American Short Fiction blog

American Short Fiction is intrigued with cover art. As it is, our artists surprise and delight us at every turn, yet their art remains a mystery.

GallyCat’s supercool superspeed video might not show us how our beautiful books are designed, but they do show us how an upcoming sci-fi novel by Gail Carriger was designed by Orbit Books creative director Lauren Panepinto.

This two-minute video captures every Photoshop tweek and edit on the six-hour-long cover design process.

Here’s more about the video by Panepinto: “Over six hours of my onscreen compositing, retouching, color correction, type obsessing, all condensed down to a slim sexy one minute 55 seconds of cover design. Trust me, no one wants to watch it in real-time.” (Thankfully, the artist left out the “not-as-riveting-onscreen stages of [her] process, including the reading the manuscript…”)

Please join us tomorrow at Club de Ville for an evening of music and readings—and teleportation.

We’re kicking things off at 7. Get there early. You don’t want to miss any of the great fiction, poetry, music, or Owen Egerton’s masterful emcee-ing. There’s a suggested donation of $2 and the chance to win amazing goodies from the participating presses.

We’ll also have the beautiful new issue for sale.

Club de Ville is on Red River, between 9th and 10th Streets.

See you there!

Hi, y’all.

It’s that time again. American Short Fiction is looking for passionate readers and writers who are in Austin (or willing to brave the scorching Austin heat for a few months) and interested in interning at the magazine this summer. Our editorial interns do things like evaluate submissions, correspond with authors, copyedit and proofread stories, help plan events, and research for future issues and various ASF projects. Interns usually work 10 to 15 hours a week for a period of 3 months. Our internships are unpaid. We recommend that applicants have a strong background in English or American literature, or a related field.

If you’d like to apply, send a résumé and cover letter to me, callie.collins [at] americanshortfiction.org. In your cover letter, let us know why we’d love to have you around the office and let us know about your experience with contemporary short fiction. We’d love to know about a story, an author, or a journal you adore and why.

We can’t wait to hear from you!

It’s a woman’s world. Well, a woman’s fellowship, anyway. And it’s given by “the only museum in the world dedicated exclusively to recognizing the contributions of women artists.”

Located in Washington, D.C., the National Museum of Women in the Arts Library Fellows Program encourages and promotes the creation of artists’ books and to support NMWA’s Library and Research Center and book art programs.

If you are a woman book artist, the 30-year-old NMWA is looking to give you $12,000 for the production of an artist book in an edition of 125. They’ll give an additional $1,000 for a promotional brochure for the book, plus another $1,000 for you to travel to the Library Fellows’ annual meeting to present your book upon completion.

Men can help! And collaboration is allowed. Check out the proposal guidelines.

See and/or purchase previous winners’ books.

Deadline: June, 30, 2010.

Invisible Man author Ralph Ellison worked on his second novel for 40 years. More than 15 years after his death, we finally get to read it.

Invisible Man was the first and only book Ralph Ellison published during his lifetime. According to Jenna Schnuer in American Way magazine, he began a second book in 1952, the year Invisible Man was published. By the time Ellison died in 1994, he’d left behind thousands of manuscript pages and notes for this second book.

Adam Bradley, an associate professor of English at University of Colorado, and John F. Callahan, Ellison’s friend and literary executor, as well as a prof of humanities at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, have pieced together the posthumous follow-up novel Three Days Before the Shooting. . . : The Unfinished Second Novel.

A sweeping narrative about an African American jazzman turned preacher named Alonzo Hickman who becomes a surrogate father to a child of “indeterminate race.” The child grows up to become a racist politician, and Hickman learns of a plot to assassinate his former charge.

According to Callahan, “It’s a book very much about memory [and] about Ellison’s mantra: that the true American, whatever else he or she is, was also somehow black.”

“We did very little line-editing,” says Callahan. “Whenever possible, we went with [Ellison’s] words, punctuation, and grammar.” Adds Bradley: “Our job was to get out of his way as much as possible.”

This is one long work ASF staffers are looking forward to sinking into.

Some ads are misdirected, unenlightened, or just, well, cursed with Taint and Wrong. Like Caribou Coffee Company’s “Taste our passion in every cup.”

Call me a prude, Caribou, but I bet your passion is the last thing America wants in its coffee.

Some ads you appreciate like your bff for their perfect combination of clever and honest and utterly dependable, as with Ford’s “Crazy Smart.” Others, like Dodge Sports’ “Man’s Last Stand,” cut a new edge on the old gender and domesticity joke.

A few ads even leak into the pop culture lexicon as surely as media-saturated nitrous oxide makes the rounds at a Friday night pizza party, manufacturing joy and repetition ad nauseum (whoa, now there’s a pun). I mean, who can forget these doozies: Miller Lite’s “Taste’s great/less filling” and Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?”

And some ads you fall in love with. Forever. Like Coca-Cola’s “The Kid and Mean Joe.” Because of its fully realized world. Its exactly right details. Its timing. Its depth. Its narrative arc. And its respect of you—your smarts, your humor, your emotional center.

Just like the best stories.

No wonder advice by giants in the advertising world–from ideas to editing—fall right in step for fiction writing. In both worlds, every word counts, and craft is critical. You’ll get good results only if your audience buys in.

See more advice from the giants of advertising at suite101.com’s “Recommendations for writing effective ad copy.”

[Thanks to ad men Peter Levin and Larry Conely at Team Detroit for the inspiration for this post.]

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Jennifer Schuessler employs a pun to examine the theme of work in literature:

How do you treat “work” in your work?

Do you want to write about your summer job as CEO of Goldman Sachs?

Do you leave out any mention of a character’s J-O-B?

Will you burn your “office” novel now that John Lanchester of the Telegraph says it can’t be done, lest you end up like Tom Clancy, a millionaire who lacks authenticity per the New York Times?

What “hardware” would you have a “best-selling fixation” on?

ASF is exerting a little Peer Pressure on March 27 at Club de Ville.

That is, we’re throwing a big bash to honor Small Press Month, and we’re inviting fellow indie presses Effing Press, Dalton Publishing, and Monofonus Press. Each press (or, in the case of us, magazine) will present one reader. We’ll also have a few great bands lined up for your listening pleasure. Please save the date.

This reading will mark the launch of ASF‘s latest issue, Spring 2010, which features great new work from Matt Bell, Laura van den Berg, and Jeff Parker, among others. Holy smokes, it’s a good issue. We’ll be posting up more details very shortly.

If you belong to our Facebook group (which, if you haven’t joined, shouldn’t you?), you’ll be getting our invite to Peer Pressure within 24 hours.

ASF is all about young writers. We are a part of Badgerdog, after all, which exists to bring published writers into the schools, and even more published writers out of the schools.

So we applaud The Howard Nemerov Creative Writing Awards sponsored by Washington University in St. Louis. In its fifth year and open solely to juniors and seniors currently enrolled in high school, the awards offer three prizes of $250 each in fiction and poetry.

Know someone who should submit?

• Pass along the rules.
• And the name of the judges, too: faculty in the Writing Program at Washington University, including fiction writers Kathryn Davis, Marshall Klimasewiski, and Kellie Wells, and poets Mary Jo Bang and Carl Phillips.
• Oh, and the deadline: Entries must be postmarked by March 15, 2010.

That’s today!

Awards will be announced May 15, 2010. Contact David Schuman at (314) 935-7130 for more info.

*Thanks to Creative Writers Opportunities List for the heads up.

What’s this?

You missed American Short Fiction Editor Jill Meyers and Winter 2009 contributor Michael Noll on Austin’s KOOP when they discussed indie publishing?

Your computer can fix that.

Link here and now to the broadcast, which includes Noll’s reading from his compelling coming-of-age story “Bullheads.”