Kyle Minor

has "First, The Teeth," a deeply moving essay in Redivider.

One of his essays is also a Work of the Day over at Emerging Writers Network.

Roy Kesey in BASS 2007!

Congratulations to the talented (and humble) Roy Kesey who recently received news that his story "Wait," published in The Kenyon Review was chosen by Stephen King for Best American Short Story!

Anyone who knows Roy will not be suprised by this glorious news, but rather, feel assured that things are right in the literary world.

Matt Bell

reviews "So, This Is Drink" by Sean Lovelace for SmokeLong Quarterly.

REAL

REAL, the journal from Stephen F. Austin University has a brand new website.

Yearly subscriptions are just twenty dollars (fifteen for contributors) and it's a gorgeous journal. The next issue is due out this spring and will have my story "Crossing Cape Fear." Yay!

"Giraffes" by Steven Gillis

Giraffes

Steven Gillis must be one part sorcerer, one part mad scientist and one part romantic. I’m not sure any other kind of writer could have delivered such a unique group of twisted stories of love and fortitude. Gillis unifies the collection with threads of science and the absurd, but what really unites is the compassion Gillis shows toward his characters—-even those that are not destined to escape the reader’s judgment. Inside this book you’ll find children as human pendulums, a man with a tail, a community of shared spouses, a lonely runaway, a Little Person in love with Cinderella, and young boys who risk their lives to mark their passage into adulthood.

The strongest stories are the ones which navigate in weirdness and the absurd, and those pregnant with metaphor. In “Korematsu Love,” a man copes with strange changes in his body brought on by the emotional challenges of a serious relationship. In “Coveting,” a man struggles between his obligation to his odd community and his love for his wife. In the title story which begins “M.E. hung the children in the yard…,” M.E. is obsessed with proving his scientific theories while his girlfriend simply wants him to surrender to the inexplicable: love.

Perhaps my favorite is the last story, “Lift,” in which boys are expected to take a Rite of Passage exam: to build their own contraption and achieve flight. The story is a brilliant metaphor for what we do to our young men (and women) by sending them to war, essentially to pay for the sins of their collective fathers, while the rest of us carry on “nibbling on wafers and jelly sandwiches, oohing and ahhing with each new crash.”
So what happens when a sheltered boy of privilege, exempt from this peculiar Rite of Passage, decides to prove himself? You’ll have to read this unusual collection to find out.

elimae

The new issue is live with stunning work by Kim Chinquee, Shelly Rae Rich, Myfanwy Collins, Antonio Maltezos, Chris Sheehan, Alicia Gifford, Mary Lynn Reed and more.

Dzanc Books Announces Two New 2008 Titles

..."February 2008 will see the publication of our second book, Yannick Murphy’s In a Bear’s Eye. Murphy’s collection includes 24 stories, 16 of which have been published in journals such as The Quarterly, McSweeneys, and StoryQuarterly. The title story will soon be included in The O’Henry Prize Stories 2007 (Anchor, May 2007).

Murphy’s earlier work has been very well received. The New York Times Book Review stated her debut collection, Stores in Another Language (Knopf, 1987), was “…disturbing and provocative … the stories in this debut collection from a twenty-four year-old writer have surprising assurance,” and named The Sea of Trees (Houghton-Mifflin, 1997), Murphy’s debut novel, as one of their Notable Books of the Year. Mark Richards deemed it “an extraordinary first novel, harrowing, brutal, funny, and extremely wise.” The Sea of Trees was also included in The Best Novels of the Nineties by Linda Parent Lesher. Murphy’s second novel, Here They Come (McSweeneys, 2006) was a Litblog Co-op Read This! Nominee last year, received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and was called “a hell of a book …” by Frank McCourt. Wendy Smith, in the Los Angeles Times, praised Murphy’s “remarkable use of language, the expressive way she puts together ordinary words and images to create surprisingly lovely and moving metaphors.” Yannick Murphy’s new novel, based on the life of the infamous courtesan, Signed, Mata Hari, will be published by Little, Brown in November of this year. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a national Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a MacDowell Artits’ Colony fellowship.

Dzanc Books will follow In a Bear’s Eye with Peter Markus’ Bob, or Man on Boat in the Fall 2008. Peter’s fourth book, Bob, or Man on Boat, will be his debut novel. Markus’ three story collections have shown him to be a master of repetition and rhythm and have earned him a loyal following of readers, as well as seeing his work frequently anthologized. Markus’ third collection, The Singing Fish, spent its first few weeks atop Powell’s Small Press bestseller list..."

Mary Akers

has a superb piece in the current issue of Brevity

Storyglossia Issue 18

is now available to read. Happy reading!

Introducing G.U.D.

"Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine publishes 200 pages of literary
and genre fiction, poetry, articles, and art, twice a year (though we're
hoping to increase our output as things pick up). We pay semi-pro rates
as an advance on royalties, in essence making our contributors
shareholders for the issue. Issue 0 is currently in its second print run!"

Lots of great stuff inside Issue 0, which you'll be able to read for only $10.00 an issue, $18.00 for a year's subscription, or $3.50 for an electronic issue (pdf). I like tthat there's a choice.

New-to-me Site:

Clusterflock, of which the brilliant and kind editor of elimae is part.

Thanks to Dan Wickett for posting the link to my elimae story on his Emerging Writers' Network.

And speaking of EWN's work of the day...there's a new link to Pia Z. Ehrhardt's story, "Train Crossings."

Alicia Gifford

has an excellent piece in 3am.

Alicia is one of my favorite writers. She is a force of nature.

Thanks to Perpetual Folly for the original link.

Snow!