Literary Death Match

Coming soon to Literary Death Match:

Timmy “The Enforcer” Waldron
Word Riot Fiction Editor
Repping Word Riot

Timmy’s stuff is hella funny and he will totally lay the smackdown on any opponent.

Also, Timmy is from Jersey and Jersey triumphs all.

Jonathan Ames and Fiona Apple? Jonathan Ames and Fiona Apple!

Greatest celeb couple ever. Period.

And “Never is a Promise” is the best song ever. That is all.

Thank you muchly

I just wanted to thank the readers at last night’s launch party for The Flash. Nathan Tyree, Paul Blaney and Andrew Lewis Conn each did an incredible job.

Thanks also to everyone who came out to the KGB Bar. I was pleasantly surprised by the turn-out and the interest level in the anthology.

Copies of  The Flash are now available for purchase at Word Riot. All proceeds go to Amnesty International.

Norman Mailer, you sexy beast

I’m reading The Naked and the Dead and I’m totally in love.

Mailer wrote when he was 23, which is kind of seismic when you start realize the psychological depth of the people, the situations you’re eavesdropping on. You start to feel like this ghost hovering around these bored, rundown soldiers kicking around sand on some hot, damp island off of Japan. And each character is made full in a couple of paragraphs of description or the brief memory of some seemingly dull and insignificant incident back home. Total grace, I swear.

Mailer wrote in the author intro that he drew on a lot of Tolstoy as he was writing it. The influence is pretty apparent as you read it.

Visit the Pequin, love the Pequin

The Better Non Sequitur folks (aka Steve Coy) have a new project:  Pequin.org

It’s a mixed media site with a spiffy design. I’ll have a flash fiction piece coming out there in the next month or so. Soon-to-be-WRP-author David Gianatasio has a story there titled, “The Last Word.”

KGB Bar Reading, July 22

What: U.S. Launch Party for ‘The Flash’
When: Sunday, July 22 7 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Where: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY

Peter Wild’s “The Flash” is an anthology of flash fiction by 100 writers. (More info here.)

Word Riot Press is sponsoring the East Coast launch party for “The Flash” at the KGB Bar. Readers at the event include Andrew Lewis Conn, Nic Kelman, Nathan Tyree, Paul Blaney, Jackie Corley and a surprise guest or two.

The book will be on sale at the reading for $12 and all proceeds go to Amnesty International.

This is the first WRP-sponsored event since 2003, so come and we’ll make it a time.

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READER BIOS:

Andrew Lewis Conn is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, P (SoftSkull, 2003). Following a starred review in Kirkus, P was chosen as one of the summer’s best books by The Austin Chronicle, Nerve, The Oregonian, Salon, and Time Out New York, and was named one of the best books of the year by The Village Voice and The Austin Chronicle. P was translated into Greek by Electra Publishing and into Portuguese for publication in Brazil by Editora W11.

Conn’s other writing has appeared in The Village Voice, Film Comment, Time Out New York, and The Believer. He has been a resident at the Ledig House International Writers’ Colony and Yaddo.

A Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude graduate of Cornell University, Conn recently completed his second book, The Last American Novel and is at work on his third, O, Africa!

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Nic Kelman is the international bestselling novel, Girls, published by Little, Brown and Co. as well as Video Game Art, an art history of video games published by Assouline. His writing and photography have appeared,among other places, in Elle, Glamour, The Village Voice, and Black Book, as well as various anthologies. He holds a B.S. from MIT and an M.F.A. from Brown University.

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Nathan Tyree is a writer from Kansas. His fiction and poetry has appeared in places like Edifice Wrecked; decomP; The Beat; Doorknobsand Body Paint; Flesh and Blood; Problem Child; The Shallow End; Lightning Journal; Journal of Modern Post and too many others to list. In addition to The Flash his work has been anthologized several times. Nathan is the author of Mr. Overby is Falling. He has never mastered the oboe.

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Paul Blaney is a fortysomething British writer now based in New Jersey. He’s had short stories published in numerous UK magazines and journals, but so far America remains immune to his charms. He is co-founder and organiser of Tales of the DeCongested (www.decongested.com) a London-based short story reading event, and of Apis Books (www.apisbooks.com).

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Jackie Corley was born in 1982. She developed Word Riot in March 2002 with the help of Paula Anderson. Word Riot Press,an independent publishing press, evolved out of the magazine in January 2003. Jackie’s writing has appeared on-line at MobyLives.com, 3AM Magazine and SerialText and in print in BOOM! For Real and Consumed: Women on Excess (So New Media).

July interviews in WR

We’ll have interviews with Jack Pendarvis, Tony O’Neill and Tao Lin in the July issue. Miles Clark interviewed Jack Pendarvis. Tony O’Neill and Tao Lin interviewed each other.

I got snippy with Tao a while ago but later cooled down and made nice with Tao at BookExpo America. He drew depressed-seeming animals in the books he signed for me. Tao draws very well and uses clean, curvy lines. Now you know.