Asia Literary Review recently launched its new website. (You may recall it has been down for some time.) Here’s from their email announcing the new site:

Asia Literary Review is excited to announce the launch of its new website…devoted to fine Asian writing. The site serves as an extended version of Asia Literary Review Magazine and will offer in-depth views to the variety of genres the magazine publishes quarterly. The new web site offers many areas for the readers to enjoy.

Shya Scanlon is publishing his latest novel, Forecast, in installments on a series of literary websites. Scanlon is calling this web serialization—which, as far as I know, is the first such one in online literary magazine history—the Forecast 42 Project (click the link for a list of all 42 websites involved). The first installment of the novel was made available on July 19th at Juked. And the second installment was put up July 20th at Northville Review. The third portion should be available soon at Emprise Review.

Southampton Review honors the recently deceased Frank McCourt in their newest issue, available July 15.

Molly Gaudry seems to be found these days everywhere one turns, such as just this July in Pear Noir!, Kartika Review, Blue Print Review, and Gold Wake Press. Gaudry is also a many-hatted editor (Twelve Stories, Keyhole). One of her primary hats is worn at Willows Wept Review, whose Summer 2009 issue includes work by J. A. Tyler, Nicolle Elizabeth, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, and others.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of mankind’s first steps on the moon, McSweeney’s offers up some never-before-seen moon transcripts.

In his inaugural post for HTMLGIANT, Christopher Higgs informs us of a new literary magazine dedicated to Joyce’s head-splitting final novel Finnegans Wake called Flash Point.

The latest issue of pax americana needs to be seen to be believed: The Poetry Brothel Issue. (That’s right.)

The recent issue of Witness, the literary periodical of Black Mountain Institute, is themed Dismissing Africa. “With this issue,” the editors write, “we revive, in different form, the feature for which Witness is perhaps best known: the special issue.” The issue is an attempt to bring together “a gathering of diverse works resulting from the title’s provocation.” Greg Weiss wrote for Luna Park about the issue:

One of the many risks of Witness, “the magazine of the Black Mountain Institute,” presenting an issue dedicated to the theme of Dismissing Africa is that the very notion of dismissing “Africa” already dismisses the individuals who live in Africa. I don’t deny that this volume sometimes succumbs to the pitfalls attached to that risk, but I still really liked the Dismissing Africa issue, both aesthetically and morally….[continues]

The Fifth Annual Chicago Printer’s Ball is coming up, Friday, July 31. If you can, don’t miss this, as it’s one of the best publishing events in the States. The participating publishers list is long, including Poetry, McSweeney’s, Another Chicago Magazine, Fence, jubilat, Ninth Letter, MAKE, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rose Metal Press, Saint Ann’s Review, and on and on, plus many other arts and publishing organizations from in and around Chicago. And it’s FREE. Here’s a sneak peek from the Chicago Poetry Calendar.

Finally, The Paris Review has put a large portion online of Katie Rophie’s interview with Gay Talese from the magazine’s Summer 2009 issue. Here’s a bit where Talese talks about his writing habits:

INTERVIEWER: How does your writing day begin?

TALESE: Usually I wake up in bed with my wife. I don’t want to have breakfast with anyone. So I go from the third floor, which is our bedroom, to the fourth floor, where I keep my clothes. I get dressed as if I’m going to an office. I wear a tie.

INTERVIEWER: Cuff links?

TALESE: Yes. I dress as if I’m going to an office in midtown or on Wall Street or at a law firm, even though what I am really doing is going downstairs to my bunker. In the bunker there’s a little refrigerator, and I have orange juice and muffins and coffee. Then I change my clothes.

Every Tuesday, Travis Kurowski presents Luna Digest, a selection of news from the world of literary magazines. Travis is the editor of Luna Park, a magazine founded on the idea that journals are as deserving of critical attention as other artistic works.

You might have noticed a few changes around the site recently, so here’s a much overdue update about what’s going on behind the scenes. Carson, Fictionaut’s co-founder and developer extraordinaire, is cleaning up code, fixing bugs, and adding features in preparation for our public launch.

New features we deployed this week include:

• Book links. If you’ve published, edited, or contributed to a book, you can now easily link it from your profile page.
• Comment notifications. Whenever you leave a comment on a story, the writer now receives an email — unless they have specifically turned off this function.
• Overhauled invite system.
• Style changes and minor fixes all over the place.

We’ve got a lot more improvements planned, and we’d love to hear from you about what you’d like to see next, so drop by the forum or shoot us an email! Thanks for being part of an incredible group of beta testers.

Luna Park is a review of the world of literary magazines, founded on the idea that journals are as deserving of critical attention as other artistic works. Every Tuesday, Luna Park editor Travis Kurowski will present selected news on the Fictionaut blog. Welcome to Luna Digest.

Literary magazine publishing has always been a risky endeavor, forever skirting the edge of the market. Foundational magazines, such as the Pre-Raphaelite The Germ and high modernists like The Little Review and transition, suffered tumultuous and typically short lives, constantly searching for funding to keep their publications (and, so, their writers) in print. Even contemporary literary gems like Grand Street and Chelsea — though beautifully designed and publishing fantastic writing by such talents as Edward Said, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley — had to fold along with many other magazines in the past decades due to insufficient funds.

In 2009, with the current economic downturn and the accelerating pace of new developments in digital publishing (Google Books, Kindle, Scribd, etc.), literary magazine editors and publishers have even more hurdles and opportunities to consider.

• As many already know, Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways alerted many readers in May to the recent problems of fellow university endowed literary magazines The Southern Review and New England Review, who have both been notified their budgets will be either slashed or eliminated.
• Poet Victoria Chang offered up her two cents about the financial problems of New England Review and the mass of literary magazines on her blog here and here.
• Flatmancrooked managing editor Kaelen Smith writes on the magazine’s blog about how he feels that the free publishing website Scribd can be a very useful tool for publishers.
• The Kindle has rocked the publishing landscape in a way previous e-readers did not, and now some literary magazines are offering up supplemental e-reader options. Monkeybicycle issue 6 is now available on Kindle, as is the new magazine Electric Literature, which features new Kindled work by Jim Shepard and Michael Cunningham.
• (And, on the subject of the future of e-readers, James Wolcott wonders in the August 2009 Vanity Fair, “How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?” How indeed.)
• New literary-magazine-type-project Significant Objects has moved original literary publishing onto not Amazon, but Ebay, with original writing by Lizzie Skurnick, Ben Greenman, Lydia Millet, Claire Zulkey, Luc Sante, Matthew Sharpe, and others readers can bid on.

And in other literary magazine news:

David Hamilton steps down as editor of Iowa Review after 32 years. Russell Valentino will take over the magazine.

Literary magazine super-couple Dave Eggers (McSweeney’s) and Vendela Vida (The Believer) in an interview with Nathan Englander for Interview magazine.

Guernica magazine writer EC Osondu wins the Caine Prize for African Writing, also referred to as the “African Booker,” for his story “Waiting” published in the magazine in October 2008.

Monkeybicycle announces Jessa Marsh as their new web editor. Marsh is also an assistant editor at Storyglossia. (And it just so happens she has stories in both magazines, here and here.)

Both Gigantic and Spinning Jenny will be represented at the July 30th Literary Death Match hosted by Todd Zuniga and Erin Hosier the Bowery Poetry Club.

New literary magazine kill author (see for yourself) names first issue after noted semiotician Roland Barthes. Includes writing by J.A. Tyler, xTx, Ethel Rohan, and many others. (The second issue is to be named after British playwright Harold Pinter.)

The summer fiction issue of Mississippi Review Online is up, with new work by Andy Plattner, Carrie Spell, Myfanwy Collins, et al.

Tin House turns ten years old. If you are in Portland, Oregon, you should think about going to their party. Looks like quite a line-up.

Cabinet magazine in Brooklyn has just opened up their own phantasmagoric art space, Observatory. From their website:

Observatory is a new exhibition/classroom/event space in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Run by a group of seven artists and bloggers, the space seeks to present programming inspired by the 18th century notion of “rational amusement” and is especially interested in topics residing at the interstices of learning and amusement, art and science, and history and curiosity. The space hosts screenings, lectures, classes and exhibitions.

Nick Owchar writes in LA Times’ Jacket Copy that Britain’s famous literary thriller magazine The Strand will be serializing the first five chapters of a long-lost Graham Greene novel, which the author began at age 22 and never finished.

In its summer double issue, Poetry magazine offers letters to a young poet from arch-formalist Yvor Winters.

New July 2009 issue of PANK just went online, with new work by Laura Ellen Scott, Ethel Rohan, xTx, and Anne Valente. And, on the magazine’s blog, The Northville Review editor Erin Fitzgerald talks “about alter egos, pop culture and the reality TV horrors she knows so well.”

(As mentioned previously on Fictionaut) Matt Bell is editor of The Collagist, a new literary magazine from Dzanc Books. Here’s a bit about The Collagist in an email from Bell:

Dzanc Books is pleased to announce its newest venture: an online journal called The Collagist. Intent on continuing the Dzanc tradition of bringing extraordinary writing to a wide audience, the first issue of The Collagist will be published on August 15th, 2009, and appear subsequently each month thereafter.

The Collagist is edited by Matt Bell, with Matthew Olzmann as Poetry Editor. Each month The Collagist will deliver outstanding new short stories, poems, and essays from both emerging and established writers, as well as an exclusive excerpt from a forthcoming novel. Early excerpts will include works from the standard bearers of independent publishing, including Coffee House, Two Dollar Radio, and Unbridled Books. The Collagist will also publish several new book reviews in every issue.

The Collagist is immediately open for submissions in all categories. As you might assume, we suggest you read the books Dzanc and its imprints publish to get a flavor of what writing gets us most excited. Submissions guidelines can be found here.

Fictionaut is now on Twitter. We’ll be updating with up-to-the-minute site news, links to member publications, and other bits of interest that come our way. You can follow our feed at @fictionaut — we’ll make sure to follow back and retweet noteworthy news. If you’d like even more Fictionaut in your social media, you can also friend us on Facebook.

Laura Castellano wrote a lovely piece about Fictionaut for Venus Zine, the women-centric Chicago-based print and online mag. The article provides an overview of the ideas behind Fictionaut, a few choice quotes from Jürgen, and helpful words about peer pressure from Pia Ehrhardt:

“Fictionaut seems fueled by support and good cheer rather than by workshoppy criticism,” says Ehrhardt. “I try to post work I think is as strong as what I’m reading on the site. Peer pressure.”

Read the article here.

The most amusing aspect of this photograph to me is that it includes the door to my balcony, the place I’d prefer to write, and where my imagination perhaps resides. But I don’t linger there much, although I do step out momentarily first thing in the morning.

People often ask me if I write, and the answer is no, not in the usual sense. The last time someone asked me that, in a bookstore in Nebraska, I replied that I am pretty sure I was supposed to turn in an essay a year ago. So no. Not even on deadline. I work. Day and night. I have a flexible lifestyle because I freelance, and the basic rule is that if I don’t have an event that requires my presence, I don’t have any particular obligation to stay in the country. But I often do because when my public relations projects are my whole life. And when I’m not doing specific tasks for clients, I’m often helping friends.

A glance at my kitchen table shows mounting evidence of things I am supposed to do, almost none of which are part of my day-to-day tasks. A pile of stuff from my friends at Featherproof, a stack of the t-shirts Two Dollar Radio made that are inspired by me, music by My Funny Detective for consideration for a future event, checks I haven’t taken to the bank. It’s not that I don’t need the money! Quite the contrary; I’m just busy.

Hanging on my doorknob are some children’s masks I bought in Edinburgh, on a long weekend I spent there last Thanksgiving. I went on a lark, it was nice, I was tired; all I remember is eating candy and watching television. I didn’t write like I thought I would.

Lauren Cerand writes about art, politics and style at LuxLotus.com. Writing Spaces is a series of posts dedicated to the desks, cafes, libraries and retreats where Fictionaut writers work, providing a window to the physical places where some of the stories on the site originated.

Terese Svoboda reports on her visit with writers in a Somalian refugee camp at The Rumpus:

When it was clear that we didn’t want five-point essays, the students instantly composed poems about female genital mutilation, politics, love, and—over and over again—the importance of education.

Quartet Press, the new digital publisher founded by Kassia Krozser, Kat Meyer, and Kirk Bilione, is now accepting submissions.

The first issue of kill author is out, named for Roland Barthes, with work by Barry Graham, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Ethel Rohan, J.A. Tyler, Mel Bosworth, and Nicole Elizabeth.

Twitter 666, edited by Martin Wall and Sam Pink, is a new journal of twitter feeds by “a big sandwich,” “a gravedigger,” “a creepy old man (at the park, not wearing a shirt),” “a shopping cart,” etc: “carrying three melons, a baby, a handbag, a coffee, two bottles of water and a beef heart.”

Dzanc Books offers a collection of Short Story Month Essays — over 160! — for a donation of $10 or more.

if:book announces the first Fictional Stimulus, “an introduction to the future of reading in the 21st Century and beyond.” You can sign up at the Bookfutures blog.

• Terese Svoboda‘s story “Read the Snow” appeared in The Brooklyn Rail.
• At Monkeybicycle, Daniel Nester‘s “Illiad Gag Reel.”
• Darryl Price,  Randall Brown, Mel Bosworth, Alan Rossi, Cynthia Reeser, and J.A. Tyler have stories, poetry, and reviews in Prick of the Spindle Vol. 3.2.
• Erin Fitzgerald and Meg Pokrass are in the July issue of decomp.
• The Rome Review #1 features a story by Blake Butler.
• Ethel Rohan also has stories in Everyday Genius, Houston Literary Review, Keyhole Magazine, Oddville Press, and Writers’ Bloc.
• Cliff Garstang‘s story “Counterpoint” and Robert Detman‘s “The Edmonton Farrell” appeared in Wisconsin Review.
• J.A. Tyler, Matt Bell, Josh Maday, and Nicole Elizabeth contributed to the July issue of Chapbook Review.

• Willow Springs 64 contains fiction by  Kim Chinquee and lists by Blake Butler.
• Matthew Simmons, Blake Butler, and Sam Pink have stories in Bust Down the Doors and Eat All the Chickens, a journal of absurd and surreal fiction.
• At ArtVoice, flash fiction by Scott Garson and Nicole Elizabeth.
• Smokelong Quarterly 25 includes work by Tara Laskowski, Amanda Nazario, and Darlin’ Neal.
• Issue #2 of Pear Noir! includes stories by Barry Graham, Charles Lennox, Brandon Scott Gorrell, J.A. Tyler, Lauren Becker, and Ravi Mangla.
• Chris Killen‘s “Paul Simon Gives Chevy Chase the Finger” appears in Loops.

The L Magazine interviews Blake Butler, and Brandon Scott Gorrell talks to BOMBlog. The Iowa Source has an interview with Laurel Snyder.

Josh Maday is editing an anthology of fiction about post-industrial work life and invites you to contribute.

Jessica West (What Would Keith Richards Do?) does a playlist for Largehearted Boy.

At Three Guys One Book, Jonathan Evison and Jason Rice have a terrific chat about finding an agent and making a living as a writer:

First, I’m compelled to remind all the spurned and frustrated writers of the world that the work itself is the real blessing and reward, and that any writer worth his salt would do well to remind himself of this fact daily.

We appreciate an email if you have news.

Stephen Stark (stephenstark.com) kicks off Writing Spaces, a new series dedicated to the desks, cafes, libraries and retreats where Fictionaut writers work, providing a window to the physical places where some of the stories on the site originated.

I grew up in the Washington, DC suburbs of Northern Virginia, and after spending more than a decade living elsewhere, moved back here in early 1996. One of the selling points of the house my wife and I bought back in 2001 was the barn in the back. When my brother saw it, his response was, Man you’ve got to believe there’s a God. Empty, it seemed huge.

I divided it, and a third of it is my office, which I’m not going to show you because it’s such a mess, and the other two thirds, roughly, is my shop, which I’m also not going to show you for the same reason. In the shop, I mostly just collect nice pieces of wood and turn them into sawdust. But occasionally I manage to get something out of it, and behind me, as I write this, on a folding table that also has a box full of my father’s letters home from India during World War II, is the electric violin that I’ve been trying to build for my daughter for the last three or four years.

It’s often said that you can write pretty much anywhere, and I have, but I’ve sort of hollowed out a little space here that in reality likely has lousy feng shui, but when I’m here, I’m not really here, so I don’t really notice. The truth is, though, if we actually had enough room inside the house where I could set up an office, I’d vastly prefer that. More than once, my “disappearance” into the barn has caused some domestic friction.

At least in my mind, as important as place is set up. I wrote my first novel in Iowa on an IBM Selectric III, rewrote and revised it in New York on a Macintosh, circa 1985. Behind me, in addition to the letters and the violin and assorted bits of electronics that will go in it, there’s a Selectric III that I bought at a yard sale for 50 bucks, a couple of other Macintoshes that have been retired, but still refuse to break. Currently, I use a MacBook Pro with an external monitor attached. On the Mac’s monitor I have Apple’s Pages program open, with the novel I’m currently working on, THE BOB DELUSION, open. On the external monitor, I’m running Windows XP virtually on VM Ware Fusion, and dictating this using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I love this program, not least because it will translate dictation from a digital voice recorder with remarkable accuracy. I spend a tremendous amount of time in traffic, and so, in addition to writing TBD in the barn, I’ve probably drafted seven or eight chapters of this novel driving on the Capital Beltway.

Alfred A. Knopf published J.S. Marcus’ collection of stories, The Art of Cartography in 1991, with a blurb by Amy Hempel: “Dozens of perfectly observed vignettes – the stories within stories – are amplified when Marcus pieces them together.” It can be had now for $1.99 via Alibris.

These are mostly very truncated stories dealing with Americans who suddenly find themselves forced to identify themselves as Americans, natives of Los Angeles, lawyers, or actors. These definitions are at odds with how they think about themselves. In “The Most Important Thing,” the narrator says, “I am Jewish, with a Jewish name, and because there are so few Jews in this city, I often feel Jewish — at work, for example — by contrast. Sometimes I think of myself a bureaucrat.” They work in Europe or New York alongside Europeans for various global concerns. The identifier “American,” is a tag or identifier that serves to encapsulate them. Encapsulation itself serves as a working structure throughout the entire book. The characters live encapsulated lives, placing themselves in various boxes of identity, as an American banker, for instance.

Marcus is the master of containment. Each paragraph encapsulates a narrative. Like organic cells, they are completely self-sufficient, and yet they specialize and perform specific functions as they build passages and stories. The word encapsulate comes from the French appropriation of the Latin word for box and means a “a membranous sac.” Boxes or cells, each paragraph encapsulates a story.

Gertrude Stein, in her enjoyably impenetrable instruction manual How to Write, discusses the difference between the paragraph and the sentence. She writes that a paragraph, rather than a sentence, has emotion. “This is so light it is an emotion,” she wrote, “and so a paragraph. Yes so a paragraph.” In composition classes, the sentence is described as a complete thought. Yet, what to do with sentence fragments. Students learn to scrub the fragments from their paragraph in order to remove incomplete and dangling thoughts.

If a paragraph has emotion, if a paragraph is itself a unit of expression, it can contain more than complete thoughts organized around thesis and elaboration. It contains half-thoughts, even dangling thoughts.

Here is a paragraph from the story “Words” (without fragments, but still):

My parents had always liked David: his occasional letters, his phone etiquette, his ability to be entertaining but occupied whenever they came over for a visit. But our stay at their house — David first — was a conceded failure. David used my parents as easy targets, and they silently thought him a monster.

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Masha Tupitsyn is the author of Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of film-based stories, and co-editor of the anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film, a cross-genre collection that uses short stories, essays, and poetry to explore the cinematic experience. She also writes daily film criticism on Twitter using only 140 characters. The following is an excerpt from Masha’s introduction to Life As We Show It.

When I met Brian Pera, my co-editor, in December of 2005, it was through email, the equivalent of coffee or drinks in the cyber world. Brian wrote me a missive in response to a formal inquiry I’d made about submitting to his online journal Lowblueflame. The last issue he edited, which was still up on his website at the time, featured some of the writers in Life As We Show It and was dedicated to the movies. The untitled issue of Lowblueflame, which I refer to as the “déjà vu issue,” was an exercise in cinematic hearsay. Tracing his own celluloid obsession, a curiosity informed in equal measure by movies seen and unseen, Brian asked each writer to describe a film based on what they’d read and heard about it. If I’d been able to participate, I would have recounted my own movie déjà vu (a word that literally means “already seen”), Don’t Look Now, which I’d seen on TV but didn’t remember seeing until years later, when I overheard someone describing what I thought was a private terror: a red-cloaked monster-dwarf haunting Donald Sutherland in the catacombs of Venice. At the time, my cinematic references were much more limited: I knew who Donald Sutherland was, but not Julie Christie (I had not yet moved to London or discovered the British New Wave). The name Nicholas Roeg didn’t ring a bell. But based on the villain sketch, and the red hoody on the little girl next to me, I immediately recalled the iconic movie I’d seen a clip of as a six year old, rather than the private “memory” fragment I had catalogued it as all those years.

By confabulating movies they hadn’t actually viewed, the writers in Lowblueflame concocted parallel pictures, plots, and narratives. In many of the stories, subtext is teased and stretched until it possesses the official narrative, filling and swallowing it like the amorphous creature in The Blob. Life-long Jaws fanatic, and one of the maker’s of the yet-to-be released 2006 documentary The Shark is Still Working: The Impact and Legacy of Jaws, narrated by Roy Scheider, Erik Hollander writes about the many different ways movies can be viewed:

It was a full three years later when I finally got to see Jaws on the big screen during its re-release in 1978. In the years between, I had obsessed about what I had come to imagine the film to be like. I based my ‘vision’ of the scenes on three years of playground chatter from those lucky classmates that were allowed to see it – which was everyone else! Despite having conjured up a pretty impressive picture in my mind about the movie, finally watching the real deal with my dad on that fateful afternoon in July replaced my misinterpretations with imagery that exceeded my wildest expectations. That day has never left me. When Jaws finally aired for the first time on network television, my dad set up a cassette recorder and taped the audio for me, and for the next Lord knows how many years, I listened to that cassette every single day until the magnetic signal wore away. Every line, every sound effect, every music cue has been seared into my memory ever since. So, for me, Jaws has always been more of a personal life experience than merely a favorite film.

In his book What Do Pictures Want? W.J.T. Mitchell treats images as living things with personalities, demands, and desires of their own, stating, “To get the whole picture of pictures, we cannot remain content with the narrow conception of them.” Part of the incentive for Life As We Show It was to use film, and the culture that comes with it, as an ingredient for narrative impetus-for writing, for imagining, and for thinking. Movies are starting points, like any subject or theme, in order to enter into the culture that’s inside of them as well as the culture that inside of us. For me, film writing, as opposed to straight film criticism, is a way for an author to merge with not just the thing they write, but the film they’re looking at, so that writing becomes both cultural analysis and personal revelation. Since on-screen and off-screen constantly overlap and get mixed up, writing about images becomes most interesting when it attempts to reflect this blurring through form and content. When it allows the writing to be transformed and shaped by what it writes about.