American Short Fiction blog

Best of the Web 2009

ASF contributor Ben Percy calls Dzanc Books “visionary.”

He also calls on readers to support their “venture that transcends the bottom-line, that trumpets what the big houses have crassly elbowed aside, that reminds us reading is more than entertainment, that books are more than commodities.”

“Their standard,” he says, “is bad-ass literary excellence.”

See for yourself: Their Best of the Web 2009 is now available, and many of the authors included in this year’s anthology are guest-posting on lit blogs across the web*.

Marcela Fuentes contributes a guest post at Clifford Garstang’s Perpetual Folly.

M. Thomas Gammarino writes about his story over at The Short Review’s blog (along with an introduction by Tania Hershman).

Todd Hasak-Lowy’s guest post can be found at the Emerging Writers Network.

Matthew Derby’s provides a post about his story at Matt Bell’s site.

Philip Holden posted on Isak.

Amy L. Clark has a guest post at Sean Lovelace’s It All Relates 2 Writing.

Corey Mesler’s guest post can be found at PANK’s blog.

Kate Peterson at Brevity’s blog, has a post up too.

Amber Cook writes about her work over at Keyhole Magazine’s blog.

Jeff Parker writes about his story over at HTMLGiant.

Karen Heuler submitted one for All Art Everywhere Is Free.

Terese Svoboda’s essay about her short essay can be found at GDCS + SWDP.

And David at Largehearted Boy has added book notes with write-ups from over a dozen of the Best of the Web authors.

*Links provided by EWN.

Sometimes ASF staff catches their favorite author readings at the cool high-tech, high-quality spots–from Poets.org to our favorite online journals, including the new Literary Arts podcasts. But as analog is to CD, sometimes we want pops and skips and background noise–the charming mess of life. Sometimes we want YouTube.

Reader Katy Chrisler loves “the vigor and intensity delivered in every (supposedly drunken) word and line” of John Berryman’s “Dream Song 14.” (The piece, taken from a BBC art program interview with Al Alvarez, begins at the 4:27 mark.)

Web editor Stacy Muszynski (that’s me) appreciates the loss, the grace, and the humor of the following:

• Anne Sexton: “The Fury of Overshoes“
• Flannery O’Connor: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find“ (scroll down).
• Tim O’Brien: “The Dead” (This emotional and rare reading of the closing story of The Things They Carried is at Front Porch Journal. It’s easy enough to skip my intro.)

(more…)

As a promised follow-up to our report on writer-translator-critic-musician James Marcus’s sampling of Philip Roth. . . ASF brings you Marcus’s new nearly 10-minute danceable “Jewish Shouting Cantina Club Mix.”

While Marcus had planned to include in the track additional shouting from Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer, high-quality clips proved elusive. Rather than jeopardize the sound, Marcus tells ASF he added a couple of samples and his own new-to-him 1938 lap steel to canned rhythm tracks, keyboard bass, dobro, piano, organ, MIDI church bells, “plus yours truly singing bits from ‘Time Is On My Side.’”

Roth remains the sole shoutster.

ASF approves of Marcus’s most creative—how did he put it?—”tinkering in a compulsive, time-wasting sort of way.”

Play the clip.

ASF wants to help you find a grant to support your fiction habit.

The Christopher Isherwood Foundation
Applications accepted: September 1 – October 1, 2009

Emerging Voices PEN USA Program
Application deadline: August 14, 2009

Fulbright Grants for Study and Research
Applications for graduate study abroad in creative and performing arts: October 19, 2009

Start your own search for grants and funds at C. Hope Clark’s Funds for Writers, Jenifer Jensen’s writingfiction.suite101.com, and George Mason University’s grants and fellowship’s page.

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Share the wealth: Add your own favorite grants search engine or site in the comments section.

Your fiction needs a home, and these fine journals are accepting submissions this summer:

• American Short Fiction
• BOMB Magazine (until August 31)
• Conjunctions
• Crazyhorse
• Hobart (print and web)
• McSweeney‘s (Internet Tendency and Quarterly)
• Mid-American Review
• Night Train (online)
• Santa Monica Review
• Southeast Review
• StoryQuarterly
• Storyglossia
• Threepenny Review
• Zoetrope: All-Story

Find most of these stellar journals and many more here and here.

ASF has glimpsed that rare creature—a free contest worth entering. Actually, we’ve spotted a half dozen.

There’s David Letterman’s Top 10 List, for which you can win a somewhat useful prize if your joke makes it into Dave’s list. Enter weekly.

Esquire Fiction Contest. Deadline: midnight of August 1. Winner gets 2500 smackers and publication in the magazine. Submit electronically only. See contest’s Complete Official Rules.

The Greensboro Review‘s Robert Watson Literary Prize for fiction is worth $500 and publication. Deadline: September 15. 7,500 words max. See submission guidelines and mailing address.

The Iowa Short Fiction Award and the John Simmons Short Fiction Award:  writers who have not yet published a book of prose fiction are eligible. Postmark entries between August 1 and September 30. Winning manuscripts will be published by University of Iowa Press. See site for full details.

Memoir (and)‘s 6th contest open to prose, graphic novel, and more. Deadline: August 15. Grand prize for fiction: $500, publication, and copies. See submission guidelines. Bonus: even if your entry doesn’t win, it’ll be considered for regular publication.

Review Fuse’s Flash Fiction Writing Contest is open to international entries. Winner takes away $100. While the contest doesn’t cost anything, Review Fuse operates partly as a peer review site, which means to qualify for the prize, you must submit and critique three other writers’ 1,000-word pieces on the site by July 31.

If you win any of these contests, let us know.

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Know of any other free contests? Let ASF readers know in the comments section.

What comes after zombies? Sea monsters, of course.

Philadelphia-based Quirk Books editor Jason Rekulak tells ASF that Quirk Classic Series is publishing its second Jane Austin mashup, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, on September 15.

The mission of Quirk Books is to enhance classic novels with pop culture phenomena.

It’s a combo dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, and OED. It’s interactive, with readers uploading definitions, tags, and favorite words. And according to theprovince.com, it’s predicted to become “the Google of digital dictionaries.” Each dictionary entry is supplemented by with “relevant Twitter posts, historical usage statistics, anagrams, examples of online use, audio pronunciation, related Flickr photos, and even the term’s Scrabble point value.”

It’s Wordnik. And founder and CEO Erin McKean says it’s “an ongoing project devoted to discovering all the words and everything about them. More than 1.7 million words, and more than 130 million examples.”

McKean’s dream for Wordnik, which now is in beta form:

[P]retty much what it was when I was eight: to have as much information about as many words as possible available to as many people as possible. That’s the perfect dictionary. The best thing is, that we’ll never be done—there will always be new words to discover and describe.

According to Critical Mass, McKean and several of her Wordnik team cut their teeth at Oxford University Press. McKean herself has 17 years of experience as a dictionary editor, including a stint as editor in chief of OUP’s American Dictionaries division.

Wordnik’s current entries are from established dictionaries including The American Heritage 4E, the ten-volume Century Dictionary, the GNU Cide Dictionary of English (Websters 1913), and Wordnet. Thesaurus sources include the Rogets II International and Allen’s Synonyms and Antonyms.

Catch Wordnik on Twitter, too.

As the number of adults in prison increases, so does the number of children who grow up separated from their parents.

“Once Upon a Time” televised on Witness, an Aljazeera program, follows two imprisoned mothers as they struggle to maintain a connection with their children through the power of storytelling.

Aunt Mary’s Storybook Project is committed to positively change lives of inmates and their children through the power of books, literacy, and the human voice.

Started in 1993 by Companions* as a Christmas project for the children of women jailed in Chicago, Aunt Mary’s Storybook Project allows incarcerated parents to record audio of themselves reading books to their children; volunteers then deliver the books and recordings to the children as gifts.

The program has expanded to year-round service, with similar programs now operating in more than 20 states.

The books available for inmates include award-winning titles and culturally diverse topics.

Interested in getting involved? Here’s how:

Organize a book group or service organization to sponsor some women and children at Christmas, Mother’s Day, or any day. Your $25 donation will allow a woman to record and send a book to each of her children. See the Companions website for more info, donation levels, and how to volunteer.

*Companions Journeying Together provides a forum to impact the emotional, spiritual, and social lives of the incarcerated and their families. Its vision is for a society that lives by the principles of restorative justice.

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If you’re a fan of other community literacy programs, please add your comments.

Looking for a quality (free) virtual social networking writing group? ASF has some suggestions.

Zoetrope Virtual Studio: a collaborative tool for writers and other artists. Submit, give feedback, get feedback—and your submissions may be read and considered for publication by the Zoetrope: All-Story editorial staff.

She Writes: a new social network where women writers working in every genre—in every part of the world and of all ages and backgrounds—can come together in a space of mutual support.

Fictionaut: part self-selecting magazine, part community network, Fictionaut is a way for readers to discover new voices and for writers to share their art, gain recognition, and connect with their audience and each other.

Facebook’s Poets & Writers Registry: a group designed to help professional and aspiring poets (writers, screenwriters, and songwriters) find and post information about poetry organizations, publishing/small presses, book releases, contests and award info, festivals, and more. (Not affiliated with Poets & Writers magazine.)

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Let ASF know about your favorite writing communities in the comments.