Here are a few of my favorites from this year. Poetry books: ~I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, by Karyna McGglynn (Sarabande Books) ~The Ravenous Audience, by Kate Durbin (Black Goat/Akashic Books) ~Shana Linda~Pretty Pretty, by Nanette Rayman-Rivera (Scattered Light Publications) ~Moth Moon, by Matt Jasper (BlazeVOX) ~The Future is [...]
Archive for December, 2009
Juliet Cook’s Best of 2009
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Aunia Kahn, Black Goat/Akashic Books, BlazeVOX, Blood Pudding Press, Casey Weldon, Dana Guthrie Martin, Dancing Girl Press, Dusie Kollektiv, Emma Bolden, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, Juliet Cook, Karyna McGglynn, Kristen Orser, Lisa Ciccarello, Marnie Weber, Matt Jasper, Michelle Detorie, Moth Moon, Nanette Rayman-Rivera, Ode to Industry, Sarabande Books, Sarah Sarai, Scattered Light Publications, Shana Linda~Pretty Pretty, Squint, The Future is Happy, The Ravenous Audience, The Sad Epistles, The Spare Room on December 14, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Lazy Poet Wants Help/Lines of Poetry
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Lazy poet, Poetry Contest on December 14, 2009 | 10 Comments »
Hi. I am the Lazy Poet. I need to publish because publishing is critical to my self esteem or my rationalization against the force of inevitable death or an upcoming argument for tenure (?) or whatever so thought I would write a poem, but I am lazy. I did use last week to write the [...]
Maria Wyeth = Patrick Bateman
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Bret Easton Ellis, Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays on December 14, 2009 | 6 Comments »
I’m reading Play It As It Lays for the first time. I don’t recall reading about how Bret Easton Ellis stole his entire style from Joan Didion. How could I have missed that? The deadpan delivery of line after line by vacuous cyphers in Didion’s Hollywood read almost exactly like those of Ellis’s Wall Street. [...]
Todd Zuniga’s Best of 2009
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Todd Zuniga on December 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Top iPhone Apps of 2009 1. AllSubway AllSubway makes waiting for a friend at a bar an international daydreamscape. It’s plain fun (for me, at least) to compare subway systems: the surprisingly comparable Beijing to Berlin, the wild mess of Tokyo, the simple straight line only once split of Helsinki. Exquisite.
J. A. Tyler’s Best of 2009
Posted in Uncategorized on December 13, 2009 | 11 Comments »
J. A. Tyler’s Best of 2009 These great BigOther folks have already covered so many of the books I would recommend as best of 2009, so I’m going to hit this as ‘the best writers of 2009 that I am on the watch for in 2010’:
My 20 Favorite Albums of 2009
Posted in Uncategorized on December 13, 2009 | 9 Comments »
Would love to see your list — let the comments stream begin! Oh, if you see something you’d like, click on the artist’s name/title. Consider it my holiday gift to you. Umlaut – Umlaut Sack & Blumm – Returns
Que Cera, Sera
Posted in Uncategorized on December 13, 2009 | 2 Comments »
I have a raging head cold and fell asleep filled with medicines, and with the title of this post ricocheting around my brain. I actually googled it because I was positive that I must have read it somewhere, but other than this, nothing really showed up. The occasion? The upcoming wide release of Youth in [...]
Alec Niedenthal’s Best of 2009
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Agriculture Reader, Alec Niedenthal, Bonfires on the Heath, Caketrain, Eskimo Snow, Night Train, Sleepingfish, Smokelong Quarterly, The Clientele on December 13, 2009 | 18 Comments »
Here’s some stuff I liked in 2009: Books: Dear Everybody, by Michael Kimball One Hour of Television, by Kristina Born Scorch Atlas, by Blake Butler Light Boxes, by Shane Jones I read more books from 2009, but I can’t remember them right now. If I had more money I would have read more books that [...]
my kind of writer
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged experimental, innovative, labels!!, tradition on December 12, 2009 | 36 Comments »
this morning, i had a conversation with one of my colleagues about writing, & i kept on saying “my kind” of writers. a philosopher, she asked exactly what i meant by “my kind,” which is a more than fair question. do you think it’s limiting or even degrading to ostracize ourselves as “innovative” or “conceptual” [...]
Ten (of the) Best Indie Lit Editors of 2009, with “Found” Biographies
Posted in Uncategorized on December 12, 2009 | 21 Comments »
James Tadd Adcox and Rebekah Silverman were American pop musicians, actors and entertainers that attained success as a husband and wife team during the 1960’s and 1970’s. The couple began their career in the mid-1960’s as R&B backing vocalists for record producer Phil Spector. In the 1970s, they positioned themselves as media personalities with two [...]
Books? Fall Apart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged The Father of All Things, Tom Bissell on December 12, 2009 | 50 Comments »
Tom Bissell, a writer who, among other things, wrote a heartbreaking account of his relationship with his Vietnam Vet father in the book The Father of All Things, has a review in the NYT of what en face looked to be a promising new Mexican novel. It let him down, to say the least, and [...]
Big Other Contest #2 Winners!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Aimee Bender, B L Pawelek, Bobcat, Gabe Durham, Gabriel Orgrease, Peter Anderson, Rebecca Lee, Sumanth Prabhaker, Sweet Tomb, The Third Elevator, Trinie Dalton on December 12, 2009 | 1 Comment »
The competition for a prize in Big Other‘s second contest was fierce. Actually, only six people entered and one was disqualified. Nevertheless, the writing was inventive and funny. So here are the winners: Gabe Durham wins Sweet Tomb, by Trinie Dalton B L Pawelek wins A Mere Pittance, by Sumanth Prabhaker Gabriel Orgrease wins The [...]
On Utilizing The Five Senses
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged A Natural History of Senses, Diane Ackerman, Patrick Suskind, Perfume on December 11, 2009 | 11 Comments »
In my five years of experience teaching college English courses, I have noticed a trend amongst young writers toward taking for granted the fact that we experience life through our five senses. Beginning writers tend to overuse the sense of sight: describing things in terms of the visible without paying much notice to the four [...]
Lia Purpura’s Best of 2009
Posted in Uncategorized on December 11, 2009 | 2 Comments »
▪ Twisted Tree, gorgeous novel by Kent Meyers ▪ The SodaStream (an at-home carbonating machine), so we now buy NO bottled anything! Here’s some more info about Lia: Lia Purpura has published poems and essays in many magazines and journals, including AGNI Review, Orion Magazine, Antioch Review, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, [...]
Alexander Bogs’s Best of 2009
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Alexander Bogs, Bogs Visionary Orchestra, Daniel Johnston on December 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Best Human: Daniel Johnston Best Sound: hub cap falling off a car in a snow storm Best Feeling: hope I wrote this about A. Bogs awhile ago: A. Bogs believes in Grace, Justice, & Love, even when everything points to the contrary. He’s a bone-aching murder balladeer who can’t stop wearing a Gun. He left [...]
Serialized Storytelling in the Internet Age?
Posted in Uncategorized on December 11, 2009 | 24 Comments »
Daytime drama is dying! …Earlier this year, CBS cancelled the longest-running series in broadcast history, Guiding Light (which debuted over 70 years ago, on radio), and earlier this week, announced the cancellation of the 54-year-old As the World Turns (ATWT). This is considered a “big deal” by soap opera types b/c ATWT is the last [...]
A New Big Other Contributor!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged American Letters & Commentary, Big Other, Denver Quarterly, Fifty-Two Stories, Gulf Coast, Kristen Iskandrian, Memorious, Mississippi Review online on December 11, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Please welcome Kristen Iskandrian to Big Other. Kristen’s work has been published in a number of places: Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Memorious, American Letters & Commentary, Mississippi Review online, Fifty-Two Stories, and elsewhere. She has a PhD in English from University of Georgia, where she currently teaches literature and creative writing, and keeps a blog [...]
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