Amber Sparks
You can scroll the shelf using ← and → keys
A Long Long List of Links
June 22, 2011 — 6 Comments
I’ve been away at a work conference for a week–just got back and then got sick and everything’s all out of whack. I’m mostly doing a lot of a lot of a lot of working these days and not a lot of writing, so when I can relax it’s with news and fiction and just reading, reading. Here’s some stuff I read today that I found interesting–maybe so will you?
Mel Bosworth’s highly anticipated novel, Freight, is available for pre-order.
This piece by Christy Crutchfield in The Collagist is well worth your time. Promise.
Al Gore has a great piece about climate deniers in July’s Rolling Stone.
Anyone Who Misses This Black Ocean Deal is a Crazy Person
May 19, 2011
I’m not kidding. I mean:
Subscriptions ordered before July 1st will receive
A SIGNED, LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER COPY OF FJORDSHunger Transit by Feng Sun Chen (Spring 2012)
Fjords by Zachary Schomburg (Spring 2012)
Handsome Vol. 4 (Spring 2012)
Dark Matter by Aase Berg, trans. Johannes Göransson (Fall 2012)
The Moon’s Jaw by Rauan Klassnik (Fall 2012)
Gonna get mine as soon as my wallet gets filled back up again. Sigh. Moving is so expensive.
This is Just a List But Things are Still Breaking
May 17, 2011
- This book is on its way to me. I am so pumped. I love China Mieville and I can’t to wait a sci-fi-y book by him.
- HOARD YOUR INCANDESCENT LIGHT BULBS! I am. My husband and I are buying them all up. Why? Not for some crazy right-wing reason, but because, jesus, haven’t you noticed how ugly and depressing everything looks under florescent light? I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, for god’s sake. Energy efficient lighting depresses me. So does my face in the mirror under that awful flat dead glare. The thought of a world without soft white lighting to read under makes me want to jump off a cliff. That is all.
- I’ve always thought most unpaid internships were a load of crap. As a middle-class kid working two jobs to pay the rent and tuition, I could never afford one in college and neither could most of my friends. Only the rich kids did internships, or the lucky ones who could find paid internships. Later, after college, I did an unpaid internship at a political firm which was pretty great, but still–you should get paid for work you do. Unpaid internships perpetuate an unfair class system where it’s harder and harder to climb up in the world if you don’t have certain opportunities available to you. And the exploitation is getting worse today , when more and more “internships” are popping up where paid work existed before. I’m proud that my union has only paid internships–and pretty well-paid, too. If you’re not investing in people, then why should they invest their time in what you’ve asked them to do? You want quality–pay people for it. Anything else is exploitation. Period. So read the book, I guess.
- Who wants John Ashbery’s new translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations? You’d better all have your hands up or you’re not my friends anymore.
- Just kidding to the second part of number 4. But seriously, I can’t wait for this book.
- Has anybody else put off reading Blake Butler’s There is No Year? If this book is like Scorch Atlas, I am afraid of not being able to write for much time afterward. I need to be writing now. Also, will I be as afraid of houses as I become reading SA? Alos will I become a little bit broken? Will there be pieces missing? I may not read this book by myself. I am so excited but it’s a scary thing to open those pages. Soon.
- Because we can all admit that there are some things we break our rules over (and mine are pianos clothes books and cars) we shall all now pause and salivate over this ’64 Alfa Romeo. Life is only bodies and things, after all, and one should be surrounded by beautiful things.
- Speaking of beautiful things, I have a reading room now. We made a reading room. It is lovely. I will post pictures the moment it’s made lovely enough for you all.
- My novel is progressing, slowly, slowly. I am really excited about it. I think you all will be, too.
- Because we were so close to ten. Because of symmetry.
Two New Books You’ve Got to Pre Order Now
May 9, 2011
They Could No Longer Contain Themselves: A Collection of Five Flash Chapbooks By Elizabeth J. Colen, John Jodzio, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Sean Lovelace, and Mary Miller. From the site:
They Could No Longer Contain Themselves contains—but just barely—five chapbooks of flash fiction, including the winner of the third annual Rose Metal Press short short chapbook contest, and four of the finalists from the fourth. Dropped toddlers, attempted drownings, juvenile promiscuity, road trips, and inappropriate therapy sessions compose the multi-voiced family portrait in Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake by Elizabeth J. Colen. Yoga stalkers, guns and gold, babies with iron stomachs, drunkards with t-shirt cannons, and warlocks are the stuff of Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever by John Jodzio. Dominatrixes and fetishists, face paint and goo, fierce parental love and perverse longings cohabitate in Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There by Tim Jones-Yelvington. Leukemia, meteorites, Wal-Mart, bocce ball, Charlie Brown’s clinical depression, the language of talking crows and of Che Guevara’s omelets fill the eggs in How Some People Like Their Eggs by Sean Lovelace. And small stories about pretty girls who sit quietly and behave themselves (or not) populate the pages of Paper and Tassels by Mary Miller.
I mean, seriously. You obviously need to get this book. And this one sounds incredible as well: The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals, by Rae Bryant. (more…)
Ooh, Heaven is an unspecified beachy place on an unspecified coast
April 20, 2011
By the always jealousy-inducing, extremely brilliant xkcd, of course.
Which is where I will be for the next five days. I won’t be much in pocket online, as this is a detox from work, and my work involves all things internetty. I’ll be checking in from time to time, of course, probably a few times a day still (okay probably more since I’m a sad, sad addict) but I will NOT be blogging. Because that really does take work. (more…)
I wrote a review of The Bee-Loud Glade by Steve Himmer, at Big Other.
April 12, 2011
You should read my review, and then buy and read this book. Truly. It’s a very good, very thoughtful, very timely piece of fiction that took me out of the world for a little while and I loved every second of that.
Plus Steve Himmer is wicked smaht. And so is his book .
News from the Department of the Obvious: Being Surrounded by Books is Good for Kids
April 5, 2011 — 4 Comments
Your collection doesn't have to look like this. Though I wish mine did.
Surprise! Having books around makes your kids smarter. They do better in school. They’re more empathetic human beings.
After examining statistics from 27 nations, a group of researchers found the presence of book-lined shelves in the home — and the intellectual environment those volumes reflect — gives children an enormous advantage in school.
It’s so sad that it takes a study to tell us having books around makes a kid a smarter, better person. I don’t know very many people I respect who admit to never, ever reading a book. I know a few. They have their reasons. But the smartest, best people I know all read.
I have a little nephew, my husband’s nephew, actually, and his mom recently posted pictures of him “reading” books on Facebook. His parents read all the time. They say that although he’s not even two, he loves books already–loves to look at them, touch them, hold them. I’m sure he’ll love to read, when he’s ready. I’m sure he’ll be a smart kid who’ll love learning, because he’ll have grown up in an environment when reading is valued. I feel sorry for all the little kids who haven’t got a single book in their house to inspire them toward the intellectual life themselves, toward a wonderful second life in books that can’t be replicated anywhere else.
Some Bright Bits to Carry You Through the Gloomy Midweek Slump
March 23, 2011 — 2 Comments
This terrifying picture was taken by Peter Hinson, and you can buy it from his sister on Etsy if you click here.
One of my favorite books that I’ve read this year so far is Ethel Rohan’s wonderful debut, Cut Through the Bone. I finally had the chance to review it over at Vouched.
xkcd put together this chart that breaks down how much radiation we’re exposed to normally, how much the Japanese around the power plant and elsewhere are being exposed to, and what exactly that means in terms of health and safety. Really interesting stuff.
I’m reading this weekend in DC with Joseph Riippi, Laura van den Berg, and Paul Zaic at the inaugural reading of the Three Tents Reading Series, put together by the folks at Big Lucks. If you’re here or close, come on over at 7pm Saturday the 26th, to the Big Hunt in Dupont Circle, and watch some good people read. This should be a very fun event.
Over at Fiction Writers Review, Tyler McMahon reviews Alan Heathcock’s short story collection, Volt. I’ve been very much looking forward to reading this one, and even if I hadn’t been McMahon’s review would have sold me. Love this:
Heathcock’s third-person narrator has the big heart and bright socks of a Garrison Keillor, but the bad liver and hard knuckles of a Raymond Chandler. (more…)
On Bad Reviews
February 7, 2011 — 2 Comments
Emily St. John Mandel writes at The Millions about bad reviews and how to handle them well or not-so-well.
I have never received a review of any kind of my writing, since I’ve never published a book, but I guess it would depend on who was reviewing it. If it was someone whose taste I didn’t particularly agree with anyway, it wouldn’t bother me a bit. If it was someone who’d liked my other work and/or whom I admired–that would be a different story.
Seth Fried is an Original and Here is an Interview to Prove It
February 2, 2011
Seriously, of all the names I hear bandied about in the tiny literary world I inhabit, I don’t hear Seth’s nearly as often as I should. That needs to change. The minute I read Seth’s piece in One Story I was floored by the originality of his voice. I wish people would stop comparing him to George Saunders. (I wish people would stop comparing everyone to George Saunders.) Seth’s voice is all his own and I think his debut collection is going to knock people backwards when they read it.
So, read the interview here and see if you don’t agree. Even just with this excerpt:
If a story is all concept and no urgency, I think that’s when you run the risk of shallowness and/or gimmickry. Conversely, if a story is all urgency with no concept to make it compelling, you can start to run the risk of sentimentality and/or preachiness. What works for me is to decide first what urgent thing I’m hoping to express, and then to come up with a concept/scenario that suits that urgent thing. Of course, both the urgent thing and the concept can change radically throughout the writing of a given story. What’s important is that there be a strong relationship between the two.
Here’s an example of what I mean:
You mentioned a story of mine called “Life in the Harem,” which is about a man who is inexplicably placed in a King’s harem alongside a bunch of beautiful women. Summarizing it like that, it definitely sounds overtly concept-y. But the idea grew out of real anxieties I had about the way heterosexual men seem to perceive desire in our culture.
David Foster Wallace once wrote in a criticism of one of John Updike’s protagonists, “[...] he persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for human despair.” That’s an attitude that seems not only prevalent among heterosexual men in our culture, but encouraged among heterosexual men by our culture. Obviously, that’s just a gut feeling I have (probably a result of sitting through one too many Axe body spray commercials) and not something I can really substantiate here. All I’m saying is that, as a heterosexual, it was an anxiety I had about our culture. The concept of the harem provided the perfect opportunity for me to explore that anxiety. Without the idea of the harem that story would have just been me complaining about Axe body spray commercials. And, as you can tell from reading this paragraph, that would have been kind of awkward.
