Please welcome another new contributor today: A D Jameson. A D is a writer, video artist, teacher, and performer. His fiction has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Brooklyn Rail, the Mississippi Online Review, elimae, Lamination Colony, and elsewhere; it is forthcoming in Fiction International, Caketrain, PANK, Mad Hatters’ Review, and Action, Yes, among [...]
Archive for December, 2009
New Big Other Contributor!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged A D Jameson on December 8, 2009 | 14 Comments »
Little Easter War Machine Rabbit
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Easter Rabbit, Joseph Young, Little War Machine, M Sarki, Micro-fictions, Ravenna Press on December 8, 2009 | 4 Comments »
There has been quite a bit of attention draw to Joseph Young’s Easter Rabbit, a collection of micro-fictions from Publishing Genius Press, so I wanted to take the opportunity to draw readers to another older book (2004) that has many of the same components of well-written, tightly-wound, intensely-structured lit: Little War Machine, by M Sarki, [...]
Books as Sculpture & Typewriter Poems
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Books as Sculpture from Florida Collections, TypeBound, Typewriter Poems from the Sackner Archive on December 8, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Via TypeBound (Books as Sculpture from Florida Collections and Typewriter Poems from the Sackner Archive): In TypeBound, two of the book’s most fundamental elements—its bindings and its type—are separated and examined for creative possibilities as they are freed of their basic, traditional functions. The artists’ books that emerged in the 20th century stress the integration [...]
New Big Other Contributor!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Nicolle Elizabeth on December 8, 2009 | 11 Comments »
Please join me in welcoming another great writer to Big Other. Nicolle Elizabeth is a fiction writer and a bike mechanic. She is a contributing writer at Words Without Borders, the Brooklyn Rail, the Collagist and others. Her fiction has appeared in Wigleaf, Elimae, Caketrain and others. She is the founder of the 12 am [...]
What the hell’s a GRAPHIC NOVEL? I read COMICS.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chris ware, comics code, comix, laocoon, lessing, neil gaiman, scott mccloud, sequential art, will eisner on December 8, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Comic creator Will Eisner’s 1985 analysis of his own medium, Comics & Sequential Art, was an important step in freeing a long marginalized and ancient medium. The need for the cumbersome term “sequential art” shows the cultural baggage that the term “comics” carries with it. The earlier tendency of 1970’s underground comic artists to spell [...]
Sage Advice from Gary Lutz
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Gary Lutz, The Sentence Is a Lonely Place, We Are Champion on December 7, 2009 | 9 Comments »
Check out a new interview with Gary Lutz at We Are Champion. An excerpt: One piece of advice would be to slow down. It doesn’t matter if it takes you all night or two nights or even longer to write one sentence. Every sentence should feel like the nucleus of the story in which it [...]
Let it Poe
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Poe book on December 6, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Edgar Allan Poe’s first book auctioned off for $662K, or about the amount of money Stephanie Meyer just made while you read this…
The Page 99 Test
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Ford Maddox Ford, The Page 99 Test, William Gass on December 4, 2009 | 11 Comments »
I first learned about the page 99 test from William Gass (I’ve forgotten where) who I think got it from Ford Madox Ford: “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” Sounds like a fractal approach to literary theory to me. So, from Gass’s [...]
Wonder Twin Titles, Activate!
Posted in Uncategorized on December 4, 2009 | 12 Comments »
Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever, by Justin Taylor Aren’t these titles strangely similar?
The Rhythm Method
Posted in Uncategorized on December 3, 2009 | 9 Comments »
I usually have at least two books going: one for whenever and one for when I’m in bed. You’ve got to choose the bed books carefully, however–too exciting and you’ll be up all night, too slow and you’ll never finish. Right now, my bed book is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and it’s pretty much perfect. [...]
Music As Children’s Lit: Weezer
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Music As Children's Literature, Weezer on December 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Back in the day, before the boys in Weezer had become complete douches (Raditude? Really, guys?), they sang simple little songs about their sweaters, their iconic choice in eyewear, surfboards, their “safe places,” shitty dads, lesbians, etc. They are also the original inspiration for Music As Children’s Lit. “My Name is Jonas” is a psuedo-intellectual [...]
Be Careful, Be Wary, Be Fruitful
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chapbookpublisher.com, Naissance chapbooks on December 3, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Things like this scare me: chapbookpublisher.com / Naissance chapbooks From their guidelines, a $10 submission fee will get you: “Guaranteed response within 24 hours. Best-case scenario is you impress our socks off and score for publication of your 4–60 page manuscript as a Naissance title. Naissance authors receive 10 free copies of their published chapbook [...]
New Article on Rilke
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Ange Mlinko, Angels to Radios: On Rainer Maria Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke, The Nation on December 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Ange Mlinko’s insightful “Angels to Radios: On Rainer Maria Rilke” appears in The Nation. An excerpt: Rilke had been fascinated by the formal conundrum of enclosure and freedom at least since his tenure as Auguste Rodin’s assistant. In 1902 the poet was commissioned to write a monograph on the great sculptor. Exhilarated by his visit [...]
Bookmarks or Dog-ears?
Posted in Uncategorized on December 3, 2009 | 22 Comments »
The earlier post about reading rituals made me want to get more specific. I treat my books like shit–I use them as coasters, I stack them and throw them around, break softcover spines–but for some reason I don’t like to dog-ear my pages. It just doesn’t feel right. Do you dog-ear? Do you use the [...]
Novel Nausea
Posted in Uncategorized on December 2, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Zadie Smith talks the essay and the novel at The Guardian. An excerpt: Novels, by contrast, are idiosyncratic, uneven, embarrassing, and quite frequently nausea-inducing – especially if you happen to have written one yourself. Within the confines of an essay or – even better! – an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of [...]
Big Other Contributors’ News #6
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged "Parents Being We Are Wrongly", "Truth Be Told", American Salvage, American Short Fiction blog, B.J. Hollars, Ben Greenman, Blake Butler, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Brian Evenson, Christopher Higgs, Dark Sky, E. Loic Leuschner, Fan Fiction, Front Porch, Html Giant, Jac Jemc, Josh Weil, Kim Chinquee, Look No Further, Matt Briggs, Matthew Simmons, Molly Gaudry, Monkeybicycle 7, National Book Award-finalist, Nick Bredie, Opium 9, Ryan Boudinot, Sam Pink, Sean Carman, Shya Scanlon, Skip Horack, Stacy Muszynski, The Collagist, The New Valley, The Rumpus, The Southern Cross, We Are Champion, We Take Me Apart, You Must Be This Tall to Ride on December 2, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Molly Gaudry and Kim Chinquee have been translated into Polish, alongside Matt Bell, Jamie Iredell, Claudia Smith, and a number of others. A review of Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart appears HERE. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Shya Scanlon curated a Fan Fiction section for Opium 9, which includes work by Brian Evenson, Matthew Simmons, Matt Briggs, Blake [...]
Genre and Its Discontents
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Fredric Jameson, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Matthew Cheney, Science Fiction Studies, Sean Lovelace, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction on December 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Piggybacking on Sean Lovelace’s post about genre, I offer this provocative recent interview with Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., coeditor of the journal Science Fiction Studies and writer of The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. According to Matthew Cheney, the interviewer, his new book “analyzes a variety of SF media through seven lenses: fictive neology, fictive novums, [...]
Isn’t it Ironic?
Posted in Uncategorized on December 1, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Sometimes I get confused about irony. Today we learn that loneliness is contagious. Does that count?
Look at my Big Brain!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Celebrity Books, What to Read on December 1, 2009 | 6 Comments »
You are a celebrity. People will photograph you always. What book do you flash?
A lead up
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged PEN, small press on December 1, 2009 | 12 Comments »
What role do YOU think small press plays?
-
Authors
-
John Madera
-
John Dermot Woods
-
Ryan W. Bradley
-
Michael Leong
-
Greg Gerke
-
J. A. Tyler
-
Stacy Muszynski
-
A D Jameson
-
Tim Jones-Yelvington
-
Rachel Swirsky
-
Edward Mullany
-
Aya Karpinska
-
Paul Kincaid
-
davis schneiderman
-
Amber Sparks
-
Tim Horvath
-
John Domini
-
Elaine Castillo
-
Curtis White
-
Paula Bomer
-
Andrew Taggart
-
James Tadd Adcox
-
Nick Francis Potter
-
Brian Kubarycz
-
Gabriel Blackwell
-
Janey Smith
-
Matty Byloos
-
J/J Hastain
-
Greg Hunter
-
-
Top Posts
-
Recent Comments
