American Short Fiction blog

The Fall ’09 issue, which features great work from Josh Weil, J. M. Tyree, Rusty Dolleman, and Nina McConigley, as well as a gorgeous portfolio by photographer Alix Lambert, is out in bookstores and landing in subscribers’ mailboxes.

Palladium and precious metals. A playful elephant. Cake and college. Echoes of A Passage to India. A future in which true nighttime no longer exists. Fall ’09 manages to hold all of these things and ponder them in its heart.

Read Stacey Swann’s powerful introduction to the issue in her farewell editor’s note. And pick up your copy here.

Melissa Swantkowski

Our web exclusive for August is Melissa Swantkowski’s funny, poignant, fresh “How to Fall in Love.” We asked Melissa to give a little bit of background on her story.

ASF: What was the genesis of “How to Fall in Love”? What sparked this story?

MS: I work in museum education, and part of my job is telling hoards of school kids not to touch, which inevitably leads to at least one kid sticking out his hand to touch something. It’s like a reflex, almost. I started thinking about this and then it led to noticing other things that people touch or the way they touch, the tone of the touch, even.

And the cabbages. I needed to write something that mentioned the cabbages because they really rile me up. I live in NYC and in some neighborhoods, they are everywhere, and I can’t wrap my head around grocery produce as decorative landscaping.

ASF: The Zen Progression Alarm Clock. Your narrator is obsessed with it, and it becomes something of a touchstone. Could you talk a little about this object in the story?

MS: The narrator’s obsession may speak a little bit to my own. Around the time I wrote this story, I got a clock that works similarly to the one my narrator is so fixated on, so it was easy to let myself fall into that place of obsessing. I am not a morning person. And this clock really changed everything. Then, about 6 months later, it just went back to being an alarm clock.

In the story, the Zen Progression Alarm Clock, gives the narrator something concrete to hold onto and to control, both as something to obsess over—to imagine her future—but also very literally as an object that she can program and manipulate.

ASF: The voice of this story is so vulnerable and young—it really pulls you in. Did you have any models for this voice? (It strikes me as similar to some of the young people in Salinger’s stories.)

MS: I have definitely read and taken inspiration from Salinger’s stories. The voice of this story speaks to the things young people find so obvious and that adults sometimes overlook, but in all that self-assurance, they are unable to see their naïveté.

ASF: Who’s on your reading list for fall?

MS: Right now, I’m working my way through The Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels  and reading After the Affair, Graham Greene. And on the ever-expanding to-read list:

Dancing After Hours, Andre Dubus
Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
House Fires, Nancy Reisman
Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann

Iota magazine, a 22-year-old British poetry journal published by Templar Poetry, has just gone to press with issue 86, the inaugural fiction issue. The first issue includes new work by Booker shortlisted authors Tim Parks and Damon Galgut, and new short fiction and reviews. Jane Weir is the new fiction editor.

According to editors,  Iota plans to have three of its four issues per year dedicated to poetry–but its Autumn issue each year will feature fiction from emerging and established authors.

Editorial and Subscription Address: Nigel McLoughlin, Editor, Iota, PO Box 7721, Matlock, Derbyshire, UK DE4 9DD.
See submission guidelines.

Best American Fantasy has released the table of contents for the next volume, and ASF contributor Katie Williams has landed a story in the anthology.

Katie Williams’s “Serials” from our Summer/Fall 2008 issue won the honor. Guest editor Kevin Brockmeier describes the story as “darkly comic” and explains “‘Serials’ profoundly violates the customs of our world, if not its rules, presenting a society that mirrors our own.”

The book will be out in January 2010. Congratulations, Katie!

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In other SF/fantasy news, Neil Gaiman nabbed a Hugo Award for The Graveyard Book. (In fact, he tweeted his response to the win. You can follow him at @neilhimself.)

Other winners besides Gaiman floated out of the World Science Fiction Society’s 54th annual Hugo Awards on August 9.

David Anthony Durham, for example, took home the award for Best New Writer.

Other wins included. . .

Best Novella: “The Erdmann Nexus” by Nancy Kress
Best Novelette: “Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear
Best Short Story: “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang
Best Graphic Story: “Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones” written by Kaja Foglio and Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio, colors by Cheyenne Wrig

View the complete list of winners here.

Monica O’Brien, chair of Writing and Literature at Chester College of New England, loves Beckett—especially The Unnamable. One gander at her tat (pictured left) will show-and-tell you. She loves Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I could go on. She’s had pieces of all of them inscribed on her body.

And she is exactly who a couple of independent editors are looking for. HTMLGiant‘s Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor want to include ink like hers in their book on literary tattoos.

According to LA Times, portraits, quotations, representations—all are eligible for the anthology Talmadge and Taylor want to put together.

The call for submissions indicates that all images must include the following:

“the name (or pseudonym) of the tattoo bearer, city and state or country, and a transcription of the text itself, along with its source.”

Editors also would like to get high-quality, clear digital images of the work (tattoolit [at] gmail.com) and a paragraph’s worth of the history and meaning behind your ink. For more info, see the call.

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Our thanks to Professor O’Brien for contributing her body of art to our blog. The translation of the tattoo shown above, taken from Beckett:

“you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that open on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know”

Now that is some sweet and heavy graffiti.

Like you need one more source for podcasted fiction. But just in case you haven’t discovered it already, the New Yorker publishes a great monthly podcast.

They feature some of your favorite writers reading some of their favorite writer’s stories. The very best stuff: interviews with The New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman.

The latest: Joshua Ferris of George Saunders’s “Adams.” Political satire at its wonky best. Here’s a taste of the opening:

I never could stomach Adams and then one day he’s standing in my kitchen, in his underwear. Facing in the direction of my kids’ room! So I wonk him in the back of the head and down he goes. When he stands up, I wonk him again and down he goes.

Recent others include. . .

Joyce Carol Oates reads Eudora Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”; Roger Angell reads John Updike’s “Playing with Dynamite”; A. M. Homes reads Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”; Aleksandar Hemon discusses Bernard Malamud’s “A Summer’s Reading”; Mary Gaitskill reads Vladimir Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs”; T. Coraghessan Boyle reads Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain”; Jhumpa Lahiri reads the short story “A Day,” by William Trevor.

Clear out your iPod—the archive goes back to May ’07.

To celebrate the 60th year of the National Book Awards, the National Book Foundation is presenting a book-a-day blog on the fiction winners from 1950 to 2008. That’s 77 books. See them all at the National Book blog, where presentations run through September 21. Check in from time to time—some of the bloggers may surprise you.

Save the Dates
On September 21, you have a chance to select The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction and win two tickets to the 2009 Awards (the first time in its history they’ll be open to a public vote).

On October 13, the 20 finalists in each of the four  categories—Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature—are announced.

On November 18, the 60th National Book Awards ceremony hits, along with the announcements of the winners.

Here’s the list of this year’s judges. You may recognize some names as past winners or finalists. For more info on the judges, see the NBA line-up.

Fiction Judges
Alan Cheuse, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Charles Johnson, Lydia Millet

Nonfiction Judges
David Blight, Amanda Foreman, Steve Olson, Camille Paglia, John Phillip Santos

Poetry Judges
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, A. Van Jordan, Cole Swensen, Kevin Young

Young People’s Literature Judges
Kathi Appelt, Coe Booth, Carolyn Coman, Nancy Werlin, Gene Luen Yang

ASF asked our staffers and readers where they go to get their online lit fixes. We got some great responses.

Contributing editor Stacey Swann cites these as her current favorites:

The ASF blog, of course!
Bookslut
Emerging Writers Network
The Rumpus (not just books, but does have a great book section)
The Owls
HTML Giant

(more…)

Thinking of spending April 7-10, 2010, in Denver? Check out what AWP Conference & Bookfair is planning.

ASF will have a table in the book fair and a panel on the long short story. More details to come . . .

If Pynchon can read for his own trailer, Faulkner can read for the ASF blog audience.

This snippet of As I Lay Dying is brought to us by Harper Audio.