Thursday, July 18, 2013

Books On Deck / Up Next

Vladimir Sorokin - "The Ice Trilogy" 

"In 1908, deep in Siberia, it fell to earth. THEIR ICE. A young man on a scientific expedition found it. It spoke to his heart, and his heart named him Bro. Bro felt the Ice. Bro knew its purpose. To bring together the 23,000 blond, blue-eyed Brothers and Sisters of the Light who were scattered on earth. To wake their sleeping hearts. To return to the Light. To destroy this world. And secretly, throughout the twentieth century and up to our own day, the Children of the Light have pursued their beloved goal.

Pulp fiction, science fiction, New Ageism, pornography, video-game mayhem, old-time Communist propaganda, and rampant commercial hype all collide, splinter, and splatter in Vladimir Sorokin’s virtuosic Ice Trilogy, a crazed joyride through modern times with the promise of a truly spectacular crash at the end. And the reader, as eager for the redemptive fix of a good story as the Children are for the Primordial Light, has no choice except to go along, caught up in a brilliant illusion from which only illusion escapes intact."



 Italo Calvino - "Letters: 1941-1985"

"This is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Italy's most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) achieved worldwide fame with such books as Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. But he was also an influential literary critic, an important literary editor, and a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia Ginzburg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luciano Berio. This book includes a generous selection of about 650 letters, written between World War II and the end of Calvino's life. Selected and introduced by Michael Wood, the letters are expertly rendered into English and annotated by well-known Calvino translator Martin McLaughlin.

The letters are filled with insights about Calvino's writing and that of others; about Italian, American, English, and French literature; about literary criticism and literature in general; and about culture and politics. The book also provides a kind of autobiography, documenting Calvino's Communism and his resignation from the party in 1957, his eye-opening trip to the United States in 1959-60, his move to Paris (where he lived from 1967 to 1980), and his trip to his birthplace in Cuba (where he met Che Guevara). Some lengthy letters amount almost to critical essays, while one is an appropriately brief defense of brevity, and there is an even shorter, reassuring note to his parents written on a scrap of paper while he and his brother were in hiding during the antifascist Resistance. 

This is a book that will fascinate and delight Calvino fans and anyone else interested in a remarkable portrait of a great writer at work."



Ben Jonson - "Volpone and Other Plays" 

"In this collection of plays, now with a new title, Ben Jonson created in Volpone and The Alchemist hilarious portraits of cupidity and chicanery, while in Bartholomew Fair he portrays his fellow Londoners at their most festive—and most bawdy."

 



Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson - "Mo' Meta Blues"

"Mo' Meta Blues is a punch-drunk memoir in which everyone's favorite Questlove tells his own story while tackling some of the lates, the greats, the fakes, the philosophers, the heavyweights, and the true originals of the music world. He digs deep into the album cuts of his life and unearths some pivotal moments in black art, hip hop, and pop culture.

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson is many things: virtuoso drummer, producer, arranger, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon bandleader, DJ, composer, and tireless Tweeter. He is one of our most ubiquitous cultural tastemakers, and in this, his first book, he reveals his own formative experiences--from growing up in 1970s West Philly as the son of a 1950s doo-wop singer, to finding his own way through the music world and ultimately co-founding and rising up with the Roots, a.k.a., the last hip hop band on Earth. Mo' Meta Blues also has some (many) random (or not) musings about the state of hip hop, the state of music criticism, the state of statements, as well as a plethora of run-ins with celebrities, idols, and fellow artists, from Stevie Wonder to KISS to D'Angelo to Jay-Z to Dave Chappelle to...you ever seen Prince roller-skate?!?

But Mo' Meta Blues isn't just a memoir. It's a dialogue about the nature of memory and the idea of a post-modern black man saddled with some post-modern blues. It's a book that questions what a book like Mo' Meta Blues really is. It's the side wind of a one-of-a-kind mind.

It's a rare gift that gives as well as takes.

It's a record that keeps going around and around."





Nick Bantock - "The Museum at Purgatory" 

"Nick Bantock's many fans have come to expect strange and wonderful experiences as they enjoy his beautifully illustrated books, and this newest work will not disappoint. An otherworldly mixture of surreal drawings, photographs of invented and actual objects, fake documents, altered engravings, and fictions, it follows the post-death journey of Non, the museum's curator, as he gathers together artists and collectors - narrating and analysing their lives - in a desperate attempt to escape Purgatory and enter either Heaven or Hell. Bold, brilliant, and profound, The Museum at Purgatory is yet another shining example of Bantock's unique gift for combining word and stunning image to craft an extraordinary tale. Chronicle Books will publish The Artful Dodger: The Art of Nick Bantock in Fall 2000."




 Nick Bantock - "The Forgetting Room" 

.".. to my grandson, Armon Hurt, I leave my house in Ronda, Spain and the uncertainty of its contents. May he discover his belonging." -- From the last will and testament of Rafael Hurtago.

So begins Nick Bantock's latest novel, in which readers are invited to delve into the journal of Armon Hurt, a sad, discontented man who discovers his inner fire. When his artist grandfather dies, leaving him the family home in Spain, Armon travels to Andalusia with the intention of selling the property. Once there, however, he finds a sealed cardboard case containing a small oil painting and a surreal booklet.

As he examines these mysterious artifacts, Armon realizes that he is holding both his grandfather's last communication to him and a puzzle. He begins to decipher the conundrum, and as each new answer leads to more questions, Armon finds himself painting furiously in his grandfather's old studio strangely compelled to create a picture that is somehow linked to his legacy. 

Featuring paintings, drawings, collages and paper foldouts, this in no ordinary novel. Captivatingly imagined and genuinely memorable in its deeply personal account of a man in search of himself, "The Forgetting Room" is a handmade treasure, a seamless blend of artistry and language and a tantalizing read."



Nick Bantock - "The Venetian's Wife"

"Nick Bantock's illustrated novel, The Venetian's Wife, is part love story, part mystery, and part ghostly tale—and an altogether bewitching brew of sensuality and lost treasures. Thoroughly bored with her job at the local museum, Sarah heads to the gallery to take another look at that new drawing, the one she can't stop thinking about, the one of the Hindu god Shiva, who dances...That's when it all begins. The next day, an e-mail message brings her a job offer: to find the few remaining pieces of a 15th-century adventurer's renowned collection of Indian sculptures. Her employer, curiously, wishes to communicate only by computer. She has no idea who he is or why he wants her. But other mysteries soon preoccupy her, such as the meaning of an enigmatic illuminated manuscript—and the sensual transformation that seems to be overtaking her. Through her quirkily decorated diary and the artful e-mail exchanges between Sara and her mentor, Nick Bantock has conjured up a richly illustrated tale of a relentless quest, an amorous legacy, and the resonating power of art—a lush, romantic adventure of the soul that tantalizes the reader to the last line."




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Friday, July 12, 2013

"Trauerspielen (Mourning Plays)" Published at Glint Literary Journal



The latest issue of Glint Literary Journal is up online. I was fortunate to have managing editor Brenda Mann Hammack have some pretty great things to say about my accepted piece "Trauerspielen (Mourning Plays)" in relation to all the other fantastic pieces in the issue. This is the first time I've seen an introduction go so deep into the work published in the pages that follow. I'm posting the introduction below, but here's the link to my piece:  "Trauerspielen (Mourning Plays)"


Introduction
 The apocalyptic landscape of Adam “Bucho” Rodenberger’s “Trauerspielen (Mourning Plays)” is more reminiscent of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia than of Robert Browning’s or T.S. Eliot’s waste lands. All is not leached of color. All is not puckered with blight even if bird squawks fall preternaturally silent, even if fish have mysteriously abandoned water as if raptured without human notice.
 Even when annihilation is not believed to be imminent, when planets are not in the process of colliding as they do in von Trier’s film, we (human thinkers and tinkerers) tend to preoccupy ourselves with the ephemeral nature of our own and our environment’s existence. As Joan Colby observes in the title to her contribution to issue 4 of Glint Literary Journal, “Everything Is Tenuous.”
 But I begin this introduction with Rodenberger’s “plays” since his text exemplifies a certain concern with interstitiality that runs throughout our issue’s contents. What do I mean by this word, which spell check insists on underlining red, as if to rebuke me for indulging a lexicon of indeterminacy?
 Interstitial means “in between.” It is also synonymous with liminal, a word that is often employed to describe threshold moments, twilight states of mind. At this point, I would like to direct my reader’s attention to the website for the Interstitial Arts Foundation (http://www.interstitialarts.org) where s/he may find a virtual compendium of defining essays on this subject. Here, multimodal artists may find theoretical support and/or inspiration for that creative, transgressive desire to defy convention, regardless of medium.
 In one contribution to the IAF website, Barth Anderson explains the nature of interstitiality in a way that may prove helpful to Glint readers who encounter subjects and strategies that don’t abide by expectations. (This background may prove useful, for example, to orthodox Christians confronted with Frederick Pollack’s “Late Find at Nag Hammadi,” in which the Second Coming manages to upset even the devil’s preconceived notions.) According to Anderson’s IAF essay,

“Interstitial art should be prickly, tricky, ornery. It should defy expectations,
work against them, and in so doing, maintain a relationship to one or more genres, albeit contentiously. There’s a sense of playful disregard on the interstitial artist’s part, seeking not merely to create something new, but something that jars. The interstitial artist converses with that viewer who recognizes what genres are being addressed but who is seeking a different experience from the one they might have been anticipating.”
 
Although I am comfortable placing Rodenberger’s “Trauerspielen” among the fiction links in our contents list, I’m less comfortable calling it a short story. Perhaps, I should call it a longer-than-usual prose poem that alternates between paragraph and stanza. We do have a number of relatively short prose poems (identified as such by their creator) in issue four. These selections (Kim Peter Kovac’s “Radium Girls,” “Gazelle Music,” and two of his “Three 2 Poems from ‘Out of Robben Island’”) would not be out of place in well-known anthologies like David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present.
 Other contributions may appear more conventional. J. Genskow’s “Gravediggers,” for example, seems to fall rather neatly into the genre of the Southern Gothic only I kept sensing traces of the western dime novel as I read—despite the absence of horses and Stetsons. Surely, HBO’s Deadwood and Stephen King’s The Gunslinger are skulking beneath the surface of Genskow’s gator country.
 Although interstitiality encompasses many vagaries of genre and form, I consider it a predominant theme of this issue’s artistic endeavor. In the philosophical language play of Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé’s poems, organism is composed with such “a multiplicity,” with “organs so diffuse / it seems lost in its miasma,” becoming “an animal soup,” where “cells like plankton” contain so much potential they could become “a punctured lung / or a cut ear or a lock of hair for a wig / or that wattlebird tail feather.” It is not surprising that bodies should become sites of instability.
 And, thus, we come back to Rodenberger’s apocalyptic text where mysterious graffiti on a concrete wall informs: “This is where you became something else,” and, then, “This is where we tried to stop you.” The reader does not know who the “we” might be, but she notices the implied failure. Metamorphosis is not impeded, not defeated.
 Art seems a natural locus for addressing changeability in its positive and negative guises as, regardless of medium, creative work often proves prone to shape-shifting, of forcing its own revision. One of this issue’s visual artists acknowledged the tendency art has for turning out to be something other than what even its creator expected. When composing the cover letter that accompanied her submission, Raechel Alexus Gasparac explained that the title of one of her paintings had once been “Zombie Man” until she’d realized its deeper connection with the death of her father. The image is now called “Cancer.” Any fan of Zombieland, 28 Days Later, or The Walking Dead will appreciate the psychological logic that prompted the title switch. Our morbid anatomy will make zombies of us all if we live long enough—or, so, we fear. What is cancer but a malignant metamorphosis?
 Our contributors respond in different ways to the grief that follows encounters with mortality. Grace Maselli finds in a garlic bulb more than nutritional sustenance. Although the cloves have often been reduced to vampire prophylactic in others’ writing, Maselli does not attempt to fend off the dead in her essay. Instead, she inhales memory—acknowledge-ing pain as well as pungency. A kind of synesthesia infuses her text as smell stimulates visions of photographs. In one: an uncle dying from lymphoma. In another: his family “climbing stairs on their knees” to visit the statue of “a saint said to save the dying.”
 Yes, illness changes us as does loss. Age renders changes both external and internal. In Kathleen Jesme’s “The Dependability of the World,” clocks are only “devices that mete out / the hours and days the face of what is passing,” whereas the heart cannot “keep from announcing itself / now that it knows the number of its beats.” How does one cope with the foreknowledge that one will burn out eventually if not spontaneously? ‘To stop a fire…..I built a fire.” Jesme’s speaker draws on the firefighter’s “break” in an attempt to redirect, to control. Caesuras disrupt lines throughout the seven-part poem as if to demonstrate the pauses between heart beats. Or, perhaps, to situate gaps in the text like those paths foresters maintain in woodland to limit combustibility.
 I cannot help but think of the religious significance of James Baldwin’s title The Fire Next Time when I encounter such imagery. A similar motif can be found in a poem composed by one of the two collaborative teams featured in this issue of Glint. Anne Barngrover and Avni Vyas remind us of the way in which bourbon can become “lighter fluid” as they contemplate the “Arson of the Old Year.” Fireworks replace prayer at midnight celebrations. The modern person can’t “mean / prayer the way serfs used to,” the poets tell us. Yet, a resurrection occurs in the poem as a “near-dead raccoon / shudders to life and then can’t stop bleating.” Such revitalization is epiphanic. The poem asks, “How many small animals / pray by the way of half-eaten flower, of half-drunk river?”
 The protagonist created by this issue’s other collaborative team, Martin Ott and John F. Buckley, could probably answer this question. “Madame Leah Bears the Weight of the Zoonoosphere” as she is besieged by psychic communications from sloths, prairie-dogs, and howler monkeys. She drinks herself to sleep where she remains under the influence of animal kind, “pump[ing] her legs,” “chasing sticks and human femurs.” The constant onslaught of animal spirits leaves her envious of “Haitian voodoo / priestesses,” who are “ridden by only one loa at a time.”
 Cross-species connections are also suggested by Miranda Barnwell’s “Cats Are Little Gods That Walk Amongst Us,” though the main characters tend to be more baffled than enlightened or possessed by the domestic pets that appear and disappear at various points in the narrative. When Seymour, a female cat, disappears into a gap in a hall closet at the beginning of Barnwell’s story, I was expecting a feline version of Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich. Would the closet portal take Seymour into some other dimension? Perhaps, she might find herself in Mr. Mistoffelees’ head? (For those who do not recall, Mr. M is the conjurer among the cast of T. S. Eliot’s Old Possums Book of Practical Cats.) I won’t spoil Barwell’s mysteries by premature revelations. But I will say that human relationships are altered as if by intervention by deities of animal kind.
 But, it is in estrangements between humans that many of this issue’s metamorphoses arrive. Sometimes, words are all that is needed to unsettle or transform our perceptions of reality. In his essay, “Abandonment,” Robert Detman expresses both repulsion and regret as he reconsiders the possibly pathological prevarications of a former college roommate. Ostensibly, Detman’s subject is the roommate’s disturbing tendency to distort all relationships—especially those with women—into lurid fantasies to be shared with anyone who will listen. By the conclusion of Detman’s essay, however, the reader finds herself remembering past acquaintances who have also become anecdote. How does the craft of writing creative nonfiction differ all that much from the deceptions or delusions practiced by Detman’s roommate—or by any of those storytellers from whom we have distanced ourselves because we distrusted, even feared their unreliability?  
 Detman’s roommate is not the only character in this issue to suspect duplicity and/or mystery whenever female bodies are concerned. In Zoe Gilbert’s “Earth Is Not for Eating,” a boy named Mouse can no longer recognize his mother as her belly grows to monstrous proportions. A friend convinces him that a fit of pica is proof of changeling status. In Jane Andrew’s “Night and Day,” a work of flash fiction, another female character withholds the secret of her impending sea change. And the artist Camille Claudel decides to break from Rodin, letting “the garden grow wild with mold” in Clarissa Jakobsons’ “Without Tears.” This poem is accompanied by a special section featuring Jakobsons’ Claudel-inspired artwork, which also revels in the flux that is implicit in feminine morphology. No wonder Pramila Venkateswaran’s speaker perceives her tongue as thorny as Saraswati, Hindu goddess of creativity, who is just as likely to inspire her to concoct “dirty limericks” as she is to generate honeyed lyrics where trees “bear[…] down like pregnant women,” and “sunshine [smears] like turmeric glowing on skin.”
 With such changeability inherent in sexuality, it’s also little wonder that the protagonist of Robin Wyatt Dunn’s “Theater Academy” is such a Pantolone. He wants to be Priapus (a minor god with no need for Viagra), but remains as frustrated as the old fool of the staged commedia. The younger narrator of Khanh Ha’s “Of Dust and Butterfly” is similarly arrested by desire for a female he should not want, the young wife of the uncle who has enabled him to leave Vietnam in order to study in America. Both of these men operate in a realm of moral suspension. In the case of the first character, boundaries between theater and life threaten to evaporate as he practices a form of method acting. In the case of the latter, a dangerous intimacy develops following a storm. The atmosphere is thick with transgressive intent.
 Finally, I would like to conclude this introductory essay to Glint, issue 4, by calling our readers’ attention to a special section of student work. Cameron Bass, April Love, Ashley Santos, and Victor Gabriel Sanchez are the winners of what we hope will be only the first contest for students of Fayetteville State University and the Cross Creek Early College Program. Although our contest guidelines did not specify a theme for submissions, I believe that similar strains of interstitiality may be glimpsed in the students’ efforts.
 Although Bass titles his essay, “How I Failed to Grasp My Grandmother’s Death,” his words emanate with great lucidity from that liminal state to which grief casts us. In Love’s short story, “The Brave Ones,” college students long for a movement as transformative as an earlier generation’s Harlem Renaissance, but discover that desire itself can transform when love is found to be another word for bravery. In Santos’ poem, “Time Rumba,” dance erupts from the body’s strong pulse music—and, in Sanchez’ still photograph, “Shadow Dancer,” the ballerina’s toe-shoes prove a steady focal point against brickwork, her legs a white gleam in foreground as thin shadows taper behind her.
 As for the rest of us, the writers and artists of Glint Literary Journal: we may not always appear quite so balanced as this ballerina; yet, we continue to negotiate uncertain thresholds both before and behind us. May we do so with grace and audacity.



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Saturday, June 22, 2013

Craft, Pt. 11(b) - Submitting Without Drowning


I had meant to touch on the specifics of actually submitting in my previous post, but it all got away from me. With this one, I'd like to suss out a few of the particulars, which I had to do some research about early on. Hopefully this will help out a future submitter later.




Multiple Submissions Vs. Simultaneous Submissions

Typically defined, the term "multiple submissions" means several unique submissions to the same journal, review, or publication place at the same time. During the course of my exploration, I've found a small number of places that accept multiple submissions. I imagine this is due to the fact that some writers simply can't help themselves and want to send a deluge of content to a place and see which they like. The problem with this is that it creates a mountain of submissions for editors to sift through. Especially considering how the next phrase works.

"Simultaneous submissions" is a term that means a single piece can be submitted to multiple places at the same time. More publications are open to this as long as they're notified when the piece is published elsewhere so that they can remove it from their own consideration pile. You can see now how the confluence of both multiple and simultaneous submissions can be problematic; submitting the same ten pieces to ten different places might up your odds of something being published, but it overwhelms and gums up the works all across the board. To say nothing of the fact that you'd have to go back and contact each of those publications if one story got published, much less all ten, a very small likelihood in and of itself.




Submitting Novel Excerpts

This one's tricky. Some places accept novel excerpts, but most don't. Why, you might ask? Because there are very few chapters of most books that don't require the chapters before and after it to make sense of the one in question. Even better, remove a chapter from your book. How does the removal of that chapter change the narrative flow of the entire work itself? If the change is so drastic as to make your book unreadable, then obviously you can't submit that piece for standalone publication. A general rule of thumb for my own personal use: don't submit novel excerpts, even if a publication accepts them on principle. It's highly unlikely the piece will make much sense without the corresponding chapters and if you're a writer, then you know you've got other pieces to submit.




Submitting Near/Around Due Dates

The vast majority of publications have cutoff dates for when they stop reading and considering submissions. I don't have much in the way of knowing how much more quickly a publication will make a decision on a piece the closer it's submitted to the due date. Personally, I try to submit a week or two before the due date, hoping I will end up hearing back on the piece sooner. But, it's just as likely that you'll hear back quickly if you submit early on when there's not such a wave of submissions coming in all at once. Perhaps the middle ground of submitting at the halfway point between the open submission date and the closed submission date is your best bet here.




Contacting a Publication on the Status of a Submission

So your piece has been out in submission land for five months. You've heard nothing back from the editors and you worry that they've somehow forgotten about your piece (because your piece being published is the most important thing...to you). Wait another month. Most publications that I've come across have blatantly stated "do not contact us about the status of a submission unless it's been over (x) number of months." Six months is usually the accepted length of time. Anytime before that and you may find yourself either blacklisted from that particular publication or have your submission summarily rejected. These are obviously worst-case scenarios, but it can happen. Don't be a douche; stay patient.




Paying to Submit

I used to only submit to places that were free and didn't charge a dime for anything; not for reading, not for editing, nothing. Now that most publications have gone to digital submissions, a few have begun charging reading fees. At first this bothered me, but more and more I realized how much paper these places were probably using to print up who knows how many submissions, so their costs were probably ballooning a bit. Since the writer wasn't submitting hard copies via post, this meant more costs in printer ink and paper. And a lot of places only publish digitally now, trying to keep their costs down while still trying to find that writer/writing that they want to highlight in their publication.

Most places charge just a two or three dollar fee to submit. This is completely reasonable. There are a few others I've seen that have charged upwards of $30, but this fee includes a deep critique of the submitted piece mailed back to the writer with notes on the manuscript. I won't say that's a high fee, but if you're just starting out and haven't had anyone look at your work before, try one of these once or twice to get a feel for the process. Each editor will read a piece differently, so it's good to get an in-depth look at your work whenever possible. Bottom line: fees are okay. Don't be afraid to pay them on occasion, but there are certainly plenty of other (free) places out there.

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Thursday, June 20, 2013

Craft, Pt. 11 - Submitting Without Drowning


"How you uh, how you coming on that novel you're working on? Huh? Gotta a big, uh, big stack of papers there? Gotta, gotta nice little story you're working on there? Your big novel you've been working on for 3 years? Huh?"


So yeah. You've put in the work. You've got a stack of stories you want the world to read because the world HAS to read these stories. Immediately. Now what?

I won't begin to tell you there's a single right way to do any of this; I think history shows us over and over again that everyone forges their own path to success and there's no better way to write a story than the way you write it. There's also no better way to try to get published and taken seriously unless it's on your terms. Having said that, I'll just go over my own process for the last year and a half. Don't take it as gospel, but feel free to use it as a trail map until you've found your own way.

When I realized I had several stories I could start sending out to various publishers, I googled these phrases to start off with:

- Literary Journal
- Journal
- Literary Review
- Review
- Fiction Submissions

You get a pretty good long list of places accepting work from both new and established authors. But one shouldn't simply barrage vast numbers of magazines in the hopes that something will stick. Like readers, each magazine has its own personal aesthetic and most implore you to read previous issues so that you don't waste your time submitting or waste their time reading that sci-fi/western piece you submitted to a place that deals primarily in turn-of-the-century, coming-of-age stories written in transcendentalist styles. But it's not always feasible to read a single copy of every literary journal out there just to find out whether or not they'll like your stuff.

What I found while picking up new story collections by authors I'd never heard of before was that each author typically had published some of their stories elsewhere separately first. As rational an approach as this was, it had never occurred to me to approach publishing this way. Short story collections that I found myself drawn to were typically of the weirder, more surreal, more slipstream/experimental and there was a pattern to where many of the authors had submitted their works to. Since I feel I write in this same vein, I began checking these sites and magazines specifically. I began submitting, feeling pretty firmly that I wasn't wasting my time or the publisher's time by doing so. What I soon realized was that I needed to have a system in place.

A great tool is Submittable (formerly Submishmash). If you don't already have an account here, you should get one as it's become almost the industry standard when it comes to writing submissions. Not only does it track the pieces that have been accepted, but tracks the ones that are currently being read, the ones that have been declined, so on. It's a really incredible resource that's helped me immensely. But supposing you don't currently have an account there? What would you do?



Almost like making copies in triplicate, I devised a few processes that help keep me from submitting pieces either to the same place twice or two pieces to the same place at the same time. The first is via my external hard-drive where I keep my files. Since every journal or magazine may have different requirements for submitting (pagination, contact information placement, etc.), each submission is a separate file. The letter (z) denotes pieces that are currently being considered, the letter (W) means pieces I've had to withdraw because they'd been accepted at other magazines, the letter (D) means the piece was denied or rejected, and the letters (AAA) means the piece was accepted. Not only is everything alphabetized, but each submission is dated as well so that I don't submit more times than is necessary during reading periods.



So that's two ways I've got my submissions info backed up, which is good because not every journal or magazine utilizes Submittable. Some prefer by mail, email,  or their own submission managers particular to their site. Either way, now I've got every submission (denied, accepted, withdrawn) completely accounted for in this file. A quick scan can show me all the places I've submitted to and which pieces have been denied where. But I needed to be more thorough, more ADD about the process.

I keep an online journal and began utilizing it to keep track of links to submission sites, all their pertinent information (dates due, page requirements, whether or not they allowed simultaneous submissions, etc.), and even as another way of simply showing which pieces were in which stage of review for publication.


And though it's a pain in the ass to keep updating, it's proven to be a wildly excellent system for me. The list of publications and the information I require grows every day and I keep adding publication opportunities to each story single story entry. When I submit to one place, I remove that particular link from that story's entry so I never end up resubmitting the same piece to a magazine twice. No one wants to be remembered as that guy that just couldn't take a hint after his first rejection letter.


There are PLENTY of places out there for every taste and genre of writer, so don't get too discouraged. And if you find yourself discouraged or waiting with bated breath to hear back about the status of a submission...stop. Go back to writing, go back to finishing half-cooked projects so that you can continue submitting to other places. By the time you've forgotten to check their statuses, they'll have already gotten back to you and you'll have already created new pieces to submit.

I genuinely hope this helps, even a little bit. Granted this is just my own laborious process, but it's been working thus far.

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Monday, June 10, 2013

Books On Deck / Up Next

 Ben Spivey - "Black God"

"Ben Spivey's BLACK GOD is a surreal dreamscape of a book. To borrow from the book itself, 'There's something black in that place like it was untouched by God himself.... Or herself.' At its claustrophobic core, this book is a love story about time and memory, fear and death. At its dreamlike fringes, it is a book that might have been written by the son of Kafka and Braque. Like our best books, it is a love story in love with its own death."—Peter Markus

"In BLACK GOD there is a dream architecture that draws the aging narrator Cooper from his dying wife like a moth to its hard and gateless outer shell. With him we explore the received forms of daily life mingling with fluctuating dreams of the interior of eternity. Here, Spivey accomplishes the rare feat of investing Cooper's efforts with resonance though his motives obscure even to himself and the theater in which he operates is a dreamscape of mechanical islands, a wife retreating into silhouettes, and beaches of washed up clocks: 'I looked up and could see where I fell from—a house hanging in the sky like a new moon—the actual moon cast shadow on the home giving it celestial shape. I could even see the stairs I must have tumbled from hanging there like a limp wrist.' This is a visionary book, a genuine terror and awe."—Joe Hall




 Jeremy Scahill - "Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield" 

"In Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, author of the New York Times best-seller Blackwater, takes us inside America’s new covert wars. The foot soldiers in these battles operate globally and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies.

Drawn from the ranks of the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, former Blackwater and other private security contractors, the CIA’s Special Activities Division and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), these elite soldiers operate worldwide, with thousands of secret commandos working in more than one hundred countries. Funded through “black budgets,” Special Operations Forces conduct missions in denied areas, engage in targeted killings, snatch and grab individuals and direct drone, AC-130 and cruise missile strikes. While the Bush administration deployed these ghost militias, President Barack Obama has expanded their operations and given them new scope and legitimacy.

Dirty Wars follows the consequences of the declaration that “the world is a battlefield,” as Scahill uncovers the most important foreign policy story of our time. From Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond, Scahill reports from the frontlines in this high-stakes investigation and explores the depths of America’s global killing machine. He goes beneath the surface of these covert wars, conducted in the shadows, outside the range of the press, without effective congressional oversight or public debate. And, based on unprecedented access, Scahill tells the chilling story of an American citizen marked for assassination by his own government.

As US leaders draw the country deeper into conflicts across the globe, setting the world stage for enormous destabilization and blowback, Americans are not only at greater risk—we are changing as a nation. Scahill unmasks the shadow warriors who prosecute these secret wars and puts a human face on the casualties of unaccountable violence that is now official policy: victims of night raids, secret prisons, cruise missile attacks and drone strikes, and whole classes of people branded as “suspected militants.” Through his brave reporting, Scahill exposes the true nature of the dirty wars the United States government struggles to keep hidden."



   
 George Packer - "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America" 

"American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives.

The Unwinding journeys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who questions the Internet’s significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era’s leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents.

The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer’s novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date."



 Richard N. Haass - "Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America's House in Order"


"The biggest threat to the United States comes not from abroad but from within. This is the provocative, timely, and unexpected message of Council on Foreign Relations President Richard N. Haass’s Foreign Policy Begins at Home.

A rising China, climate change, terrorism, a nuclear Iran, a turbulent Middle East, and a reckless North Korea all present serious challenges. But U.S. national security depends even more on the United States addressing its burgeoning deficit and debt, crumbling infrastructure, second class schools, and outdated immigration system.

Foreign Policy Begins at Home describes a twenty-first century in which power is widely diffused. Globalization, revolutionary technologies, and the rise and decline of new and old powers have created a “nonpolar” world of American primacy but not domination. So far, it has been a relatively forgiving world, with no great rival threatening America directly. How long this strategic respite lasts, according to Haass, will depend largely on whether the United States puts its own house in order.

Haass argues for a new American foreign policy: Restoration. At home, the new doctrine would have the country concentrate on restoring the economic foundations of American power. Overseas, the U.S. would stop trying to remake the Middle East with military force, instead emphasizing maintaining the balance of power in Asia, promoting economic integration and energy self-sufficiency in North America, and working to promote collective responses to global challenges.

Haass rejects both isolationism and the notion of American decline. But he argues the United States is underperforming at home and overreaching abroad. Foreign Policy Begins at Home lays out a compelling vision for restoring America’s power, influence, and ability to lead the world."




 Doxiadis, Papadimitrius, Papadatos, Donna - "Logicomix" 

"This exceptional graphic novel recounts the spiritual odyssey of philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his agonized search for absolute truth, Russell crosses paths with legendary thinkers like Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, and Kurt Gödel, and finds a passionate student in the great Ludwig Wittgenstein. But his most ambitious goal—to establish unshakable logical foundations of mathematics—continues to loom before him. Through love and hate, peace and war, Russell persists in the dogged mission that threatens to claim both his career and his personal happiness, finally driving him to the brink of insanity.

This story is at the same time a historical novel and an accessible explication of some of the biggest ideas of mathematics and modern philosophy. With rich characterizations and expressive, atmospheric artwork, the book spins the pursuit of these ideas into a highly satisfying tale.

Probing and ingeniously layered, the book throws light on Russell’s inner struggles while setting them in the context of the timeless questions he spent his life trying to answer. At its heart, Logicomix is a story about the conflict between an ideal rationality and the unchanging, flawed fabric of reality."

 




 Ben Marcus - "Leaving the Sea"
(Out in Jan. 2014) 

"In the dystopian "Rollingwood," a divorced father struggles to hold on to his job while taking care of his ill infant son. In the hilarious "I Can Say Many Nice Things," a writer toying with infidelity teaches a brutal creative writing workshop on a cruise ship. In "Watching Mysteries with My Mother," a man spends time with his aging mother and meditates on mortality. And in the title story, told in a single breathless sentence, we watch as the narrator's marriage and his sanity unravel.

Surreal and tender, terrifying and life-affirming, Leaving the Sea brings us an utterly unique writer at the height of his powers."

 
 
Sandra Day O'Connor - "Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court" 

"From Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to sit on the United States Supreme Court, comes this fascinating book about the history and evolution of the highest court in the land.

Out of Order sheds light on the centuries of change and upheaval that transformed the Supreme Court from its uncertain beginnings into the remarkable institution that thrives and endures today. From the early days of circuit-riding, when justices who also served as trial judges traveled thousands of miles per year on horseback to hear cases, to the changes in civil rights ushered in by Earl Warren and Thurgood Marshall; from foundational decisions such as Marbury vs. Madison to modern-day cases such as Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, Justice O’Connor weaves together stories and lessons from the history of the Court, charting turning points and pivotal moments that have helped define our nation’s progress.

With unparalleled insight and her unique perspective as a history-making figure, Justice O’Connor takes us on a personal exploration, painting vivid pictures of Justices in history, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of the greatest jurists of all time; Thurgood Marshall, whose understated and succinct style would come to transform oral argument; William O. Douglas, called “The Lone Ranger” because of his impassioned and frequent dissents; and John Roberts, whom Justice O’Connor considers to be the finest practitioner of oral argument she has ever witnessed in Court. We get a rare glimpse into the Supreme Court’s inner workings: how cases are chosen for hearing; the personal relationships that exist among the Justices; and the customs and traditions, both public and private, that bind one generation of jurists to the next—from the seating arrangements at Court lunches to the fiercely competitive basketball games played in the Court Building’s top-floor gymnasium, the so-called “highest court in the land.”

Wise, candid, and assured, Out of Order is a rich offering of inspiring stories of one of our country’s most important institutions, from one of our country’s most respected pioneers."



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Wednesday, May 29, 2013

(Review) Matt Bell's "How They Were Found"


 
"How They Were Found" 
by Matt Bell
238pgs
Keyhole Press Books

I've been on a kick recently, trying to find short story collections by little-known authors or those better known on the far outskirts of the literary canon, people pushing beyond just pure narrative and reconfiguring text to suit their own needs. Matt Bell's "How They Were Found" sounded like something I would enjoy immensely, if only for the imagination if not for the writing. As far as I'm concerned, he delivered on all counts.

The majority of the collection (13 stories total) are longer pieces than I'm typically used to reading, but each piece was as engaging, if not more so, than the one that preceded it, which was a nice surprise. Often a collection can lose steam towards the final push if the pieces aren't placed properly, and while I was less enthused by two or three of the stories, the remaining ones made me an instant fan and I will certainly be checking out more of his work.

"The Cartographer's Girl" was a wonderful introduction, utilizing map notations and symbols in an effort to deconstruct a past relationship, of which there is still some mystery left lingering in the air.

"X:
X is the store where he bought the ring he never got to give her.
X is the place where he planned to propose, where he already made the reservation.
X is the speech he rehearsed, that he practiced saying slowly, carefully, so that she would not mishear even a single syllable.
X is nowhere, X is now, X is never mind.
X is everything that ever mattered. 
X is all he has left."



"The Receiving Tower" seemed to be after some great "event," putting us in a snowy region with a small battalion of soldiers who were slowly losing their minds and their memories, forgetting not only their names, but their entire histories and how they ended up where they are.

"As I remember it - which is not well - young Kerr was the first to grow dim. We'd find him high in the tower's listening room, cursing at the computers, locking up console after console by failing to enter his password correctly. At night, he wandered the barracks, holding a framed portrait of his son and daughter, asking us if we knew their names, if we remembered how old they were. This is when one of us would remove the photograph from its frame so that he could read the fading scrawl on the back, the inked lines he eventually wore off by tracing them over and over and over with this fingers, after which there was no proof to quiet his queries."


"His Last Great Gift" was an unbelievably dark piece about 19th-Century minister building a machine that would be the supposed coming of God. More than just a commentary on religion through science fiction tropes, Bell does a great job of explicating the relationships between the members of this religious sect as their lives come into constant contact with each other.

"He says, When God created the world, did he try over and over and over again until he got it right? Are there castaway worlds littering the cosmos, retarded with fire and ice and failed life thrashing away in the clay? 

No, there are not.

When God came to save this world, did he impregnate all of Galilee, hoping that one of those seeds would grow up to be a Messiah?

No. What god needs, God makes, and it only takes the once."




But it is "Dredge" that curled my toes back the most out of this entire collection. We follow along with the narrator as he first finds a body in a lake, removes the body, and takes it home with him, taking off on some kind of twisted detective noir tale in suburbia. Truly one of the creepiest things I've read and I appreciated the deep psychological explication of the character as things move along. While a "normal" person may not agree with every action that occurs, there's an understanding that comes by the final page that's disturbingly sweet.




There are several other solid stories here ("An Index of How Our Family Was Killed" was a particularly inspired piece), but these were the ones that really stood out to me. The entire collection as a whole is really solid and even the longer pieces didn't make me feel like I was trudging through them; I was genuinely enjoying them. "How They Were Found" is highly unsettling and highly enjoyable. I'd scoop up everything of his that you can find.


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Saturday, May 25, 2013

Books on Deck / Up Next

I've been slow on posting new stuff, but I've been reading through a fantastic "trilogy" by Carlos Ruiz Zafon recently. Beginning with "The Shadow of the Wind," then "The Angel's Game," and ending on "The Prisoner of Heaven." All pretty good books, but the last of the series was half the size of the first two and felt rushed (probably more by Zafon's publishers than the man himself). Regardless, all three were fantastic reads.

I've also been trying to pump out more stories for this collection I've been working on for the last year and a half now, so I've been trying to find new (to me) short story collections in a darker, more experimental vein. I've got a few coming to me in the mail that I'm super excited about. The first one to arrive, Matt Bell's "How They Were Found" has been an incredibly nice surprise thus far. Right up my damn alley and I couldn't be happier with his style, his imagination, or with his prose.

Matt Bell - "How They Were Found"

"In his debut collection “How They Were Found,” Matt Bell draws from a wide range of genres to create stories that are both formally innovative and imaginatively rich. In one, a 19th-century minister follows ghostly instructions to build a mechanical messiah. In another, a tyrannical army commander watches his apocalyptic command slip away as the memories of his men begin to fade and fail. Elsewhere, murders are indexed, new worlds are mapped, fairy tales are fractured and retold and then fractured again. Throughout these thirteen stories, Bell’s careful prose burrows at the foundations of his characters’ lives until they topple over, then painstakingly pores over the wreckage for what rubbled humanity might yet remain to be found."




Amber Sparks - "May We Shed These Human Bodies"


“May We Shed These Human Bodies” peers through vast spaces and skies with the world's most powerful telescope to find humanity: wild and bright and hard as diamonds. Here is humanity building: families reconstruct themselves, mothers fashion babies from two-by-fours and nails, boys make a mother out of leaves and twigs and wishing. Here is humanity tearing down: a wife sets her house on fire in revenge, a young girl plots to kill the ghosts that stalk her, a dying man takes the whole human race with him. Here is humanity transforming: feral children, cannibalistic seniors, animal wives - a whole sideshow's worth of oddballs and freaks."





Donald Barthelme - "Paradise"


"Simon, a middle-aged architect separated from his wife, is given the chance to live out a stereotypical male fantasy: freed from the travails of married life, he ends up living with three nubile lingerie models who use him as a sexual object. 

Set in the 1980s, there's a further tension between Simon's desire to exploit this stereotypical fantasy and his (as well as the author's) desire to treat the women as human beings, despite the women's claims that Simon can't distinguish between their personalities. 

Employing a variety of forms, Barthelme gracefully plays with this setup, creating a story that's not just funny—although it's definitely that—but actually quite melancholy, as Simon knows that the women's departure is inevitable, that this "paradise" will come to an end, and that he'll be left with only an empty house, booze, and regrets about chances not taken."





David Markson - "Vanishing Point"


"In the literary world, there is little that can match the excitement of opening a new book by David Markson. From "Wittgenstein’s Mistress" to "Reader’s Block" to "Springer’s Progress" to "This Is Not a Novel," he has delighted and amazed readers for decades. And now comes his latest masterwork, "Vanishing Point," wherein an elderly writer (identified only as "Author") sets out to transform shoeboxes crammed with notecards into a novel — and in so doing will dazzle us with an astonishing parade of revelations about the trials and calamities and absurdities and often even tragedies of the creative life — all the while trying his best (he says) to keep himself out of the tale. Naturally he will fail to do the latter, frequently managing to stand aside and yet remaining undeniably central throughout — until he is swept inevitably into the narrative’s startling and shattering climax. A novel of death and laughter both — and of extraordinary intellectual richness."





Ann & Jeff Vandermeer - "The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities"


"You’ll be astonished by what you’ll find in “The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities.” Editors Ann and Jeff Vandermeer have gathered together a spectacular array of exhibits, oddities, images, and stories by some of the most renowned and bestselling writers and artists in speculative and graphic fiction, including Ted Chiang, Mike Mignola (creator of “Hellboy”), China Miéville, and Michael Moorcock. A spectacularly illustrated anthology of Victorian steampunk devices and the stories behind them, The “Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities” is a boldly original, enthrallingly imaginative, and endlessly entertaining entry into a hidden world of weird science and unnatural nature that will appeal equally to fantasy lovers and graphic novel aficionados."




Dante Alighieri - "The Divine Comedy" (John Ciardi Translation)


"The historical and cultural significance of Dante Alighieri’s masterpiece “The Divine Comedy” cannot be overstated. Dante’s poetry takes the reader on a multi-layered journey, one through which he or she experiences this literary master s unique aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities. “The Divine Comedy” also presents the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of medieval Italian thought and its bearing on Western theology and culture. This lyrical allegory of a journey from the depths of Hell to Paradise is a moving read in its own right and its influence upon world literature unchallenged."



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Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Books On Deck / Up Next

Stephen Beachy - "Some Phantom / No Time Flat" (Two Novellas) 

"In Some Phantom an unnamed woman arrives in a strange city, fleeing a violent relationship in her past. Taking a job with disturbed children, her own mental stability becomes more and more precarious. A marriage of The Turn of the Screw and Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls, Some Phantom poses questions about the line between madness and memory, fantasy and abuse, questions elaborated on in No Time Flat. No Time Flat follows Wade, a young boy who grows up on the American plains in an isolated existence with his elderly parents, as he makes his way through a childhood of playground shootings and mysterious strangers. Becoming a wanderer himself, Wade inhabits a sparse American landscape of fleeting connections, missing children, and possible crimes."


Alvin Lu - "The Hell Screens" 

"Cheng-Ming, a Chinese American, rummages through the used-book stalls and market bins of Taipei. His object is no ordinary one - he's searching obsessively for accounts of ghosts and spirits, suicides and murders in a city plagued by a rapist-killer and less tangible forces. Cheng-Ming is an outsider trying to unmask both the fugitive criminal and the otherworld of spiritual forces that are inexorably taking control of the city. Things get complicated when the fetid island atmosphere begins to melt his contact lenses and his worsening sight paradoxically opens up the teeming world of ghosts and chimeras that surround him. Vengeful and anonymous spirits commandeer Cheng-Ming's sight, so that he cannot distinguish past from present, himself from another. Images from modern and colonial Taiwan - an island of restless spirits - assail Cheng-Ming even as they captivate the reader."




Bernard M. Patten - "The Logic of Alice: Clear Thinking in Wonderland"

"In this unique approach to interpreting Alice, the fruit of ten years of research, Dr. Bernard M. Patten shows that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, fused his passion for logic, mathematics, and games with his love of words and nonsense stories to produce a multifaceted, intricately structured work of literature. Patten provides a chapter-by-chapter skeleton key to Alice, which meticulously demonstrates how its various episodes reveal Dodgson's profound knowledge of the rules of clear thinking, informal and formal logic, symbolic logic, and human nature."




Peter Hook - "Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division"

"In Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, Peter Hook, bassist for the legendary, groundbreaking band Joy Division, takes readers backstage with the group that helped define the sound of a generation and influenced artists such as U2, Radiohead, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Unlike other books about Joy Division, Factory Records, or lead singer Ian Curtis—who took his own life just before the band's first U.S. Tour—Unknown Pleasures tells Joy Division's story from the unique perspective of one of the three surviving band members."




Albert Einstein - "Ideas and Opinions"

"A new edition of the most definitive collection of Albert Einstein's popular writings, gathered under the supervision of Einstein himself. The selections range from his earliest days as a theoretical physicist to his death in 1955; from such subjects as relativity, nuclear war or peace, and religion and science, to human rights, economics, and government."





Neil DeGrasse Tyson - "Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries" 


"Loyal readers of the monthly "Universe" essays in Natural History magazine have long recognized Neil deGrasse Tyson's talent for guiding them through the mysteries of the cosmos with stunning clarity and almost childlike enthusiasm. Here, Tyson compiles his favorite essays across a myriad of cosmic topics. The title essay introduces readers to the physics of black holes by explaining the gory details of what would happen to your body if you fell into one. "Holy Wars" examines the needless friction between science and religion in the context of historical conflicts. "The Search for Life in the Universe" explores astral life from the frontiers of astrobiology. And "Hollywood Nights" assails the movie industry's feeble efforts to get its night skies right."





Joshua Mohr - "Fight Song" 

"When his bicycle is intentionally run off the road by a neighbor's SUV, something snaps in Bob Coffin. Modern suburban life has been getting him down and this is the last straw. To avoid following in his own father’s missteps, Bob is suddenly desperate to reconnect with his wife and his distant, distracted children. And he's looking for any guidance he can get.

Bob Coffin soon learns that the wisest words come from the most unexpected places, from characters that are always more than what they appear to be: a magician/marriage counselor, a fast-food drive-thru attendant/phone-sex operator, and a janitor/guitarist of a French KISS cover band. Can these disparate voices inspire Bob to fight for his family? To fight for his place in the world?

A call-to-arms for those who have ever felt beaten down by life, Fight Song is a quest for happiness in a world in which we are increasingly losing control. It is the exciting new novel by one of the most surprising and original writers of his generation."




Norman Lock - "A History of the Imagination"

"A History of the Imagination is a postmodern tale of adventure that reshapes the parameters of time and space, thought and action. In a metaphorical Africa, replete with nostalgia (but no dimensions), anything can happen and usually does. The narrator defends his magical departures, saying his is a history of possibilities, where fiction is "no less real for [it's] being so." But when Darwin's corpse begins to lust after Colette and the African porters go on strike because the author hasn't acknowledged the important role they play, we are left to wonder: just how far is reality from dreams?

Norman Lock juxtaposes remote times and places, historical facts and literary fictions, to create an absurdist collage reminiscent of Guy Davenport and Donald Barthelme. In this world it is not impossible to sail from Mombasa to Cinncinati, or to set out from the City of Radiant Objects, where "things are free of the obligation to signify," or to go hunting icebergs in a quest to avenge the Titanic at last. Borne aloft by Wilbur Wright, Jules Verne, Ziegfield, and Houdini, we find ourselves lost again in a "seam in the world...between History and Imagination."


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