PubGen

Notes from Publishing Genius and information on The Chris Toll Prize.

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Index to Michael Kimball’s new book, “The One-Hour MFA”

Here is the index to Michael Kimball’s amazing new book, a collection of essays about how to write fiction. He makes tons of references to great writers, past and present? See anyone you love in the list below?

(Order the book here or read the essays free at Real Pants, starting on July 7.)

Antosca, Nick 60

Aristotle 20, 21, 23, 43

Banville, John 27

Bender, Aimee 15

Blau, Jessica Anya 47

Bradbury, Ray 43

Broadkey, Harold 46

Burroway, Janet 23, 31, 35

Butler, Blake 12

Carson, Rachel 9

Carver, Raymond 7, 27, 37, 55

Cioran, Emil 70

Connell, Evan 70

Crews, Harry 9

Delillo, Don 12

Devine, Andy 19, 28, 31, 36, 52

Dillard, Annie 59

Doctorow, E.L., 10, 61

Eliot, T.S. 63

Elkin, Stanley 45

Fitzgerald, F. Scott 59

Freud, Esther 69

Freytag, Gustav 20-21, 22

Gardner, John 29, 37, 45-46

Gilchrist, Ellen 67

Hemingway, Ernest 15-16, 24, 37

Hoban, Russell 4

Holland, Noy 70

Howard, Joanna 29

Irving, John 67

Kelly, R. 40

King, Stephen 28

Krusoe, Jim 51-52

Landis, Dylan 51-52

Leonard, Elmore 4, 43, 51

Ligon, Samuel 30

Lipsyte, Sam 6-7, 19, 41, 45, 64, 67, 69-70

Lutz, Gary 28, 33

Mantel, Hilary 52-53

Markson, David 3-4

McInerney, Jay 39

Moore, Lorrie 60

Melville, Herman 3

Murakami, Haruki 58, 60

O’Brien, Edna 19

Oates, Joyce Carol 58, 59-60

Offutt, Chris 5

Plath, Sylvia 4

Porter, Andrew 45, 64, 68

Proust, Marcel 53

Raban, Jonathan 48

Raffel, Dawn 6, 7, 32

Saunders, George 11, 64

Scapellato, Joseph 12

Shakespeare, William 37

Stanislavski, Constantin 46

Stone, Robert 47-48

van den Berg, Laura 43-44, 63-64

Vonnegut, Kurt 23-24, 44

Waters, Sarah 44, 51, 69

Whisnant, Luke 23

Willis, Connie 23

Woolf, Virginia 9-10, 35

[pubgen]

Big Week at PGP

Receiving the ARCs of our new graphic novel and approving the print run of our next book, this week at Publishing Genius was busier than usual. Here’s my status report:

Last week I announced PGP’s 2015 catalog (including a sweet collection of poetry from Cheryl Quimba!), and this week I officially accepted the third book in the first flight of ebooks from Ebook Flights -- and it is Man Bites Cloud by Bob Schofield. 

Nick Sweeney, PGP’s intern extraordinaire, made that beautiful cover for it, and you can read all about the book (including an excerpt) and Ebook Flights at flights.publishinggenius.com. This series launches on July 1 and also features ebooks by Gabe Durham and Lily Hoang. 

(I’m biased, but I think Ebook Flights is one of the coolest things to hit the indie publishing world since Instant Future, or when my cat started sleeping on my desk.)

On Thursday we received copies of the ARC for The Well-Dressed Bear Will (Never) Be Found, a graphic novel by Jarod Roselló. Sneak a peak:

Jarod is doing a Sunday Comics feature at Hobart that is most definitely worth a read.

On that same day the WDB ARC came in, the printer’s proof for The Three Sunrises arrived from McNaughton & Gunn -- but it was delivered to my old house in Baltimore. Thankfully Joe Young still lives there and he was able to go through it so I could sign off on this massive book, which you can still preorder for just $11: http://www.publishinggenius.com/?p=5299. 

This morning I finished my final proofread of Eat, Knucklehead, our cookbook from Craig Griffin. Meanwhile, the high school baseball team that Craig coaches won state finished with a stunning 11-3 record and advanced to the conference championships in Chicago.

Here’s a Pot Butter recipe: Pot Butter recipe for you in Eat, Knucklehead by @rooftophowl

At Real Pants, I posted the results of my informal ebook survey, here. Turns out that people who don’t read ebooks still complain that the devices are hard on their eyes, and of the people who do, 94% of them don’t use subscription services like Oyster or Scribd.

Now I’m going to go figure out how to promote cookbooks.

Oh, and Matt Cook was declared Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, and his book is still on sale at the PGP website!

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Ebooks Survey » Real Pants

Do you read ebooks? Please take this survey!

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Subject line, “Around the horn,” this image just in from Barrett Warner as he drives into Chicago for his reading for Free State Review. 

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Coming soon from Publishing Genius

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I just ordered hundreds of bookmarks that you can have at AWP. Stop by the Real Pants booth :)

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So jealous of anyone who gets to go to one of these readings.

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Literary magazine, small press, and conveyor of writing workshops and conferences, Barrelhouse bridges the gap between serious literature and pop culture.

Excited to see the title story of Madeline ffitch's Valparaiso, Round the Horn published at Barrelhouse. Thank, Dan Brady, for publishing the whole thing, in its entirety (and for hosting Madeline on her tour next week).

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I Made Uncle Tommy's Sloppy Joes

I made food from the cook book that PGP is publishing. It's called "Eat, Knucklehead," and it's by Craig Griffin. The book is not just a cook book. It's also an epistolary novella about a father trying to teach his 20something son not to be stupid about what he eats. 

I made Uncle Tommy's Sloppy Joes. They were great. Here's what I did:

First I cut up some onions and green peppers and garlic.

I sautéed those things.

I made small piles of black pepper, cumin, and allspice. Actually we didn't have allspice so Amy mixed together nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves, which I guess is what allspice is. 

I added those spices, and some ketchup and mustard.

I stirred it up with some brown sugar. It was gross.

I added like a pound of ground beef. Craig's recipe calls for fake meat because the book is pretty veggie, but I'm not, so.

I let all that cook until the bottom of the pan started to get sticky. It was smelling good.

I cut apart some rolls and scooped out the middle and Amy hunked in some avocado.

Then I plopped on some of the sloppy joes and put it in the oven at 425 (for the length of two songs, as the recipe says) with some sharp cheddar cheese up on there.

Then we ate the delicious things, served up like this:

Stay tuned for more info about the book, and more recipes.

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Have you read this yet?

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How and Why Barrelhouse Pays Poets (by Dan Brady)

When Barrelhousestarted in the back booth of a bar in Washington, DC just over ten years ago,we had a few goals regarding how we wanted to do business:

We wanted to publish the best writing we could find that wasn’t getting the attention it deserved.

We wanted to be fully independent, not subject to the whim of university funding or anyone else’s ideas of what was     appropriate or good.

We wanted to contribute to our community of small presses and independent literary magazines.

We wanted to pay our writers.

To be honest, those first three points were pretty easy to execute on chutzpah alone. As far as paying writers goes, our plan went something like 1) collect underpants, 2) ?????, 3) profit!

As writers and readers ourselves, we recognized the intrinsic value of literature. What’s more, we appreciated how much hard work goes into creating a good poem, short story, or essay and believed that the authors of those works should be compensated.

Read More

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Real Pants welcomes pitches/queries for articles and features. We’re looking for fresh, enlivening approaches to literature, books, publishing, and the new literary community.

Find out more about Real Pants at the FAQ.

Some items:

Please send pitches/queries, not full drafts.

Please send a few sentences describing what you have in mind, along with a link to something you’ve written, to [email protected].

We do not publish conventional reviews, think pieces, or author interviews. Entropy has a great list of places to send reviews: http://entropymag.org/resource-where-to-send-your-book-reviews/

Right now, we are not looking for new beats, just pitches for single articles and features.

We do have some unconventional ways to celebrate new books that we love, so if you are an author of a new or upcoming book, publicist, or publisher, please send some info about the book to [email protected].

Real Pants strives to become a paying market for all contributors, but right now our budget only allows us to pay cash money to regular beat writers.

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"My Friend Timmy Reed" by Barrett Warner

from the chapbook My Friend Ken Harvey, winner of the second annual Chris Toll Prize

Order here $7

[mikeayoung]

Hi y’all! I’m going on tour for a week in the Midwest with my friends Gene Kwak and Mike “Fletch” Schlesinger! I hope to see you in Omaha, Iowa City, Milwaukee, Chicago, Muncie, Yellow Springs, or Akron. I will be hawking copies of Sprezzatura and passing out free copies of NOÖ [15]. Gene, Fletch, and I will be updating dustandrosewater.tumblr.com with pictures, stories, and videos. Expect many guest stars! I’m so stoked to go to cities I’ve never been and meet cool people and read some poems! Please come out and please tell your friends! Hope to see you! =) Here’s a rundown with Facebook event links:

:::::: SPOTS ::::::

»> SATURDAY OCTOBER 4TH (OMAHA, NE) 10PM: KWAKSTOCK + TOUR JUMPOFF FR FLETCH, MIKE, & GENE with Jean Genevieve, Simon Joyner, Stomach, Sean Pratt and the Sweats

»> SUNDAY OCTOBER 5TH (IOWA CITY, IA) 2PM: DUST AND ROSEWATER: Iowa City: w/ Alice Gribbin and Delaney Nolan. This one is in the afternoon at the Iowa City Book Festival! I’ve never been to Iowa City but supposedly i should eat a burger at Georges?? Thanks to Andre Perry for setting this up!

»> MONDAY OCTOBER 6TH (MILWAUKEE, WI) 7PM: At People’s Books Cooperative with Matt Cook, hosted by Mike Hauser! No Facebook event yet. I’ll update when it comes!

»> TUESDAY OCTOBER 7TH (CHICAGO, IL) 8PM: Dust and Rosewood: Chicago reading at Innertown. With Lindsay Hunter, Peter Jurmu (thanks Pete for setting this up!), Daniela Olszewska, and Cassandra Troyan. i’ve never been to Chicago in the Fall!!!

»> WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 8TH (MUNCIE, IN) 8PM: Muncie, IN presents: A Fiction & Poetry Reading w/ Peter Davis and Austin Hayden. thanks Austin for setting this up!! everyone who’s never been to or lived in muncie thinks it’s weird we’re going to muncie, but muncie people know that a pilgrimage is necessary.

»> THURSDAY OCTOBER 9TH (YELLOW SPRINGS, OH) 12:30PM: Visiting Writers Series. hosted by Christopher DeWeese! gene, fletch, and i are staying in an old jailhouse.

»> FRIDAY OCTOBER 10TH (AKRON, OH) 7PM: The Big Big Mess Reading Series hosted by Mike Krutel. no facebook event for this one yet either, but i’ll update as soon as there is one!!!

»> SATURDAY OCTOBER 11TH (HADLEY, MA) 7PM: 4-Year Anniversary and Benefit Raffle at Flying Object, for the Hadley, MA leg of the Midwest tour. i’ll be posting about this again, but don’t forget to buy raffle tickets!!!

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If you are in the American Midwest, I recommend you take Mike up on his offer to read poems to you. Sprezzatura is an easy achievement! But if you are in some other awful place, brighten your day by ordering the book here.

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Michael Seidlinger just completed an awesome month of Everyday Genius. Check out work by Sarah Rose Etter, Amber Sparks, Megan Boyle, Matt Bell, Elizabeth Ellen, Richard Chiem ... sheesh, the list goes on.

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Chapbook Prize update

On July 31 we received the last of the Toll Prize chapbook entries. There are some beauties in there! Now the committee has divvied up all the submissions and is reading them blindly. This Sunday, we are going to meet and discuss our selections, then choose a winner, the book that we feel best honors the memory of our great friend, our brilliant poet.

We're also raising money to keep the series tenable, so now we're offering ast year's winning chapbook, What Hank Said on the Bus by Kyle Flak, available for just $5. I love Kyle's book! It's fun, funny, and supple. 

Here's the book's first poem. Fans of Spencer Madsen take note:

MABEL MY DEAR

you held my hand all through the new kung fu movie

we were at the mall

and then we were buying popsicles

later we were naked

much later than that you were showing me the pinball machine you keep

in your garage

i felt like we were too old for everything

you kept pulling champagne out of surprising places

i said, “okay. i get it. you’re a fun person.”

but then stuff kept happening

stuff is still happening

Keep the prize alive and read the whole chapbook in your hands. Order a copy here.

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At book fairs I ask people if they can identify what the animals are on the cover of Matthew Savoca's book, I Don't Know I Said. Pretty much everyone can see the bear, but I've never had anyone find the other animal. That's what I love about this cover drawing (by Craig Griffin)—it really only makes sense when you read the book. Then it becomes one of those things where you can't NOT see it.

(I'm not posting the cover here because the way computer screens work makes it a lot easier to see the second animal. But you can see it here.)