• Congratulations to Tayari Jones for winning a 2008 United States Artist Grant!
• Elizabeth Crane‘s short story Ad aired on NPR’s radio show Selected Shorts. You can download the podcast.
• Kyle Minor‘s debut collection In the Devil’s Territory is now available from Dzanc Books.
• Fantastic reviews coming in for Kirsten Menger-Anderson‘s Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain: The Washington Post, Time Out Chicago, New York Press.
• Bob Eckstein‘s History of the Snowman is being re-released for the holiday season.
• David Ulin provides a sane outlook on the state of publishing in the LA Times.
• Katherine Gleason‘s short story Tvorog received Honorable Mention in Glimmertrain’s Very Short Fiction contest [pdf].
• Kim Chinquee‘s short story Down the Road was reviewed on Five Star Literary Stories.
• On NPR, Lizzie Skurnick reviews Kate Atkinson‘s When Will There Be Good News? and Stephen King‘s Just After Sunset.
• Mark Haskell Smith will be leading intensive four-day workshops at the Writers Studio in Los Angeles from February 5 – February 9.

As always, please send your news to jurgen@fictionaut.com to be featured on the Fictionaut blog.

On the eve of the election, we asked Richard Nash, publisher of Softskull Press, to pick a favorite piece on Fictionaut. Without much hesitation, he cast his ballot for Laurel Snyder‘s poem The Poor Little: “I know it is because I’m a new father, and everything hurts and is joyful, all at once, like my reaction to Obama’s grandmother dying this morning, selfish and all over the place, and Laurel’s poem does all that stuff. All that stuff.”

“Sign me up as a member of the Keith Lee Morris fan club. His characters are as real, fallible, and surprising as anyone I’ve ever met, and his novel has all the textures of real life: precarious, tender, and utterly engrossing.” That’s Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners, on Fictionaut Keith Lee Morris‘s new novel The Dart League King.

On November 9th, Keith will read at the Wordstock Festival in Portland and then go on to tour the Northwest. You can find his complete schedule at tinhouse.com.

Kicking my feet up on the rail of my yacht, drinking expensive wine, gazing back toward my villa on the Mediterranean coast, popping figs into my mouth one by one.

The Harry Potter series.   If I’d written the Harry Potter series, I’d be kicking my feet up on the rail of my yacht, drinking expensive wine, gazing back toward my villa on the Mediterranean coast, popping figs into my mouth by one.  Ok, truly, I’d give up at least a couple of fingers to have written The Road.  I admired Cormac McCarthy a great deal before he published The Road, but that book really put him up in the stratosphere as far as I’m concerned.  Greatest American novelist of our time.  And The Road was so damn SIMPLE, really.  The best ones usually are.

I’ve also held a grudge for a long time against William Faulkner for writing As I Lay Dying before I was born, so that I didn’t get a crack at it.  Same thing goes for Salinger with Catcher in the Rye.  George Eliot and Middlemarch–if I’d been born in England in about 1820, I’d have beaten her to that one, I’ll bet you any amount of money.  Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping–it was set in my hometown, dammit, and she thought of it before I did.  Very, very recently I’ve felt like I should have gotten to some of the material in Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff, but never went quite that far.  Sometimes friends of mine–a writer like Brock Clarke, to give one example–will write excellent stories that have elements of experience common to both of us, and I’ll wonder why I didn’t get to them first.

I’m tempted to say there are none, but now I’m remembering that if the Clemson University website (I teach at Clemson) goes down for five minutes, I begin to gnash my teeth and moan.  So I suppose www.clemson.edu.

I’m struggling to find time for fiction at the moment, but when I do I’m trying to make progress on a novel about two characters I’ve written about in a couple of short stories previously.  In this incarnation, they’ll be two middle-age buddies who try to recapture their youth by re-forming their country duo from the 80s, The Post Hole Diggers, and hitting the road for one final tour, with both comic and tragic results.  It’s a pre-apocalyptic novel about the limits of friendship and the possibility (or impossibility) of change.

Whiskey or yoga?

Beer, coffee, red wine, jogging, tennis, and basketball.

Previously on the Fictionaut Five: Matt Bondurant

We asked Ami Greko, formerly of Folio Literary Management and — as of today! — Digital Marketing Manager at Macmillan, to recommend a story, and she picked Free Time by Jesse Jarnow.

“The dread starts early in this story,” Ami says, “so much that I felt the desire to scream at the main character that his simple, out-of-date calendar will lead to horrible mistakes–but I was also sort of glad I couldn’t, since the accumulation of that dread (and eventual payoff) is so enjoyable to read.”

You can follow Ami’s bookish passions via her Twitter stream.

We’ve been told to be less shy about tootin’ our own horn, so here goes: Fictionaut made the L.A. Times. Jacket Copy lead blogger Carolyn Kellogg writes: “With its clean design and integration of social networking and magazine-style content, Fictionaut might just take off.” We like to think it’s well on its way. Thanks, Carolyn!

As a new feature, we’ll occasionally ask our members to recommend a favorite story on the site. Fictionaut advisor Frederick Barthelme, whose new novel Waveland is due in the spring, picked Lydia Copeland‘s Haircut, which he calls “funny and delicate, light as a feather, sharp as a razor.” Haircut originally appeared in NOÖ Journal.

With his second novel The Wettest County in the World out now, Matt Bondurant kicks off the Fictionaut Five, a new feature in which we ask one of our members a few hard-hitting questions.

“Brilliantly conceived, and so close to home, this novel proves Matt Bondurant’s burgeoning talent — a book for thirsty American readers to guzzle down, a book for all young American writers to admire,” writes Alan Cheuse, author of The Fires.

I would likely be a literature professor who quietly ground out a modest profession at a small liberal arts college somewhere. Wait, that is how I spend my time. If not that, I would likely work in the basement of some kind of museum, or perhaps in public radio.

Which book do you wish you’d written?

Focault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco or Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Name one website you couldn’t live without.

Life without iTunes would be a sucking void for me. I realize this is quite sad.

What are you working on now?

A new novel about long-distance open-ocean swimming/Irish goatherds/physics & I’m trying to raise my first-born son, Ford. Not in that order.

Whiskey or yoga?

This is real easy. Bourbon (none of that Scotch shite — tastes like burnt sod). Maker’s Mark is my usual, Woodford Reserve is a splurge, but in a pinch Jack Daniels (technically not bourbon) will do.

Matt’s official site is mattbondurant.com.

Please drop us a line if you have a piece of news and would like to be featured in a future installment of the Fictionaut Five.

Fictionaut’s own Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s spellbinding debut story collection Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain is out now: twelve generations of doctors search for the soul and cures for pain and madness.

If you’re on the West Coast, Kirsten will be reading and signing books at the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association in Oakland this Saturday and then continuing her tour through California and Oregon.

As always, please send your news to jurgen@fictionaut.com.

Thanks to your posts, comments, and enthusiasm, Fictionaut is growing into a place we’re getting more excited about every day. If you feel the same way — or you happen to have Thomas Pynchon’s email address — you can use the invite tool to ask your friends to join. We’ve added invitations to every user account.

I’ve been asked “Who should I invite?”, but of course that’s entirely up to you. Writers looking for a community or a new avenue to publish, readers who trust their own taste, and just about anybody interested in discovering fresh writing would all make a great fit. Fictionaut is an experiment, and curiosity, talent, and a little bit of courage to try something new are more important to us than impressive literary bona fides. If you think that somebody might enjoy the site, they probably will.

And no, it’s not trpynchon@waste.org. Believe me, I tried.

We’ve redesigned the front page to display a better mix of the latest stories and community favorites. The main section of the page is still dedicated to the newest stories, but we’ve added a new spot up top that shows the most interesting stories, as determined by a combination of favorites, comments, and views.

The new section, called “Fictionaut Recommends,” highlights the site’s collaborative editing process — every time you read a story, leave a comment, or add a story as a favorite, you are making a recommendation that helps decide what others will see.

As always, we appreciate your feedback, either to jurgen@fictionaut.com or in the forum, so please let us know what you think. Special props go to Carson, who coded the redesign from the road after Hurricane Ike left his hometown of Houston without power for a week.