Posts tagged ‘Tessa Mellas’
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:
|
- 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.
|
|
|
- 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.
- E. Lily Yu‘s “Daedalum, the Devil’s Wheel” appeared in Clarkesworld.
And for 140 And Counting contributors:
|
- Kaolin Fire‘s poem, “Future Cities,” was in Polu Texni.
- During the recent TwitterFiction Festival launch event live in NYC March 12, S. Kay‘s very short story (#vss) was one of three chosen to be featured and read aloud by the host Sara Barron (video 41:29), and a second story was featured in the TwitterFiction Festival feed.
- Deborah P Kolodji had a haiku in the March 2014 issue of A Hundred Gourds.
- 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….
- Lightspeed published Ken Liu‘s “Ghost Days” (which will be reprinted in our How to Live on Other Planets) and “None Owns the Air” as well as his translations of Hao Jingfang’s “Invisible Planets” and Chen Qiufan’s “The Mao Ghost,” and Clarkesworld published his “The Clockwork Soldier.”
30 March 2014
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:
- Byliner publishes Margaret Atwood‘s The Heart Goes Last, #4 in the acclaimed Positron Series; additionally, her marginalia on The Blind Assassin is being auctioned off for English PEN; subscribers to The New Yorker can read her “Cat’s Robo-cradle” online; she offers three reasons to keep physical books (and I’ll take advantage of her thoughts to mention we still have physical copies of Apocalypse Now for sale); the Royal Winnipeg Ballet is adapting her The Handmaid’s Tale; and, Tim Wu talks to her on SlateRadio (warning: autoplays).
- In Conversation: Paolo Bacigalupi, Lauren Beukes, and Jesse Bullington: a conversation on genre and world-building (warning: auto plays).
- ManArchy Magazine interviewed Brian Evenson; his story “A Collapse of Horses” is at The American Reader, from their February/March issue.
- T.R. Hummer at Slate: “The Intimacy of Walt Whitman’s ‘America’“
- Tessa Mellas won the 2013 Iowa Short Fiction Award for her short story collection Lungs Full of Noise.
|
And for 140 And Counting contributors:
- Richard Baldasty‘s “Op Art” appeared at Burrow Press Review.
- Peg Duthie, who is also the author of the poetry collection Measured Extravagance, had two menupoems in Alimentum (you’ll have to scroll about halfway down the page).
- Chris Galvin posted a review of Berit Ellingsen‘s Beneath the Liquid Skin at the Lit Hub; Ellingsen also was interviewed about writing and being Asian in Timothy Moore’s blog (Moore edits Ghost Ocean Magazine).
- Simon Kewin is providing story prompts at StoryADay.
- Chen-ou Liu has haiku at Issa’s Untidy Hut.
- Luc Reid interviewed Ken Liu for Strange Horizons.
- Jonathan Pinnock was featured on The Undercover Soundtrack, a weekly guest post by a writer who uses music as part of their creative process.
27 May 2013
Apocalypse Now
How will the end come? What will we do when all the lights go out?
|
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