American Short Fiction blog

Last week a cursory glance at Twitter and Facebook unearthed the mother lode of project-starting rap sessions.

Here’s my favorite, from David Lynch: “Twitter Friends, please post some pictures of your projects for me.”

So polite. See the actual post here: http://twitter.com/DAVID_LYNCH/status/5053721184. Perhaps you’ll find some of your own inspiration there, hmm?

If you’re in Austin this weekend, join ASF for “Possessed: Characters with Magnificent Obsessions” on Sunday, November 1, at 12:30 pm.

Why is a character who’s obsessed with something—whether it’s love or an idea or a person—someone we want to read about? The protagonists created by the writers on this panel have obsessions that keep readers compelled all novel long.

ASF editor Jill Meyers moderates the discussion with debut novelists Jamie Ford, Amanda C. Gable, Victor Lodato, and John Pipkin.

Where: Capitol Extension Room E2.012 (map)

Be sure to check out the rest of the Festival and visit ASF at the Badgerdog booth in the book fair, which is located on the west side of the Texas State Capitol on Colorado Street.

not an ASF contributor.

Quality Systems consultant (ironic, isn’t it?) and writer David McKenzie took home the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest honor for the world’s worst opening sentence to an imaginary novel.

The annual contest McKenzie won began in 1982 at San Jose State U. and was named after Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton. He, dear friends, it is said, penned the opener “It was a dark and stormy night” (for his novel Paul Clifford in 1830).

The 2009 stinker:

Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such  a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.

Before you start penning next year’s entries, check out our favorite, from the Detective category:

She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida—the pink ones, not the white ones—except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.

There are more. Many, many awful others, including the category Vile Puns. Find them here. The contest accepts submissions “every day of the livelong year.” Contest guidelines here.

(Thanks to GalleyCat for the tip.)

In an update to our recent post on great books being adapted for the big screen, we have to add Aravind Adiga’s genre-jumping dark and funny 2008 Man Booker Prize winner The White Tiger.

According to Film News Briefs Britain’s award-winning playwright-screenwriter-director Hanif Kureshi will take on the project. For more info, see Variety.

Also: CBC News suggests David Cronenberg is set to write and direct Don DeLillo’s 2003 Cosmopolis, which follows 28-year-old millionaire Eric Packer through Manhattan. Filming is scheduled for 2010.

Note: reviews were mixed on the book when it was relased, but the New York Times Michiko Kakutani called it “a major dud” and “a long day’s journey into tedium,” and John Updike’s take on it in the New Yorker: “physically cool, [...] sleek and silver-touched” but “nothing happens.” Let’s hope the master of horror can pull off a Cinderella story.

Murmurs are circulating, too, about Cronenberg and a forthcoming adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s spy tale The Matarese Circle, starring Denzel Washington and that guy who jumps on Oprah’s couches.

Stephanie Austin, author of “Jesus Cake Baby,” ASF’s June Pinup/web exclusive, says a compelling new journal has landed. Actually, what she said was, “It will change your fucking life.”

In the words of its founders,

Bring the Ink is a quarterly web journal/zine (yearly print) brought to you from the mad mind of Sardonakiss Rexakon, a literary Voltron. He is the combined minds of Wayward Son, Comfortably Numb, Silent Lucidity, and Dr. Rover—four men who met on the back roads in the middle of nowhere to bring to the world a fresh perspective on literature that includes short stories, poems, essays, creative nonfiction, and comics. Our tastes are eclectic, our mag is eclectic, we are eclectic. If you are too, then check the site out at www.bringtheink.com. Issue 0 is live.

If Austin’s mind hasn’t been melded, she recalls meeting the founders near the MFA department of the University of Nebraska. She doesn’t remember any wreckage.

Bring the Ink is unable to pay right now, but if work that appears on the web ends up in its yearly (best of) print issues, contributors will be given a comp copy.

Conspiracy theorists have known it all along: the CIA invisibly and powerfully influences media, politics, and people. According to GalleyCat, one writer has uncovered the agency’s shady influence on classic novel adaptations as well.

Author Hugh Wilford’s new book, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America reveals how the CIA influenced popular culture—from film to art to publishing. The title A Mighty Wurlitzer ironically refers to the creation of front organizations, some of which were cultural, by the CIA during the Cold War—a CIA spymaster likened them to a huge organ, “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.”

A long Commentary essay lays out the details, including this one:

“In addition to providing most of the funding for an animated film version of Animal Farm, George Orwell’s anti-Stalinist fable, the CIA planted an operative inside Paramount Pictures… Another operative worked directly with the writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz to shape the film version of Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American.”

Sara Lloyd’s talk at Frankfurt “Revisiting a Publishing Manifesto—What Does the Future Look Like for Publishers?” generated a lot of buzz on Twitter . . . so we thought we’d introduce you to a new conference.

The Conference

The first ever Digital Book World, to be held January 26 and 27, 2010, in New York, is “is designed specifically to help consumer book publishers and their trading partners assess the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital age.” According to Publishers Weekly, a number of speakers and panels have been confirmed—including sessions on Evolving the Business Model and Ebooks: Opportunity or Threat?—and you can register now.

In the “Books Plus in the 21st Century” session, Cookstr, Fourth Story Media, and author Alison Norrington will examine how new revenue streams can be created by combining print and web content. Tor.com will take on how social media builds communities, and BookSquare will tackle the sensitive subject of book pricing. Some additional panels ASF finds intriguing:

• The Changing Agent-Author Relationship: How It Will Affect the Business Model
• Understanding Brand Basics: What Makes Brands Work or Fail, and Why Publishers Should Care
• The New Farm System: Scouting Blogs and Self-Publishers for Commercial Books
• Listen to Your Young People: When Entry-Levels Know More than Managers
• Video Is a Requirement: Mastering a New Skill and How to Apply It

Speaking of that last panel. . .

The Sentence

ASF hopes the conference will feature crazy-cool byproducts of marriages between thought and multimedia, like Electric Literature‘s “Single Sentence Animations”—which this month shows a bloody good 33-second Jonathan Ashley animation of a single sentence of Michael Cunningham from Olympia, a novel in progress. Last issue featured the haunting interpretation by Luca Dipierro of Lydia Millet’s “Sir Henry.” See them both here.

Why, hello there.

We hope you all have been enjoying the regular blog posts and are routinely stopping to admire our lovely Web editors, Stacy and Dina, as much as we do. We’re starting something new around here called “Short Notices.” We want to let you in to the office. Metaphorically, obviously. We can’t have you traipsing around our palatial, perfectly organized set of corner offices. You wouldn’t actually fit.

So look out for incoming posts hinting at the exotic inner workings of American Short Fiction, including but not limited to: updates on where we are with issues; what’s in those issues; recommendations on submitting, writing, being, and living from our staff and our friends; things we like, dislike, and feel indifferent towards; giveaways (yes!); tips, timelines, statistics, and more secret things that will make you giddy with all your new lit mag knowledge.

We’ll get you started with a little teaser. Yes, an amuse-bouche.

Today is Tuesday. We are in the office, drinking coffee (black), with the windows open because it is absolutely gorgeous in Austin in October.

We’re working on getting the Winter issue prepped to send to the printer next week and we’re so thrilled about the five pieces in it. There are magicians and possibly severed heads. There are tigers and fish and turtle shells. There’s a drought in Los Angeles. It could be the best issue ever and you should probably begin preparing for it now. Soon we’ll let you in on some first sentences, some author name anagrams.

ALSO! The Texas Book Festival is coming up, Halloween weekend, and we can’t wait for it. We’ll have a booth and we’ll be there all day Saturday and Sunday alongside our Badgerdog cohorts. Our wonderful editor Jill Meyers is moderating a panel on Obsessive Protagonists and hoards of ASF friends and heroes will be reading and talking and wandering around. Come see us if you’re in Austin and fly down if you’re not.

We’re excited about all these things. Are you excited about all these things? Are there other specific things you’d like to hear about? Let us know.

With Halloween around the corner, ASF sees fit to give a shout out to the horror story—that often ignored but much loved genre. Here are a few of our staff favorites.

Jill Meyers claims, “I don’t read horror so much, but the three suggestions below are
deliciously creepy reads. I get freaked out by stories about amoral, seemingly omniscient children. Bad seeds.” Her list:

What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt
“The Rocking-Horse Winner” by D. H. Lawrence (“not really a bad seed, but creepy nonetheless—a child possessed, you could say”)
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (“a child in the form of a Columbine killer”)

Stacey Swann
“Stephen King’s last short story collection, Everything Is Eventual, is pretty erratic. However, the short story ’1408′ has an unexpected creepy power (much more so than the film adaptation). Also, I still have a weird affection for Henry James’s Turn of the Screw. Old-school horror.”

Rebecca Bengal’s getting scared by “the very timely The New Vampire’s Handbook: A Guide for the Recently Turned Creatures of the Night by Joe Garden, Janet Ginsburg, and a whole coven of past and present Onion writers and editors.”

(more…)

ASF web editor Dina Guidubaldi suggests Wag’s Revue is something to consider.

Now in its third issue, the online quarterly Wag’s Revue “aspires to borrow many of print publishing’s good habits (like having content arranged in a page, and employing great editorial stringency) while taking advantage of the Internet’s free and far-reaching distribution.”

When you think Wag, think Web mag. Get it?

Revue editors say also that “each issue features fiction, poetry, nonfiction and interviews with ‘waggish luminaries of our day’ (which has included George Saunders, Dave Eggers, T. C. Boyle, and Wells Tower, so far).” Poets & Writers has taken note.

Wag’s Revue was founded Spring 2009.  Check them out at www.wagsrevue.com. See too their writing contests with cash prizes.