New Lits on the Block: unfold, Hinchas de Poesia & wordriver

unFold is a Twitter-zine published by Folded Word, edited by Rose Auslander. unFold seeks to develop Form140, experimental 140 characters (including spaces) and invites those submitting to improvise solutions to Twitter’s inhospitably to traditional line breaks, as described at Form21. UnFold is now accepting submissions and are looking for “digestible poems written in present tense that mobile phone users will enjoy to the point of forwarding.” Are you up to the challenge? For more info, check out the submission guidelines at UnFold’s website.

Editors Yago Cura (New York City) and J. David Gonzalez (Miami) call Hinchas de Poesia a “digital codex of modern, American writing” publishing fiction, poetry, and prose of authors from the Americas, which they interpret in the broadest geographical sense. The first issue of Hinchas includes works by Abel Folgar, Marco Bravo, Daniel B. Johnson, Yaddyra Peralta, Luivette Resto-Olmeteotl, Jesse Tangen-Mills, Adolfo Barandiaran, Bishop Sand, Oliverio Girondo. A modest beginning with a lot of promise. Submit to Hinchas de Poesia.

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction of adjuncts and part-time instructors teaching in our universities, colleges, and community colleges. Published by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Department of English Studies, the editors define adjunct instructors as anyone teaching part-time or full-time under a semester or yearly contract, nationwide and in any discipline. Graduate students teaching wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction of adjuncts and part-time instructors under part-time contracts during the summer or who have used up their teaching assistant time and are teaching with adjunct contracts for the remainder of their graduate program also are eligible. Premier issue published in Spring 2009. Submissions accepted year around; issue deadline is October 31st of each year. For more information, check out their website.

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Calling all Manuscripts . . .

Bellevue Literary Press is accepting manuscripts. Visit their website for guidelines: www.blpbooks.org
janna.rademacher[at]comcast.net

Plainview Press is accepting manuscripts. Visit their website for guidelines: www.plainviewpress.net. You can also you email them at: sb[at]plainviewpress.net. When you send a query letter put “query” in subject line.

Replacement Press is accepting book length manuscripts. Query with first chapter at: editors[at]replacementpress.com and visit their website at: www.replacementpress.com.

Old Brick Press publisher of Scarab (an iphone literary magazine, at www.scarabmag.com), is seeking submissions for poetry chapbooks (18-24 poems) novellas (50-120 pages). Accepted manuscripts will be published as applications featuring both text and audio. Send your work as email submission to: submission[at]oldbrickpress.com.

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The Next Decade in Book Culture

by Tess Taylor || Critical Mass; National Book Critics Circle

As we wind down the “aughts” decade, the NBCC seeks the best guest posts about the future of book culture, including essays, interviews and free-range opining. The topic: How do you see book cluture evolving over the next decade? This post is from Tess Taylor.

I found myself writing a letter to a fellow writer friend today, a friend who’d written for the NBCC about facebook marketing and networking for books in the Huff post. It was, I think, a deft handling of a much needed topic. But as I read on, I found myself feeling discouraged in some way, not by you, but by some bigger pheneomenon– the whole way in which we facebook about our books at all.

I guess I hate to think that I, like some sort of evangelist, have to go out and get e-followers and moderate e-discussions with them, that I have to fritter what attention span I am able to gather in putting up in twittering or texting or speaking nanospeak in order to make people know some little piece of my life.

I think this relates to a general feeling I have lately, as a book person, of being baffled by the internet -not email, which is so much like the world of letters, or can be, but actually by the world of facebook, blogs, twitter. This, again, is not twitter’s fault, but perhaps my own. I am not used to thinking of the world of literature as a world of broadcast. Broadside, yes, perhaps, always. There have always been posts, palaver, publicity. But I suppose I always felt the separateness of that from the real writerly life, from what drew us in as book people in the first place. I was always drawn to books (and literary life) because of its modes of intimacy. A book is intimate. A letter is intimate. It’s not a post; it’s a privacy. It’s a correspondence, a one on one back and forth.

Which relates to my hope for book culture, what I’d love to see. I’d love to see us talk about books as sanctuaries for our attention spans, ecosystems where our thoughts can run long distances. I’d like us to find new ways to make parks and wildernesses for our minds. I’d like to see us talk about why reading at length matters and helps and restores and reveals us to ourselves. This, I say, thinking that this may not be where book culture goes. It may trend electronically, shorter, more interactive, more amorphous. We, in this ever apocalyptic culture ( sometimes unaware of our own literature, the ways we retell our own deep cultural stories about the ends of things) talk about the ends of things: “history”; “race”; “the book.” Yes and no, of course. Things seem catastrophic partly because we keep telling ourselves the stories of catastrophe. The questions we need to ask are how we talk about why the book needs to continue, how we make a market and a world that values art, attention, the life of the mind. Let’s brainstorm. We have big work ahead of us.

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The decade in reading: How bad is it?

by Carolyn Kellogg LOS ANGELES TIMES/BOOKS || Jacket Copy
In Sunday’s L.A. Times, we take a look at the last 10 years: what the Internet has meant for reading, where fiction has gone, the cold publishing climate and why there are so many darned vampires.

Screenwriter Michael Tolkin (“The Player,” “Nine”) takes on the supernatural: vampires, warlocks, werewolves and our new literary fascination with them.

The Vampires are the aristocracy of the undead, who can, at least, talk. The Vampires are the fear mongers, the talk show hosts, the politicians who can’t find a way to give health insurance to children, much less adults; the bankers, Ponzi schemers, drug company lobbyists, the theologians of prosperity. We can’t understand them without first considering why they’re in a symbolic war against the Lycanthropes.

Susan Salter Reynolds looks at the evolution of fiction in our world. From a powerful place in culture, she sees its real estate shrinking:

Writers write what they write, a path up and out of one generation’s burden, one strangulating set of cultural norms into the future, regardless. But fiction, generally speaking, has been affected by this shrinking market, this smaller pie, largely in the last decade. It is more interactive, in very subtle ways. It tries to do more with less. Plot twists can be interpreted in many ways. Reality is layered, archaeological. Perspective shifts. The narrator is hardly ever reliable. Voices labor under the weight of excessive irony. Morality is more elusive as well. The poor reader searches for truth like a needle in a haystack.

And when Judith Freeman looks at the landscape of reading, she finds little solace in e-mail or e-books. Yet David Ulin thinks that there’s possibility in our shifting relationship to words and story. Is he right?

What has changed is our sense of text as fixed, not fluid, as something solid to which we can return again and again. That’s the influence of the Web, of course, where story has no end and no beginning, and readers are not passive but play a determining role. This is scary to a certain way of thinking, but I want to look in the opposite direction, to suggest that what is more compelling is how this opens up the possibilities.Writing and reading are about engagement, about participating in a conversation, and inasmuch as technology can play a role in this interaction, it only draws more people in. How does the screen change things? This should have been the question of the last decade, but it appears it will unavoidably be the question of the next. What kind of platforms — social networks, Web, print, multimedia — are we looking at? And how do we move flexibly among them, using each according to its ability and taking from each according to our need?

As Ulin asks: How does the screen change things? How has evolving technology affected how you write and read?

Photo (left): “Twilight.” Credit: Little, Brown.
Photo (right): Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in “New Moon.” Credit: Kimberley French / Summit Entertainment

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A passion for life: Nobel laureate is a scientist and a lover of literature

by Darla Carter COURIER-JOURNAL.COM, NOV. 2009

Forget the idea that people are either passionate about the arts and humanities or passionate about science.

Nobel laureate Harold Varmus is a preeminent U.S. scientist, but when he was a young man, studying at Amherst College, he was more likely to be found reveling in a great piece of literature or taking on controversial topics at the school newspaper than toiling in a laboratory.

“I couldn’t understand how some of my close friends (among them, some now distinguished scientists) could spend long afternoons and evenings incarcerated in a laboratory, when they could be reading books in a soft library chair or reciting poetry on Amherst’s green hills,” he writes in his new book, “The Art and Politics of Science” (Norton, $24.95).

But a year into a PhD in literature, Varmus — who appears at the University of Louisville Kentucky Author Forum on Thursday — switched directions and went to medical school, eventually carving out an extraordinary scientific career.

His lengthy list of accomplishments include winning a Nobel Prize in 1989 with fellow researcher J. Michael Bishop for work linking cancer to cellular gene mutations; being appointed by President Bill Clinton to lead the National Institutes of Health; speaking out on national and global health issues, from malaria and AIDS to stem-cell policy; and taking on his current role as the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

“I have been dealt some very good cards,” from exemplary partners in life and science to affiliations with strong institutions, he writes in his book. “… That good fortune has allowed me to lead a charmed and exciting life in science. But I write at a time when science has strained relationships with the federal government, has been losing its financial support, and has become a less appealing career goal for many students on our campuses.”

Last week, we chatted with Varmus about some of those challenges as well as his career and book.

Why did you write “The Art and Politics of Science?”

The book is an outgrowth of a lecture series that initially was going to focus on the old concept of two cultures, the arts and the sciences, separated by language and thought. >>MORE