic publishing fiction, drama, poetry, literature in translation, and general nonfiction.

Kay Ryan: The Best of It
New and Selected Poems
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4521-5
Price: US $14.95
288 pp

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

The Short Story Reader (a web project)

"A blog about good stories on the Web and other reading" - that's The Short Story Reader, which features more than 500 short stories and books so far - all read and reviewed by Jon Morgan Davies.

For reading preferences, stories are tagged by length: 1000+words, 2000+words.., by rating: Four-Star Stories, Five-Star Stories, by magazines, and authors. There also are reviews of nonfiction books and novels included. For all available categories, scroll to the bottom of The Short Story Reader.

Here's what Jon says about his blog:
The blog aims, first, to provide links to and short synopses or reviews of notable stories online and, second, synopses or reviews of books offline.
In essence, what it really is is a personal reading blog. I started it in April 2008. The write-ups on books were something I'd been doing for several years in personal e-mails, but I found I'd lose track of the e-mails and thus lose track of my past reading (this came to full light once when visiting with a friend who seemed to remember more about an Arabic reading list I'd stormed through than I did--and he'd only read my e-mails, not the books).

At the same time, I'd noticed several really good stories online, and I wanted to share those with other people, as well as keep track of them myself so that I could bring them back up at any time. When I first started the blog, I wasn't expecting to find as much quality material online as I have; my views of the online literary scene were largely biased against it based on a much earlier survey (in the late nineties) and on the general lack of cred online publishing has tended to get in the print world. That is, I think, changing and has, in fact, already changed greatly over the past decade. Now, there's so much good stuff online that a blog highlighting some of the best seems to make sense. Of course, these are all my own favorites; awards like the Million Writers Award and books like the Best of the Web anthology try to present a slightly broader view. And there are other people doing blogs similar to what Short Story Reader does.

The selection process
As for how I choose stories to feature on Short Story Reader: I read around various online literary journals, hitting up at least one a day. I have my favorites that I check regularly, others that I check less regularly. And I'm always slowly adding new journals to my reading list, as I find out about them and have time to get to them. The first time I read a journal, I usually try to read a substantial part of one issue, if not the whole thing. Unfortunately, time doesn't allow me to do such surveys for all magazines all the time, so after that, when I return to a magazine, I'm usually picking out the story in the most recent issue that most catches my eye. Of the stories I read, I probably write up about one-fifth of them, any of the ones that stick with me in some way. This isn't a strict science. I'll have weeks where virtually everything I read seems to work for me and will get written up, and other weeks where nothing seems to.

I keep a backlog of stories to feature so that the blog isn't primarily focusing on the most recent work. Partly, what I want to do is reintroduce people to great works in magazine archives, things people have forgotten about or won't know to look for. Hence, by the time a work gets featured, it's often a year or two after its publication.

Recent great stories
I like so much of what Necessary Fiction is publishing these days. I've also enjoyed many of the works at Corium, with Amber Sparks's story "All the Imaginary People Are Better at Life" (link) as well as Tara Laskowski's "Something More Interesting" (link) as highlights of things I've read over the past few months.

About Jon Morgan Davies
As for me, alas, I write too. (Part of me wishes I were just a disinterested fan, as I can say of music, rather than a fellow practitioner, since pure fans seem rare.) When I read so much great material online, it's humbling and helps me understand just why it is so hard to actually get work featured in many of these journals. Reading what's out there also helps me learn sometimes what works and what doesn't. And sometimes, I've seen writers pull off tricks I myself have wanted to pull off for a long while but have never figured out how to do it.
Also interesting to me is seeing how the Web is changing the short story Stories are, by and large, getting shorter. I've had to kind of retool, since my own work has tended to be longer--and was, until a couple of years ago, tending to grow even longer. (Here's my website with links to some of my stories). Even with the shorter stuff I am writing now, the stories are often linked so that they aren't really just short stories (which sometimes makes for them being less successful when the story is pulled out on its own). I guess writing wise, I still am wanting that longer form. That's harder for online reading, though.

The Short Story Reader
short story reviews

related links: short stories, best of,  web projects

The Book of It - Daniela Elza

The Book of It by Daniela Elza is about being and becoming in the inconclusive manuscript of life. It is about creativity and the alchemy of the imagination. It is about knowing, and perhaps how we know more than we know we know. It is about the contemplative mind that wants more. It is about that which cannot be named, but can be pervasive in our lives (if we let it).

"The Book of It is a tribute to 'none of the above' when it comes to the search for meaning and answers-both in life and in education. In this meditative book, Daniela Elza tries to find the It between 'cash and two pieces of ID' and 'a blue guitar with one string (forgotten)', between a tree trunk that 'needs more than one person to embrace it' and a measurement of '1000 words (can be more but not less).' Without doubt, The Book of It is a pleasant surprise even to itself." - Arlene Ang

Daniela Elza is currently finishing her doctorate in Philosophy of Education at Simon Fraser University. Her work (mostly poetry) appears in over 50 publications. The Book of It is Daniela’s first ebook. Her full length poetry book, The Weight of Dew, is forthcoming with Mother Tongue Publishing (Spring, 2012).

Daniela Elza: The Book of It
116 pages
available as paperback + download + kindle-version
- the book of It (paperback) $11.99
- the book of It (PDF file download) $2.99
- kindle version:  amazon.com / amazon.uk

related links: poetry, kindle-books

How to Write Your Way Home - Fiona Robyn

How to Write Your Way Home by Fiona Robyn is an inspiring ebook that combines writing advice with a story.

Lorrie, who has pea-green eyes and mousey hair, lives in a narrow grey house and works in a call-centre in a grey office building. If you asked her whether she was happy, she wouldn't know how to answer you. Until she is shown something that's right under her nose, and which changes everything...

Paired with Lorrie's story are simple instructions that help to feel more connected with oneself and the world. The book also contains information on hunting & polishing "small stones" (pieces of writing that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment, more here: pay attention: a river of stones), and advice on how to build a creative network & much more.

This is a free e-book, you can download your copy here: How to Write Your Way Home

Fiona Robyn is on a mission to help people connect with the world through writing. She is a novelist, a blogger, a creativity coach and a Buddhist. She writes a weekly inspirational newsletter & runs e-courses. She started writing small stones in '05, launched a handful of stones in '08, & started a river of stones with her fiancé Kaspa in '11. She is very fond of earl grey tea and homemade cake, her cats Fatty and Silver, & the lovely Malvern hills (which she can gaze at from her home office window). Her novel "Thaw" has been previsouly featured in Daily s-Press: Thaw by Fiona Robyn)

How to Write Your Way Home
free e-book
62 pages

related links: on writing, e-books

triskelion, tiger moth, tangram, thyme - Marcia Arrieta (Otoliths)

triskelion, tiger moth, tangram, thyme is Marcia Arrieta's first book of poetry. Within its pages language and the invisible coincide, voyaging precarious, discovering.

"Arrieta’s poems are overlapping spheres, vanishing points, circles that reflect her fascination with modern cosmology, aesthetics, and the spirituality of language." — Andrea Moorhead

"Her poems are compelling, marked by deft and abrupt turnings, a total mastery of paratactic construction, and a dazzling sense of the landscape of the heart played against that insistent inner voice. Here, at last, they are gathered together, a gift well worth having, a quiet visionary voice which surprises and invites the reader to be attentive." — David Cope

As well as a poet, Marcia Arrieta is a mother, educator, and artist. Her chapbook experimental: was published by potes & poets press and another chapbook the curve against the linear was published by toadlily press in An Uncommon Accord. She edits and publishes Indefinite Space, a poetry journal. (featured in Daily s-Press: Indefinite Space 2010)

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 the ulterior eden by j/j hastein and Market Street Exit by Caleb Puckett.

Marcia Arrieta: triskelion, tiger moth, tangram, thyme
poetry collection
80 pages, $13.45

related links: books by blueprintreview contributors, poetry