Read it all here.

And order Shut Up/Look Pretty today before it sells out! You may want to get on that now, especially, because Tiny Hardcore Press has got a great deal going on where you get bundles for less! Including 2 THP books for sixteen bucks. They’re gorgeous books and that’s a good, great deal. Get on it!

Both these issues are remarkable, remarkable, remarkable. As always, as ever, artistry shining sharp and deep through. I am surrounded in both by too many amazing writers to put to pen (or pixel) here, but take it from me: you must read both these publications all the way through.

My piece in Gargoyle, “The Woman Across the Water Wore the Shape of Love,” can be found here.

And my piece in Smokelong Quarterly (which you might like if you’re a fan of Peter Pan–or not a fan at all) is called Never Never, and can be found here.

Enjoy! And seriously–read the whole thing(s.)

The five stories in A Great Dark Sleep: Stories for the Next World  explore death and what follows. These stories are by turns gothic, sweet, funny, fanciful, tragic, playful, and even gruesome. Whatever the tone, whatever the tune, these stories are all written in the language of loss: that ancient tongue the dead have left their loved ones to make sense of.

So anyway, you should definitely pre-order this book because holy shit is it going to be good. These writers will eat your bones and read them back to you like the I Ching. So here you are. And you are welcome.

Robert Kloss and I decided to write one together, using Beckett’s “Fizzle #6″ as a starting point and moving from there into this organic sort of thing.  Fathers and dirt and glass and smashed things and cities and earth and meat and concrete and dead things emerged as we went along–which is probably par for the course as far as we’re concerned.  Here’s a little bit of the story, “What we Dream About the Fathers:”

You have always been willing to bring him food, to clean his wounds, to hand him his spear and watch as he writes his name in the biggest spaces under the sky. You have always fed him the oil clumps of roast goose and duck while the aluminum tin of his canoe skimmed the green-black. The crisp beaks and the molted over eyes of the creature you pulled fat fistfuls of. The way his eyes skimmed along the peat and black, the way his eyes searched for the yellow eyes beneath, even as he chewed the greasy meat from your hands.

Read the whole thing here. You won’t be sorry. (Well, you might, but not for the reasons you think…)

And while you’re purchasing said anthology, don’t forget to check out jmww’s winter 2011 issue, now up and full of goodness.

After some painful maneuvering, he manages to get down belly first on the floor. Facedown so close he could lick the dust and dirt and filth right off from between those white grooves. He thinks of the shoes that must have worn down those grooves, the feet filling them cramped up with misery and awful hope. Wonders about the red-brown-yellow stains spilling across the middle of the floor. Are these small remainders biology or tragedy? Just a person’s sloughings, tiny pieces of hair and teeth and fingernails; what was once living is broken down to component parts. A skin flake is just a skin flake. An eyelash is just an eyelash. The body’s leftovers are myriad and mean.

You can read the rest here. Thank you, Brian and Kevin, for including me in such a terrific magazine!

Anyway, that weird graphic description is just to say that this story, like anything you spend a long time on, is kind of near and dear to me. Here’s a bit of it:

Ruby knows she is selfish and silent and stark-raving. This is why she has to go away from everyone. This is why she has to go away from Randy; this along with all the other reasons that she can’t be with him. For starters, he will want to marry her, and then they will officially be Randy and Ruby Richter. They will have to start wearing matching track suits with puffy designs sewn on. They will have to start watching sporting events, and eating chips ‘n dip, and they will have to say it just like that: chips ‘n dip. Eventually they will have children, and they’ll have to give them names that start with R, like Ruthanne and Remus and Roxy and of course, Randy, Jr. They’ll acquire a minivan. They’ll use the minivan to shuttle children back and forth to soccer and baseball games, carrying loud and terrible musical instruments to band practice. She will go slowly mad until they have to put her in a padded cell shaped like a kitchen, because all she’ll want to do by then is bake brownies and cookies and cakes with names painted on in frosting, blue for the boys and pink for the girls and yellow for the ones who haven’t yet decided what they want to be, beautiful or strong because in this world you can’t be both.

By the way, when you’re done with my piece you’ll want to read through this issue in its entirety. It’s really, really great. Ravi Mangla, Meg Sefton, Peter Schwartz, Eric Bosse, Michelle Reale, Amelia Gray and Lindsay Hunter–yup, pretty much a do-not-miss-this-issue kind of issue. Thanks, Lauren and Heather. You ladies do some fine fine work.

Robert Kloss wrote a killer story called “The Clown Show.” Then he let a bunch of us hack it apart and remix it. Here’s my version today: it’s an homage to a favorite, silent movie great Lon Chaney Sr., and it’s called “Aria for the Clown’s Wife.”

Enjoy, and thanks Robert, for letting me beat up and twist around your story as much as I did.

Neat that he’s doing this. Nick’s mind works through these stories in a really interesting, immediate-yet-reflective way–I’m enjoying this in-depth look very much.

To sleep is to be in a state of rest, but these dreams are rarely restful. The men—and they are always men—who dream them knew nothing of rest when awake. Their lives were mad and glorious and they were pure motion, streaks of flame burning through their own eras, their brilliance blurring all down the centuries except the fact that there was brilliance, there is brilliance still, lying dormant and deep under the dreams. For gold, yes. For love, yes. For lust, yes, for blood, for glory, for power, for country, for freedom, and sometimes just for the sheer dear pleasure of the fight. The fortune won or lost or defended.

Read the rest and the remix here.