Will Horror Authors Write for Relief?

Michelle Belanger, author of The Psychic Vampire Codex, “the definitive book on the modern vampire subculture,” is calling for contributions to an anthology of original horror fiction to be called The City Lies Dreaming, “a book that will evoke and celebrate all the reasons why New Orleans has been a Mecca to those of us who are drawn to the shadows.” She’s aiming to have a $25 trade paperback available by December with all proceeds to be donated to the American Red Cross.

2 September 2005 | uncategorized |

I Only Read Fence for the Poems

To the left: the cover of the Fall/Winter 2003 issue of Fence. As editor Rebecca Wolff observes:

“Imagine my wry bemusement… to see that this issue, as worthy as any other, sold significantly less on the newsstand and at bookstores than any others, before or since. A typical issue of Fence has a sell-through rate of around 60 percent. This issue, which includes work by Jean Valentine, John Taggart, Jane Miller, Hal Sirowitz, Diane Williams, Lydia Davis, and a host of alluring unknowns, sold a mere 35 percent of its allotment to our distributor. The bemusing part is that, upon noting this, I knew immediately what must be the cause of the drop.”

She’s making sure that ain’t gonna happen with the double-sized “Summer Fiction” issue this year. In addition to stories by Dawn Raffel, Frederic Tuten, Stacey Levine, Chris Offutt and Harry Matthews, a big roundtable debate on contemporary fiction, an essay by Joe Wenderoth, and all the other goodies, this latest issue sports a Suicide Girl on the cover.

As part of her explanation, Wolff compares the American consumer of literature to a screaming infant, and her breasts to those of the cover girl:

“As a woman entering her eighth heavenly month of breastfeeding, happy as all get-out to be plumping up my Margot, an eighteen-pounder built of nothing, so far, but the milk from my own considerably smaller, considerably older tits, I am currently feeling even more especially fond of tits than usual. Margot has an entirely unconflicted relationship to my tits: When she’s hungry she wants them; she cries out; they are delivered to her. So why not, I thought, give the people what they can also be understood to want.”

I’d probably have a snappier closer if I didn’t agree with the last part of her analysis just a wee bit.

2 September 2005 | uncategorized |