The Mumpsimus

Most images grabbed off the internet are terrible. A few days ago, I wrote a draft of this post that was a snarky attack on a badly thought-out essay by J. Robert Lennon at Salon . It would be nice if sites like Salon would expend more of their energies in bringing attention to some good writing that doesn't get noticed rather than running yet another quick-and-dirty "contrarian" takedown. After writing the snarky draft, I realized my problem wasn't with Lennon or the essay per se. My problem was more with the people who seemed so desperately to want to like his essay. Lennon sets himself up against  some comments by Dan Chaon  that have been bouncing around the internet for a while (for some unfathomable reason, that website doesn't clearly date its material). These comments by Chaon are intelligent and accurate. He says writers need to read widely and eclectically, and he even suggests some good things to read. Specific, helpful advice. Lennon decides ...

I have contributions in three new e-books that offer all sorts of wonders and joys: Don't Pay Bad for Bad  is a collection of rare and previously unpublished short stories by Amos Tutuola (author of The Palm-Wine Drinkard, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts , etc.). The e-book includes an introduction by Tutuola's son Yinka, and an afterword by me in which I try to give some of the context for how Tutuola's writing has been perceived by readers over the years. [Available from Weightless (Epub & Mobi formats), Wizard's Tower (Epub & Mobi), Amazon .] Tainaron: Mail from Another City  by Leena Krohn is a nearly-indescribable novella, easily one of my favorite pieces of writing of the last few decades, and so I'm thrilled to have provided an afterword for the e-book. [Available from Weightless (Epub & Mobi formats), Amazon .] The second issue of the lit journal  Unstuck  includes all sorts of stories, poems, essays, whatzits, etc., including a little ...

I don't generally publicize Kickstarter projects, etc., here, because it would be easy to get overwhelmed, but here's one I've got multiple personal interests in: Unstuck: New Literature of the Fantastic and Surreal . Unstuck  is a new(ish) annual(ish) journal out of Texas. Their first issue included fiction by Aimee Bender, Matthew Derby, Amelia Gray, J. Robert Lennon, Meghan McCarron, Rachel Swirsky, Leslie What, and others who are just too fabulous to name. Their upcoming (at the end of the year) second issue will include work by Other People You Know, plus me (a very short story about Victrolas and turtles that I read last year at Readercon). The rewards for funding the project are pretty great. Also, one of the editors is Meghan McCarron , someone whose life I nearly ruined once by hiring her to teach at a boarding school in New Hampshire. She's beginning to forgive me. She'll forgive me more if you fund this project. (But don't use that as an exc...

Bradford Morrow , editor of Conjunctions  and writer of The Diviner's Tale  and The Uninnocent , in an interview conducted by Edie Meidav at The Millions : I may be overly optimistic or utterly blind, but my view of contemporary American fiction is that it is as rich as ever. Some of the best work is being written in what until recently was considered, at least among the conventional literati, genre fiction. Horror, gothic, mystery, fantasy, fabulism. There are so many stunningly original and serious writers working these fields. I have to think that anybody reading this interview would agree. Just one example, though there are many, would be Elizabeth Hand . She composes sentences of ravishing beauty. She is capable of creating metaphor systems that are so dynamic and provocative. She can turn a fictive moment that seems deeply rooted in the everyday into something that, in fact, touches upon the sublime, the miraculous. Just read her novella Cleopatra Brimstone and tell m...

The latest issue of The Paris Review  includes not only fiction by Jonathan Lethem, Roberto Bolaño, David Gates, and Amie Barrodale along with poetry by, among others, Frederick Seidel and Cathy Park Hong, but it also includes interviews with Samuel R. Delany and William Gibson. An excerpt to whet your appetite: DELANY Gide says somewhere that art and crime both require leisure time to flourish. I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that's how people perceive me, they have to say I'm prolific. But I don't find that either complimentary or accurate. INTERVIEWER Do you think of yourself as a genre writer? DELANY I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing. Thus I write more than most people, and I write in many different forms. I think of myself as the kind of person who writes, rather than as one kind  of writer or another. That...

With one post, Larry Nolen simultaneously offers a thoughtful and well-informed response to folks who got all "wwaaaahhrrr!  waaaahhhhrrr!  genre good!  waaahhhhrrrr!" about the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" promotional list (whereas I just offered snark ) and he proves what we already knew -- that he was the perfect successor as Best American Fantasy series editor, because his perspective is exactly the one we wanted for the book when we created the series (and he's a much faster reader than I am, which will make the work perhaps a bit less arduous for him than it was for me).  It's a post well worth reading -- one of the things being inundated with piles of lit mags does is show you the extraordinary variety of writing out there, both in terms of content and form. Now if I can just get him to stop calling it "mimetic fiction" , I'll have achieved all of my goals for world domination, bwahahahahahahahaaaa! Update: The link for "...

A reader writes to Tin House : I have read several issues of Tin House , including the most recent. Two vegetarians go on a hunting trip . . . enough said. I feel that I have several pieces that would fit the magazine, however, I am struggling with just one thing. This question is geared not only toward the magazine but the writing workshop as well. Do you accept genre fiction? I was also wondering how I might go about determining whether or not my piece fits into a specific genre and what general fiction is. Thank you in advance. —Confused in LA And Tin House responds. Now, I happen to like Tin House very much. We've reprinted stories from the magazine in each volume of Best American Fantasy . Their "Fantastic Women" issue was awesome. Their current anniversary issue is also awesome. Just about all of their issues are awesome. But the response to Concerned in LA is not awesome. It's disappointing. I spend too much time, perhaps, defending writers, editors, a...

According to Inside Higher Ed , Middlebury College has announced that it will pull funding from The New England Review by 2011 "if the publication doesn't become self-supporting." This hits home for me in a few ways -- NER was one of the first lit mags I ever read, because at the time I became interested in such things, the local college library subscribed (and still does). As a teenager, I attended the Bread Loaf Young Writers' Conference , met the managing editor, and got her to sign a copy of the magazine for me (for a while, NER was known as The New England Review & Bread Loaf Quarterly , and I still tend to think of it as NER/BLQ ). Later, I attended the adult version of Bread Loaf , and though NER 's official relationship with the conference was less by then, many of its staff members still attended, as well as numerous writers it had published. NER was also one of the earliest supporters of Best American Fantasy , and I'm thrilled that BAF 3...

One Story is a marvelous magazine (and not just because they published me -- that should, perhaps, be held against them...) and I can testify that it makes a great gift for people who like to read but generally feel too busy to do so, because receiving a nicely-produced story every three weeks or so in the mail is great fun. One Story now and then asks for donations, because the magazine is a non-profit and doesn't run ads. Clifford Garstang pointed out that a recent solicitation included this description of the "Editor" donation level: Editor: $100 – I’ll pay one author for their story Mr. Garstang notes that there is, according to certain interpretations of English usage, a problem with agreement between the one author and the plural pronoun their . What he doesn't say, though, is that One Story is simply showing their respect for the history of English literature and the language itself. According to the indispensible Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English U...

When we were working on the first volume of Best American Fantasy , I said to Jeff and Ann that I wished we could reprint some nonfiction, because some of the most wondrous things I'd encountered were essays. I had New England Review at the forefront of my mind when I said this, because I sit down and read each issue that arrives immediately, and most of what excites me is the eclectic nonfiction they publish (which is not to say the poems and stories they publish are not exciting, too; many are, and I've passed some on to Ann and Jeff. Yes, we're still working on BAF 2, the "patience is a virtue" edition...) The latest issue of NER contains an essay by J.M. Tyree, "Lovecraft at the Automat". It's not an essay that will offer too much that's new to a Lovecraft devotee, I expect, but I'm only a casual Lovecraftian, and generally more interested in his life and circumstances than in his writing. It's fun, though, to see a journal lik...

Due to various technical mishaps, I wasn't able to get into the AWP Bookfair on Friday to help the ever-erstwhile Clayton Kroh with the Best American Fantasy/Weird Tales table. Saturday, though, was no problem, and I spent the day in the labyrinthine world of the Bookfair -- three floors of tables and booths. It took me fifteen minutes just to find our table, placed as it was against a back wall of the farthest room, and once when I wandered out alone I managed to walk in circles for at least ten minutes before realizing the source of the profound sense of deja vu filling my brain. Tempest Bradford stopped by, and I quickly convinced her to take over the table so I could wander around and give copies of BAF to any magazine or journal whose representatives I could convince to take one. It can be amazingly difficult to give things away at AWP, because so many people are traveling by airplane and cannot carry away piles and piles of the many things it is so easy to accumulate ...

Pindeldyboz is migrating from being a print-and-online magazine to being only an online magazine, and so they held a party Monday night, and I went. So did other people. Including Richard Larson , Dustin Kurtz , Ed Champion , and Sarah Weinman . The last print issue of Pboz is actually only appearing as a free PDF download . It's 16 megabytes of worthwhile reading. Of last night's readings from the last issue, I was particularly taken by two. Here are excerpts: As internships go—is that still what this is? -- you could do a lot better than zig-zagging through no man’s land carving up no man’s cows all summer. It’s not for credit, what the hell kind of major would give you credit for that? It’s more like an apprenticeship, but with no hope or desire to take over the business. Every Wednesday $250 is direct-deposited into my account back east. This job makes a lot more sense on Wednesdays. --from "Every Creeping Thing of the Earth" by Patrick Rappa I agreed with...

Paolo Bacigalupi, who used to work for High Country News , takes some lessons learned from his previous employment and speculates about the ways science fiction and fantasy magazines could save themselves from their ever-declining circulations. Paolo's thoughts appear in three blog posts: Part 1 (overview), Part 2 ("Marketing in Meatspace"), and Part 3 ("Online Marketing"). I don't have any great knowledge of marketing, so I will defer to Paolo and others on that, but I do hope the magazines are able to survive, partly because I respect the history they represent and partly because I like the idea of monthly magazines full of fiction being able to survive in our world. But honestly, I only pay money to subscribe to one of them. I receive subscriptions to some others because once upon a time I reviewed them more frequently than I do now (I certainly still read them for Best American Fantasy ), but for the others, when it comes time to make selections for...

Whenever I encounter a piece of writing that blows the top of my head off, I try to settle down and figure out how it works and what I so forcefully responded to within it. Sometimes I can figure it out, sometimes I can't. Sometimes the top of my head just won't go back on. So it is with "Akhil and Judy" by Avi Lall, published in the latest issue of Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine . You might not have heard of Porcupine , but it's worth your attention; this issue in particular is rich with good poetry, prose, and pictures. But "Akhil and Judy" is the standout for me, and a standout among all the stories I have read this year, or, for that matter, any year. I have a few hypotheses for why I find this story so affecting, so impressive, but I don't have much in the way of solid reasoning, though I'm going to try here to make my hypotheses hold some water. I know the story's effect on me: during one of my three readings, it brought me t...

Tempest and I spent the day at the Brooklyn Book Festival , mostly just wandering around harrassing various vendors. I finally got to meet Hannah Tinti, editor of One Story , in person, and she told me about the Save the Short Story project , and even got a picture of me reading Calvin Baker's "Dominion" , a very fine story indeed. We also got to meet Tom Roberge of A Public Space , another person I'd exchanged plenty of emails with, but had not yet encountered in person. I convinced Tempest to subscribe, which was one of my better accomplishments of the day. There are only a few magazines I really wouldn't want to be without for even one issue, and A Public Space is one such magazine. Gavin Grant and Jed Berry manfully manned the Small Beer Press table. Tempest and I had discussed the fact that there haven't been any good, physical literary fights recently -- plenty of internet flamewars and such, but nobody actually punching somebody out -- and so we...

Potash just let me know that there are two new blogs worth keeping an eye on. First, the Kwani? literary magazine and organization now has its own blog (not to be confused with the Kwani? litfest blog ). I was thrilled to see that Kwani? 4 has officially been published , and I hope copies find their way to the U.S. soon (the first three are available at various places, and are worth seeking out). I saw a preliminary edition of Kwani? 4 when I was in Kenya in December, and it's a big book rich with fiction, poetry, and nonfiction of all sorts. Second, Binyavanga Wainaina has a blog . Actually, that should be Binyavanga Wainaina has a blog!!! , because it gives me great joy that one of the most astute writers I know is now going to be (at least occasionally) posting new material online. Binyavanga is presenting not only some of his own writing, but that of writers he knows and admires, including Jackie Lebo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie .