Posts tagged ‘Joyce Carol Oates’

Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good

a welcome antidote to the conventional world of women’s fiction
—Best New Fiction

Print (978-1-937794-46-0)

Ebook (978-1-937794-43-9)

Out of print.

Go to: About | Goodreads | Reviews
Released 31 March 2015

ChooseWiselycover-print-front

Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good is a feminist anthology of dark fiction, co-edited by H. L. Nelson and Joanne Merriam. Containing 35 stories of “bad” women, and “good” women who just haven’t been caught yet, it features Joyce Carol Oates, Aimee Bender, Diane Cook, and 33 other fearless women writers. In January 2016, it was nominated for a This Is Horror Award. It’s the first in the Women Up To No Good series.

About this book:

Table of Contents:

  • Janet Shell Anderson, “Every Purpose Under Heaven”
  • Sidney Archer, “Woman Enough”
  • Alisha M. Attella, “Rise”
  • Gwen Beatty, “Angel Thinks She Will Die Very Soon”
  • Aimee Bender, “Broke”
  • Tina Connolly, “Hard Choices”
  • Diane Cook, “Moving On”
  • Kathy Fish, “The Hollow”
  • Amina Gautier, “A Cup of My Time”
  • Amelia Gray and Lindsay Hunter, “Sisters”
  • Tina May Hall, “Vampire”
  • Rebecca Jones-Howe, “Better Places”
  • Andrea Kneeland, “Imagination”
  • Molly Laich, “Kristen Doesn’t Like Surprise Parties”
  • Heather Lindsley, “The Angel of Death Has a Business Plan”
  • Holly Lopez, “The Head”
  • Kelly Luce, “Rooey”
  • Mesha Maren, “Eminent Domain”
  • Jessica McHugh, “In the Silt”
  • Mary Miller, “This Boy I Loved a Rock”
  • Ellen Birkett Morris, “After the Fall”
  • Joyce Carol Oates, “Spotted Hyenas: A Romance”
  • Jennifer Pelland, “The Kennel Club”
  • Cat Rambo, “Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut”
  • Joani Reese, “Good Neighbors”
  • Marytza K. Rubio, “Clap If You Believe”
  • Nisi Shawl, “Looking for Lilith”
  • Quill Shiv, “The Bitter Sea”
  • Emily Slaney, “Bear Traps”
  • Amber Sparks, “We Dressed Up Like Other People”
  • Rachel Swirsky, “The Sea of Trees”
  • Meg Tuite, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”
  • Damien Angelica Walters, “Girl, With Coin”
  • xTx, “Today I Am A Wife”
  • Bonnie ZoBell, “Tricking the Moon”

Contributor Bios:

Janet Shell Anderson has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for fiction and the Micro Prize for short fiction, published by Cease, Cows; decomP; FRIGG; Vestal Review; Gemini Magazine; Black Heart; Convergence; Grey Sparrow; and others. She likes flash fiction and is an attorney.

Sidney Archer is one of the pseudonyms of K.D. McCrite, popular author of children’s books and cozy mysteries. As Sidney Archer, she looks into the darker side of life, seeking redemptive qualities found in the shadows. She harbors passion for a well-crafted story, a unique plot twist, or a colorful phrase. Her books guide readers along narrow paths fraught with obstacles and illusion until light shines fully on what was hidden. Desolate Heart, a between-worlds novel, tells the story of a cursed painting, the man who has been trapped in it for a century, and the modern-day woman who finds him.

Alisha M. Attella lives in Long Beach, California with her two blond children and one black cat. In their tiny apartment she reads books, scratches out poems and stories, raises-up the children, and talks to the cat about writers and schedules and the wonders of publishing. She’s served as Managing Editor at Mojave River Press & Review and Cease, Cows, and her own work can be found in Lummox, East Jasmine Review, San Pedro River Review, Cadence Collective, and elsewhere.

Gwen Beatty is a sorority dropout from Iowa. She is an editor at First Stop Fiction and her website is the ridiculously convenient gwenbeatty.com.

Aimee Bender is the author of five books, including The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

Tina Connolly lives with her family in Portland, Oregon. Her stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her first fantasy novel, Ironskin (Tor 2012), was nominated for a Nebula, and the sequels Copperhead and Silverblind are now out. She narrates for Podcastle and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, runs the Parsec-winning flash fiction podcast Toasted Cake, and her website is tinaconnolly.com.

Diane Cook is the author of the story collection Man V. Nature (Harper, 2014). Her fiction has been published in Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Zoetrope, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and on This American Life, where she worked as a radio producer for six years. She won the 2012 Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction, and earned an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a teaching fellow. She lives in Oakland, California.

Kathy Fish’s short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The Lineup: 25 Provocative Women Writers (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), Guernica, Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She served as guest editor of Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2010. She is the author of three collections of short fiction: a chapbook of flash fiction in the chapbook collective, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women (Rose Metal Press, 2008), Wild Life (Matter Press, 2011), and Together We Can Bury It (The Lit Pub, 2012).

Amina Gautier is the author of two short story collections: At-Risk, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award (University of Georgia Press, 2011) and Now We Will Be Happy, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). More than eighty of her short stories have been published, appearing in Antioch Review, Best African American Fiction, Callaloo, Crazyhorse, Glimmer Train Stories, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, and Southern Review among other places. Her stories have been honored with the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, the Danahy Prize, the Jack Dyer Prize, the Lamar York Prize, the Schlafly Microfiction Award, and the William Richey Award as well as fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, MacDowell Colony, Prairie Center of the Arts, the Retreat for Writers at Hawthornden Castle, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Writers in the Heartland, as well as artist grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Amelia Gray is the author of four books: AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, THREATS, and Gutshot. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is at work on a novel.

Tina May Hall lives in upstate New York where she teaches creative writing at Hamilton College. Her collection The Physics of Imaginary Objects won the 2010 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her stories have appeared in Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, The Collagist, Fourth River, and other literary magazines.

Lindsay Hunter is the author of the story collections Daddy’s and Don’t Kiss Me and the novel, Ugly Girls. Find her at lindsayhunter.com.

Rebecca Jones-Howe lives and writes in Kamloops, British Columbia. Her work has appeared in [PANK], Pulp Modern, and Punchnel’s, among others. Her first collection of short fiction, Vile Men, will be released by Dark House Press in summer of 2015. She can be found online at rebeccajoneshowe.com.

Andrea Kneeland is the author of How to Pose for Hustler (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015). Her stories and poems have appeared in more than 50 journals and anthologies. More work can be found at andreakneeland.com.

Molly Laich is a writer in Seattle. Her work has appeared in Hobart, [PANK], Midwestern Gothic, and beyond. You can read her blog at mollylaich.com.

Heather Lindsley’s work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s, and Strange Horizons. Her fiction has also been in John Joseph Adams’s dystopian anthology Brave New Worlds, in Year’s Best SF 12, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and in Talking Back, edited by L. Timmel Duchamp. She has been featured on Escape Pod as a writer and on Podcastle as a reader, and her stories have appeared in Polish, Romanian, Russian, and French translations.

Holly Lopez lives in Charlotte, NC with her husband, pampered Doberman, and the growing number of offbeat characters mulling about in her head. Her work has appeared in Plots With Guns and Charlotte Viewpoint.

Kelly Luce’s story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, won the 2013 Foreword Review’s Editors Choice Prize in Fiction. Her work has been honored by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Jentel Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Kerouac House, and Michener Center for Writers, and has appeared in Salon, O Magazine, Crazyhorse, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, and other magazines. She’s the editorial assistant for the O. Henry Prize anthology and editor-in-chief of Bat City Review. She grew up in Illinois and currently lives in Austin, TX.

Mesha Maren is a fiction writer from southern West Virginia whose work appears or is forthcoming in Tin House, The Oxford American, Hobart, The Barcelona Review, and other literary journals as well as the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial.

Jessica McHugh is an author of speculative fiction spanning the genre from horror and alternate history to young adult. She has had seventeen books published in six years, including her bestselling Post Mortem Press thriller, Rabbits in the Garden, and the first two books in her edgy YA series from Evolved Publishing, The Darla Decker Diaries. More info on her speculations and publications can be found at JessicaMcHughBooks.com.

Mary Miller is the author of two books, Big World and The Last Days of California. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies including McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, the Oxford American, and New Stories from the South.

Ellen Birkett Morris is a writer and poet based in Louisville, Kentucky. Her fiction has appeared in journals including The Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, South Carolina Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, wigleaf, and Paradigm. Her story “The Cycle of Life and Other Incidentals” was a finalist in the Glimmer Train Press Family Matters short story competition. Morris is a recipient of a 2013 Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. Her acclaimed fiction includes We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Jennifer Pelland is a two-time Nebula nominee for short fiction, and has a short story collection (Unwelcome Bodies) and novel (Machine) available from Apex Publications. Nowadays, she mostly belly dances. Find her at www.jenniferpelland.com.

Although currently on the road, Cat Rambo usually lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com. Her short story, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” from her story collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012. She is the current Vice President of SFWA. For more about her, as well as links to her fiction, see kittywumpus.net.

Joani Reese is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Final Notes and Dead Letters, and the poetry collection Night Chorus, forthcoming from Lit Fest Press. Reese’s poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and featured in over seventy print and online venues. She has been poetry editor for THIS Magazine and senior poetry editor for Connotation Press—An Online Artifact and was fiction guest editor for Scissors and Spackle in 2013 & 2014. Reese is currently Editor-in-Chief of the online magazine MadHat Lit, the quarterly online presence of MadHat Publishing. Reese won the first Patricia McFarland Memorial Prize for her flash fiction and The Graduate School Creative Writing Award from The University of Memphis for her poetry, where she earned her MFA. Reese won the 15th Glass Woman Prize in 2014 for her flash fiction and currently lives in Texas with six fine cats and some men. She also has a real job.

Marytza K. Rubio is a writer from Santa Ana, CA.

Nisi Shawl’s acclaimed story collection Filter House was one of two winners of the 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Award and a nominee for the World Fantasy Award. She was WisCon 35’s Guest of Honor. She edited WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity and with Dr. Rebecca J. Holden she co-edited Strange Matings: Octavia E. Butler, Science Fiction, Feminism, and African American Voices. With classmate Cynthia Ward she co-authored Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. Shawl is a cofounder of the Carl Brandon Society and serves on the Board of Directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Tor books will publish her Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair in Fall 2015. Her website is www.nisishawl.com.

Quill Shiv is a genre-blending writer living in Saugus, MA. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Haikus for Lovers (ed. Laura Roberts) and 1 Photo, 50 Authors, 100 Words: Flash Fiction (ed. Madison Woods), and in literary magazines such as Metazen and The Watermark. When not cross-stitching or blogging at www.QuillShiv.com, Quill spends her time perfecting the nap-to-coffee ratio.

Emily Slaney is 70% no confidence, with dark humor and a crooked smile. She describes her writing as nihilistic emotional satire because she likes to make you laugh before she pulls it all away from you. She lives in England with her husband and kids in a semi-detached madhouse where sarcasm is what passes for everyday speech. She has been published in Menacing Hedge, Revolt Daily, Solarcide, Parable Press, Thunderdome Magazine, and Cease, Cows. You can find more about Emily at: emilyslaney.com.

Amber Sparks is the author of the short story collection May We Shed These Human Bodies, and co-author (with Robert Kloss and illustrator Matt Kish) of the hybrid novella The Desert Places. Her second short story collection, The Unfinished World and Other Stories, is forthcoming in 2016. You can follow her on Twitter @ambernoelle, or at ambernoellesparks.com.

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including Tor.com, Subterranean Magazine, and Clarkesworld Magazine. It’s also been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the World Fantasy Award, among others, and twice won the Nebula Award. Her second collection, How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present and Future, came out from Subterranean Press in 2013.

Meg Tuite’s writing has appeared in numerous literary journals. She is the author of two short story collections, Bound By Blue (Sententia Books, 2013) and Domestic Apparition (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011), and three chapbooks, the latest titled Her Skin is a Costume (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). She won the Twin Antlers Collaborative Poetry award from Artistically Declined Press for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging (2014) written with Heather Fowler and Michelle Reale. She teaches at the Santa Fe Community College, is an editor for Santa Fe Literary Review and Connotation Press, and has a column up at JMWW. She lives in Santa Fe with her husband and menagerie of pets. Her blog: megtuite.com.

Damien Angelica Walters’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in various magazines and anthologies, including Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume One, The Best of Electric Velocipede, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Shimmer, Apex, Glitter & Mayhem, Not Our Kind, and What Fates Impose. Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of her short fiction, will be released in early 2015 from Apex Publications, and Paper Tigers, a novel, will be released later that same year from Dark House Press.

xTx is a writer living in Southern California. Her work has been published in places like The Collagist, [PANK], Hobart, The Rumpus, The Chicago Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf. Her short story collection Normally Special is available from Tiny Hardcore Press and her chapbook Billie the Bull is available from Dzanc Books. Her story “The Mill Pond” won the 2012 storySouth Million Writers Award. She says nothing at www.notimetosayit.blogspot.com.

Bonnie ZoBell’s new linked collection from Press 53, What Happened Here: a novella and stories, was released in 2014. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, the Capricorn Novel Award, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. She has held resident fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA, and Dorland, received an MFA from Columbia University on fellowship, and currently teaches at San Diego Mesa College. Visit her at www.bonniezobell.com.

Susan Perabo is Writer in Residence and Professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Who I Was Supposed to Be, and a novel, The Broken Places (both with Simon and Schuster). Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, and New Stories from the South, and has appeared in numerous magazines, including One Story, Glimmer Train, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, and The Sun. Her new collection of short stories is upcoming from Simon and Schuster in 2016.

In addition to co-editing Choose Wisely, Joanne Merriam has edited How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens and 140 And Counting: an anthology of writing from 7×20. In 2001, she quit her job as the Executive Assistant of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia to travel Canada and write The Glaze from Breaking. Her writing has also appeared in The Fiddlehead, [PANK], Per Contra, Strange Horizons, and The Journal of Unlikely Entomology. In 2004, she immigrated to the USA, and now resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

In addition to co-editing Choose Wisely, H. L. Nelson is head of the online magazine Cease, Cows and Co-CEO of LitDemon.com. Her publications include Writer’s Digest, Nightmare, Lunch Ticket, [PANK], plus over 50 others in the last few years. H. L.’s poem “Absolution” was nominated for Best of the Net 2013. Her fiction chapbook, The Sea is Only Meat, will come out this summer from Sundress Publications.

Stories from the book available online:

Reviews:

Composed of 35 gleefully dark short stories by and about women, this anthology is a welcome antidote to the conventional world of women’s fiction. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Alice Monroe and agree that the minutely observed world of everyday life is just as viable a form of literature as the more adventurous fiction dominated by men, but, still, there’s something so energizing about girls who kill, or chase ghosts, or bide their time in strange worlds of the future. If there’s a mother daughter story in here, it’s likely to involve a little serial kidnapping as well. If dad was a sexual predator, then his little girl is going to be one too. Super heroes, with costumes, terrifying weapons, and all too human foibles abound. And the strange passage of time as a wife and mother? Tina May Hall describes it beautifully: “You remember the first six weeks of your firstborn’s life were the longest you’d ever known. Time slowed down into a milky trickle, stretched out, thinned. Then the rubber band snapped, and everything accelerated. An entire lacrosse season took place over the course of one rainy afternoon. Your knees sagged, wrinkled, tightened up again, grew bulbous as wormy apples in the time it took to walk to the ATM.” But this is the memory of a vampire crawling from her mausoleum in search or blood, not some elderly lady whiling away her last days in a nursing home. I don’t know how anyone can read this book and not feel energized.

—Vickie Fang, “Choose Wisely: 35 women up to no good,” Best New Fiction, 5 May 2015

What I enjoyed the most about this anthology was the range of characters: from doddering old attention seeking women, to women chased by their own demons (literally), to female serial killers and housewives striving to be perfect for their husbands. Every story showed a different type of woman facing situations that are both conceivable and inconceivable. . . This anthology is full of wonderful stories about women facing the roles they’ve chosen for themselves or had chosen for them – with glee, with sadness, with rebellion.

—Sharra Rosichan, “Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good: A Book Review,” Odds and Ends, 5 May 2015

After all, in a perfect world I’d just talk about how the anthology is all the things I mentioned above: strong, well written, and intriguing. Inside are a number of writers I downright worship. . . a stellar collection of high caliber writing.

—David S. Atkinson, “InReview: Choose Wisely,” InDigest, 30 April 2015

31 March 2015

Hey, how about some contributor news

Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted contributor news, since I’ve been pretty busy with our new projects, like the Floodgate Poetry Series, the Soles Series of Stories, our forthcoming 2015 anthology, How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens, and another anthology still being formed, co-edited by H. L. Nelson and me, Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good. I’m pretty psyched about all of these projects.

 

…on to the news!

Lyn Lifshin, whose Marilyn Monroe: Poems we put back into circulation in December, has a new book of poems, Malala, out from Poetic Matrix Press.

 

News for Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days contributors:

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  • Tina Connolly‘s Copperhead (sequel to the Nebula-nominated Ironskin) came out in November, and her story “On the Eyeball Floor”, which first appeared in Strange Horizons, came out in translation in the Argentinian magazine La Idea Fija. Her “Flash Bang Remember,” co-written with Caroline M. Yoachim, was featured in StarShipSofa 320.
  • Seth Fried‘s story “Hello Again” is in the Spring 2014 issue of Tin House (and you’ll have to buy a copy to read it).
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  • Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum‘s poetry collection Ghost Gear, a 2013 Miller Williams Poetry Prize finalist, was released by University of Arkansas Press.
  • Tessa Mellas has a new book of short fiction, Lungs Full of Noise, out with University of Iowa Press.
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  • Chet Weise is the co-editor, with Third Man co-founder Ben Swank, of Language Lessons: Volume 1, the debut book by Third Man Books (a new division of Nashville’s Third Man Records), which was celebrated at AWP. Contributors include Jake Adam York, C.D. Wright, Brian Barker, and me.

 

And for 140 And Counting contributors:

  • David C. Kopaska-Merkel‘s poem, “Spark,” was in Polu Texni, and his story “A Better Place” is in the December issue of The Fifth Di….

30 March 2014

“What a gruesome question. Let’s see. If you leave a tadpole in a jar in the sun it will die.” – Margaret Atwood

News for Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days contributors:

 

And for 140 And Counting contributors:

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Finally, this is a great reader review of Signs Over the Pacific and Other Stories at LibraryThing:

This collection has so many endearing elements I fear I will not be able to do them justice here. The stories interweave so well that it can be read like a novel, but they are also different in big and small ways that create more than enough interest to keep on reading. I was up till 6am this morning completely captivated by the themes and excellent continuity of the stories. These themes are sometimes deep, metaphysical, existential – generally philosophical; but, they are measured by wry and observant humour. Nothing is left in the ether; this is one of the most satisfying short story collections I’ve ever read.

22 September 2013

grotesquely captivating

I love this reader review of Signs Over the Pacific and Other Stories over at Smashwords:

The characters, plots and themes are very graphic, perverse at times, shockingly so. But the writing is so good, that you find yourself flitting through the stories effortlessly, accepting one outrageous thing after another. You’re eager to turn the page to find out what grotesquely captivating character the author will dream up next.

 

News for Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days contributors:

 

And for 140 And Counting contributors:

31 July 2013

Signs coming tomorrow

I’m sitting here in the Dalek Pride t-shirt I got last week at Hypericon (a fun little science fiction and fantasy convention here in Nashville), pretty excited by all the stuff my peeps have done in the past month or so.

Also! We have a new book coming out tomorrow. Well, officially tomorrow, but actually it’s already up at Amazon and Barnes & Noble—which you’d already know if you followed us on Facebook or Twitter. Signs Over the Pacific and Other Stories is a collection of a dozen intertwined short stories by New Zealand author RJ Astruc, featuring airship crashes, Interpol agents, artificial intelligence, hologram cities, bioterrorism and psychic gamblers. Official announcement, naturally, tomorrow.

 

News for Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days contributors:

 

And for 140 And Counting contributors:

23 June 2013

I initially mistyped that as The Bling Assassin

Ducklings, I’m sorry. I’ve been busy enjoying my life and editing our upcoming titles, and have fallen behind on posting contributor news, so I’ma write this long-ass post and hope y’all will click through every one of these delicious links.

 

But first! If you live in Nashville, a couplethree events you should know about:

We’re having two readings this coming Saturday June 1st for Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days, at 11 am at the downtown library (Conference Center, Main Library First Floor, 615 Church Street, Nashville, TN; FB; NPL; Nashville Scene) and at 2 pm at East Side Story (1108 Woodland Street, Unit B, Nashville, TN; FB). Join Chet Weise, Tessa Mellas and Maggie Smith for readings from the end of days! Maggie Smith is the author of Lamp of the Body, Nesting Dolls and The List of Dangers. Trapeze aficionado Tessa Mellas is a lecturer at the Ohio State University. Chet Weise, the force behind the local Poetry Sucks! A Night of Poetry, Music, and All Sorts of Bad Language reading series, was once banned from Canada for playing rock-n-roll without a permit.

And speaking of Poetry Sucks!… I will be reading at their open mic night on Thursday, June 6th at Dino’s Bar and Grill (411 Gallatin Ave, Nashville, TN 37206; FB; Nashville Scene listing). They begin at 8 pm and end at 10 pm. Dino’s is very smoky so people with allergies may find it hard to take, but they have to-die-for cheeseburgers and fries and Poetry Sucks! is always a ridiculous good time with a great crowd. My portion will be 5-8 minutes long and I won’t know where I am in the line-up til that night. They turn off the grill when the readings start so you’ll want to arrive by 7 pm if you want to eat.

 

News for Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days contributors:

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And for 140 And Counting contributors:

27 May 2013

a little shine left

Okay, ducklings. Save the date! We’ve set up two Apocalypse Now readings for Saturday the 1st of June—one at 11 am at the Main Branch of the Nashville Public Library (which, if you’ve never been, is a gorgeous modern classical building that’s all limestone and marble with loads of light inside) and the other in the early afternoon at East Side Story (a great bookstore in East Nashville).

Other news! For Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days contributors: Margaret Atwood will be on the Giller Prize jury and was recently on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor; and Joyce Carol Oates will headline the 15th Annual Get Lit! Festival in Spokane, WA.

And for 140 And Counting contributors: Jim Kacian won second runner-up for the 2012 Readers’ Choice Awards for The Heron’s Nest; Ken Liu‘s “The Message” is at StarShipSofa; and Peter Newton‘s haiku is at Issa’s Untidy Hut.

15 February 2013

“The Romantics and the Bohemians wrote poems to impress girls and get drunk–exactly what Chet is trying to bring to Nashville.”

Hi there peeps. I took the day off from my day job today so I could work on URB stuff, and I’m really excited about some of the stuff we’re bringing into the world in the next fews months, not least Signs Over the Pacific and Other Stories and The Mask Game. I’ll be working on The Mask Game cover art in the next few weeks.

This afternoon I stopped at East Side Story and met their proprietor, Chuck Beard, and dropped off some copies of Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days. Chuck posed for a photo (below).

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Lots of news to report! For Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days contributors: a review of The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home by Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman is up at The Toronto Review of Books; Booklist Online has a new cute, contentless interview with Paolo Bacigalupi; Davis McCombs received the 2013 Laman Library Writers Fellowship; reviews of Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates are up at Pop Matters and The Times; and Chet Weise is featured in the latest issue of Native (check out page 35). If you live near Bellingham, WA, you should go see him performing poetry (and selling anthologies!) on 22 February 2013 with two seminal garage/punk bands, The Mono Men and Fireballs of Freedom.

front_cover_800px__93307.1359477875.800.600 For 140 And Counting contributors: David C. Kopaska-Merkel‘s Luminous Worlds should come out this month from Dark Regions Press; David was also recently interviewed by The Mystic Nebula; Peter Newton‘s haiku appeared in Neverending Story; so did Liam Wilkinson‘s; Jonathan Pinnock has two poems in The Pygmy Giant: “Dissonant Love Song #2” and “Dali’s Moustache“, and The Independent gave his Dot Dash four stars; Miriam Sagan‘s short story “The Nun” appears in Orion headless.

7 February 2013

“Writing is alone, yes, but I don’t think it’s lonely” – Atwood

The print edition of Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days is now available on Amazon as well as at a handful of independents:

And!! we’re doing a giveaway of ten copies over at Goodreads.

 

Apocalypse Now contributor Margaret Atwood was featured in Wired for her latest project, Fanado. She was also interviewed yesterday in The Rumpus, and will appear at a free, public event at University of Calgary for Valentine’s Day.

Tobias Carroll and R. Stephen Shodin discussed Brian Evenson‘s fiction for Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and TSP: The official blog of The Story Prize interviewed him.

blackdahlia T. R. Hummer was interviewed by Meg Pokrass and had 3 poems in Slate this month.

Joyce Carol OatesBlack Dahlia & White Rose was reviewed last week in The New York Times Sunday Book Review.

 

140 And Counting contributor Dawn Corrigan had a story (“Force Majeure“) in The Dying Goose.

Ken Liu talked about translating Chinese science fiction into English.

Jonathan Pinnock‘s Dot Dash was reviewed at The Independent, and his poem “This is Just To Be Meta” went up at The Pygmy Giant.

dotdash

21 January 2013

Apocalypse Now

How will the end come? What will we do when all the lights go out?

  • ISBN 978-1-937794-24-8 (print): used from Amazon.
  • ISBN 978-1-937794-23-1 (epub).
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Winner of the Nashville Scene‘s Best Literary Anthology 2013.

Every society and every generation has its version of the apocalypse: swine flu, genetic mutation, global warming, nuclear fallout, the second coming, peak oil, mass extinction, giant irradiated ants, zombies… Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days is the first anthology of its kind to bring together the poetry and prose of some of America’s finest (though not always most well-known) literary voices with an eye for the literary and the popular, for story and lyric, for the past and the future, for the psychological and the physical, for the real and the fantastic.

Missy, the single mother of Margaret Atwood‘s “The Silver Astroturfer,” spends her days in her basement of computers churning out copy under various aliases (“ExCodFisherman” or “LeglessVeteran” or “LadyDuckHunter”) in order to manipulate the daily news. Davis McCombs poems tell the story of a dying tobacco industry in the South and of the killing of the last gray wolf in Edmonson County, Kentucky.

Rodney Jones‘s “Apocalyptic Narrative” opens in a post-apocalyptic United States in which our hero survives via c-rations and government cheese in an abandoned cave. Joyce Carol Oates‘s “Thanksgiving” depicts a father and daughter who venture out to buy food for their Thanksgiving dinner because the mother is ill. This seemingly ordinary trip, however, becomes decidedly unordinary when our assumptions about their world quickly crumble.

Judy Jordan‘s poems examine humankind’s slow destruction of the earth while Paolo Bacigalupi‘s story, “The People of Sand and Slag,” looks at how we would live post-global warming via three explorers who utilize the environment itself to remake their decaying bodies.

Chet Weise‘s poems tell of the sorely under-reported floods that overwhelmed Nashville, Tennessee in May 2010 in which the Cumberland River rose twelve feet above flood stage and twenty-one people were killed. Pinckney Benedict‘s “The Beginnings of Sorrow” is a deeply disturbing take on metamorphoses as well as apocalypses both large and small, centering on a rural couple with a dog possessed by his master’s deceased and lust-sick father.

Authors include Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Brian Barker, Jenna Bazzell, Nicky Beer, Pinckney Benedict, Kristin Bock, Tina Connolly, David J. Daniels, Darcie Dennigan, Brian Evenson, Seth Fried, TR Hummer, Rodney Jones, Judy Jordan, Kelly Link, Alexander Lumans, Charles Martin, Davis McCombs, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, Marc McKee, Tessa Mellas, Wayne Miller, Simone Muench, Keith Montesano, Joyce Carol Oates, Ed Pavlić, Catherine Pierce, Kevin Prufer, Joshua Robbins, David Roderick, Jeffrey Schultz, Maggie Smith, Chet Weise, Josh Woods, and E. Lily Yu. Cover art by Jason Clark.

Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days is edited by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, and fiction was selected by Alexander Lumans.

Alexander Lumans graduated from the MFA Fiction Program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from Story Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Blackbird, Surreal South 2011, and The Book of Villains. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2010 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and he won the 2011 Barry Hannah Fiction Prize from the Yalobusha Review. Recently, he was awarded a MacDowell Colony Fellowship for Fall 2011.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum‘s poems, essays, reviews, podcasts, and interviews recently appear or are forthcoming in The Writers Chronicle, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Missouri Review, storySouth, InsideHigherEd.com, Eclipse, Copper Nickel, New Letters, Glimmer Train, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Potomac Review, and The Southern Indiana Review, among others. He writes a web-column, poetry=am^k, as a Contributing Editor for The Southern Indiana Review, and he is Founder and Editor of PoemoftheWeek.org, Managing Editor of AdHominem.weebly.com and Acquisitions Editor of Upper Rubber Boot Books. Andrew holds a Masters of Fine Arts Degree from Southern Illinois University – Carbondale and is an Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Colorado – Denver, Metro State College of Denver, Community College of Denver, and CCCOnline. He currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

What people are saying about Apocalypse Now:

The first short story The Adjudicator, by Brian Evenson is stark and bleak in a post-apocalyptic, terrifyingly realistic world with just enough strangeness to keep you wondering. I can’t wait to read more of this book.

—Diane Severson, “Various and Sundry Science Fiction Poetry,” Amazing Stories, 22 February 2013.

In the midst of this hyperbolic fun, Apocalypse Now is a startlingly serious contribution. Six sections encompass 98 stories and poems, which are fairly evenly across the breadth of the book in tone and topic.
Lured in by the promise of big names like Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood and Paolo Bacigalupi, I fell in love with the sheer variety in this book. Covering more than traditional apocalypse scenarios, it’s a collection of absolute endings.

A story about anarchistic bees sits alongside a poem which describes a woman committing quiet suicide. David J. Daniels nervously relates the ripple-effect of his own mugging in This is the Pink before his spotlight is stolen by a group of cheese miners who are stranded on the moon.

Kelly Link’s surreal, neo-traditional folktale about feuding witches follows a description of God as a lion on the hunt.

I wasn’t sure what to expect of the poetry, but the standard was generally high. Different writers aimed for different things – it was surprising how many plumbed for humour, in the face of all that could be.

—Sarah Dunn, “Apocalypse Now: Revisiting the Daydream,” Nelson Mail, 8 February 2013.

Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days is a treasure-chest of cataclysms. Lumans and McFadyen-Ketchum have ranged far across the landscape of contemporary English-language literature searching for glimpses of upheaval and ruin, and in doing so they have produced something unique: a survey of the present-day apocalyptic imagination in both poetry and fiction. If, like me, you’ve read much of the one and little of the other, you’re bound to make some compelling new discoveries here, and if you’ve read little of either, you’re in for one beautiful harrowing surprise after another.

— Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead and The View from the Seventh Layer

Warning: reading Apocalypse Now may result in side effects like chewed fingernails, heart palpitations, and paranoia so severe that you stockpile dried goods, fill the bathtub with water, hammer plywood over the windows, and oil your rifle.

— Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon, The Wilding, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk

Never before has humanity’s twilight shined so brightly. The poems and stories within Apocalypse Now glitter with a clarity and luster typically reserved for only the purest of gems or the most cutting of insights. The voices here have each taken their own, singular approach to a theme that is as ancient as humanity itself and, in doing so, created a unified theory of the apocalypse: a coming together of our fears, our hopes, our willingness to discover ourselves at the moment we have lost it all, the moment when we stand on the cusp of annihilation and, somehow, cannot look away… but can only sing. And this collection sings like no other.

— Jason Mott, author of The Returned

Table of Contents

(with links to works from the book available online)

Brian Evenson
The Adjudicator
Rodney Jones
Apocalyptic Narrative
Chet Weise
An American Prayer for the Second Coming
Jericho Trumpets
Joyce Carol Oates
Thanksgiving
Judy Jordan
At Winter’s Edge
Moon of Hunger, Moon of Coyote Howl
A Short Drop to Nothing
Ed Pavlic
From: Arachnida Speak
Margaret Atwood
The Silver Astroturfer
Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
when the dark heads of sleep
Marysarias
David Roderick
Target
Kelly Link
Catskin
Marc McKee
& I Don’t Sleep, I Don’t Sleep, I Don’t Sleep Till It’s Light
We Are All Going to Die, and I Love You
I Love You and We Are All Going to Die
Electric Company
Darcie Dennigan
Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse
David J. Daniels
This Is the Pink
Alexander Lumans
All the Things the Moon is Not
Brian Barker
Visions for the Last Night on Earth
Gorbachev’s Ubi Sunt from the Future that Soon Will Pass
The Last Songbird
Lullaby for the Last Night on Earth
Maggie Smith
Eliza
Night of the Comet (1984)
On the Beach (1959)
The Quiet Earth (1985)
When Worlds Collide (1951)
Paolo Bacigalupi
The People of Sand and Slag
Simone Muench
Wolf Centos
Who will take the madness from the trees?
I watch my life running away
I have lost my being in so many beings:
The wolf licks her cheeks with
First frost blackens with a cloven hoof;
How long have I left you?—played the wolf
Joshua Robbins
Field Guide to the Second Coming
Tessa Mellas
Blue Sky White
Jenna Bazzell
Into the Damp Woods
Wet Field
Charles Martin
Taken Up
Kristin Bock
Oracle
Icescape
Dear Life Form
Early Gospel
Copilot
Seth Fried
The Siege
Keith Montesano
Love Song for the End of the World
Duet Near the End
Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” Finally Collapses the Radio Waves
Wayne Miller
The Feast
A History of Art
A History of War
VII.
The Dead Moor Speaks
Josh Woods
The Lawgiver
Nicky Beer
Rimbaud’s Kraken
TR Hummer
Post-American
Ooo Baby Baby
The Death of Neruda
Corrosive Lyric
Westbound: Little Cat Feet
Eastbound: The Book of Enoch
Terrorism
Adornment on an Ancient Tomb in Tibet
Fragment of a Perpetually Unfinished Field Guide
Rx
E. Lily Yu
The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees
Jeffrey Schultz
Weekday Apocalyptic
J. Finds in His Pocket Neither Change nor Small Bills
Tina Connolly
Recalculating
Kevin Prufer
Apocalypse
The Enormous Parachute
Army Tales
Who are our Barbarians?
suburbia
a poem of the museum
What We Did With the Empire
Catherine Pierce
Dear Atom Bomb,
Emergence
How it Ends: Three Cities
Fire Blight
Several Days Before the End of the World
Pinckney Benedict
The Beginnings Of Sorrow
Davis McCombs
Gnomon
The Sharecroppers Nightshade
Nineveh
First Hard Freeze Wraith
biomass: a genealogy lone
wet [weather] spring[s]
riddle:

2 comments 21 December 2012

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