Month: April 2008

Free stories

This is very cool. Small Beer Press has announced that what was easily one of my favorite short story collections of recent years, Maureen F. McHugh‘s Mothers & Other Monsters, is now available for free online under a Creative Commons license. So if you’ve never read any of McHugh’s stories — Ursula K. Le Guin rightly calls her “one of our best and bravest imaginative writers” — now is your chance. As SBP notes, “The paper edition is much nicer, although not free.”

They have also made available Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link’s wonderful first collection and John Kessel‘s The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, which I regret I’ve not yet read.

Kaleidotroping along

(cross-posted to the Kaleidotrope weblog)

I’m starting to get some feedback on the most recent issue of Kaleidotrope, and I think contributor Bill Ward’s comments might be my favorite so far:

I’ve just read through my contributor’s copy of the fourth issue of Kaleidotrope and the magazine continues to impress. There’s a healthy dose of surreal scifi and cross-genre slipstream shorts between the covers, and a variety of poetry and prose poems. But it’s the quirky humor of Fred Coppersmith that really comes through in his magazine and makes it different than a lot of other small press cross-genre ‘zines, which take themselves far too seriously. Kaleidotrope, with its eclectic stories and articles (the standout here is a history of the ‘fembot’ in popular culture) and weird little vignettes like faux horoscopes and ironic photography, is a magazine that isn’t scared to have some fun.

Bill’s fun short story, “The Three Wishes of Miles Vander,” appears in the issue, on sale now.

Some links for today

And now, because I apparently have well over fifty items in my “shared” newsreader folder (and countless hundreds in my “to read” folder), here’s a random assortment of links:

Friday. Random. Ten of ’em.

By now, I think we’re all familiar with the general concept, no?

  1. “The Man Who Sold the World” by Nirvana (orig. David Bowie), guessed by Kim
    We spoke of was and when
  2. “Tempted” by Richard Thompson (orig. Squeeze), guessed by Kim
    I said, “It’s no occasion. It’s no story I can tell.”
  3. “Set the Fire to the Third Bar” by Snow Patrol w/ Martha Wainwright
    I find the map and draw a straight line
  4. “Back in the High Life Again” by Warren Zevon (orig. Steve Winwood), guessed by Kim
    It’s so hard to just slow down
  5. “Gorillaz on My Mind” by Redman & Gorillaz, guessed by Eric B.
    Then I’m back on purple hills
  6. “No Myth” by Michael Penn, guessed by Clayton
    I’ll catch the first junk to Soho
  7. “Squalor Victoria” by the National
    I’m going down among the saints
  8. “The One that I Want” by the Beautiful South (orig. Grease), guessed by Clayton
    Yes, I’m sure down deep inside
  9. “Modern Love” by the Last Town Chorus (orig. David Bowie), guessed by Kim
    But things don’t really change
  10. “Lion’s Jaw” by Neko Case
    You’re gone, the trees are so quiet

Guess the lyric, win no prize! Here’s what happened last week. As always, best of luck!

My misspent youth

My aunt is getting ready to sell her house, and she recently came across a number of old photographs, including this one of me at around two or three:

My parents and I were both amused to note that, even at that young age, I’m wearing a t-shirt from my future alma mater. I have absolutely no memory of this, or in fact much of anything before my sister was born when I was four, but there I am all the same.