A crew of dear old friends put together a pilot for Dragons, an original comedy series about two skate buddies transcending their human forms and attaining enlightenment, starring skate legend Mike Vallely. Treat yourself to a half hour of good vibes.
http://www.vimeo.com/14569502
After a few weeks of taking a breather, we’re opening up submissions again. As we put the finishing touches on the print issue we’ll be considering all submissions for web publication only. If you’re looking to get published on the website (and why wouldn’t you be?) bear in mind that being succinct is important. And if you’re going to going to submit something over 3000 words, it had better grip from the first sentence and never let up. Click here to submit them gems.
Chicago is a reading town. Reading towns demand good bookstores and it doesn’t get much better than Quimby’s. A landmark in Chicago’s literary scene for almost two decades, Quimby’s is the archetype for what a good bookstore should be: weird, intriguing, fun, surprising and a bit mysterious. Owner Eric Kirsammer answered a few questions about how Quimby’s achieved this level of awesomeness.
What’s the origin story of Quimby’s?
Quimbys was started in 1991 by Steven Svymbersky. He was doing a zine called Quimbys in Boston then he decided to move to Chicago and open a store by the same name. Steven sold the store to me in 1997.
What’s the curatorial process when choosing books to stock?
We look for any type of publication that is about things out of the mainstream. Anything weird and important. There are so many things being published that just do not get the exposure they deserve. For zines we take a very broad range of things on consignment. This allows us to carry a lot of different zines and allows someone just starting out to get their book on the shelf.
What helps a book sell? What are some of the more successful books at Quimby’s?
Quality writing in an interesting package. We do well with things that hit it on multiple fronts. Some of the books that we do well with are anything by Chris Ware, Dan Clowes or Dave Eggers.
Quimby’s has achieved this legendary status among independent bookstores. How did this happen and how do you maintain relevance in the age of Amazon?
We have stuck to our mission of carrying the offbeat and being very open to people just starting to publish. We also hold a lot of events which has built community support. We try to stock the books our customer wants. Quimbys is a niche bookstore are we have never had the desire to become mainstream.
Please describe the cat that lives in your store. If you don’t have a bookstore cat, please explain why.
We do not have a store cat for several reasons,
1. I would always be worried about the cat running out the door.
2. I don’t think the cat would get the attention it deserves.
3. Our store mascot is Chris Ware’s Quimby the mouse and cat and mice just do not mix.
This is Sasha Fletcher. His writing is like walking towards a door but first putting on a blindfold and spinning in circles and then trying to walk towards a door and eventually ending up at the door but you’re not entirely sure how you got there. Sounds nauseating, but it’s a delightful experience.
Sasha emceed the Dzanc Best of the Web reading that took place last Tuesday at McNally Jackson. Other people read there. And I took videos of them too, but I was too far from the PA and they reading in semi-hushed tones. Sasha speaks loud when he reads in front of an audience. He knows how to perform. That’s what you’re doing when you’re reading at an event by the way. You know that, right? You’re supposed to be entertaining the folks in the audience. If you move some people on an emotional level, that’s fantastic, but priority number one is to be compelling. Sasha’s compelling. Take note, readers.
Leigh Stein read some very good poems. Elissa Bassist read some interesting anxieties on writing about Infinite Jest originally published on The Rumpus. For an extensive take on the evening, head over to Vol. 1.
Below is the tentative roster for Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance. Tentative because not all of these people have gotten back to me yet. If you haven’t, please do. I want to print your stuff.
Poetry:
Coming For To Carry Me Home
Poem: Sasha Fletcher
Image: Jake Blanchard
Fiction:
You Will Be The Living Equation
Story: Amber Sparks
Images: Margaret Durow
2001 or This is How the Century is Born
Story: Salvatore Pane
Images: Justin Chen
The End, Temporarily
Story: Matthew Simmons
Images: Patrick Savile
Water-Filled Jugs
Story: Brian Allen Carr
Images: Erin McCarty
Rainbow Dogs
Story: Justyn Harkin
Images: Sam Brewster
Five Pieces of a Broken Heart
Story: Roxane Gay
Image: Bryan Schutmaat
The Worst Thing My Father Did In His Life
Story: Patrick deWitt
Images: Cali deWitt
What is Your Favorite War?
Story: Joe Meno
Images: Kristian Hammerstad
Dieback
Story: Nick Ripatrazone
Images: Rose Wind Jerome
The Difference Between
Story: Andrea Kneeland
Photo: Kristie Muller
Relations
Story: Nicolette Kittinger
Birth in the Memory
Story: Carl Fuerst
Image: Jonas Norway
Nonfiction:
Lions
Essay: Paul Kwiatkowski
At the Window
Essay: Jen Knox
(image by angela n.)
Do you love indie bookstores so much that you were refraining from buying Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice online just so you’d have an excuse to visit your local independent book seller? I hear you. I do that too sometimes. We got you covered, for the most part. Issue Six is now available in the following fine brick-and-mortar stores:
(*** indicates a recently-added retailer)
Long Beach, CA
San Francisco, CA
Denver, CO
Durango, CO
Maria’s Books ***
Miami, FL
Orlando, FL
Atlanta, GA
Iowa City, IA
Chicago, IL
Bloomington, IN
Lawrence, KS
Louisville, KY
Brookline, MA
Portland, ME
St. Louis, MO
Oxford, MS
Baltimore, MD
Minneapolis, MN
Bozeman, MT
Missoula, MT
Raleigh, NC
Buffalo, NY
New York, NY
Ithica, NY
Cleveland, OH
Portland, OR
Ottowa, ON
Doylestown, PA
Philadelphia, PA
Pittsburgh, PA
Providence, RI
Austin, TX
Richmond, VA
Seattle, WA
“Hey!” you say, “That’s not a hell of a lot of stores there, partner!” You’re right. If your favorite bookstore isn’t on our list then shout it out in the comments. We’ll contact them and say there’s folks in their area clamoring for a piece of the Issue Six action.
Whooo, buddy. Took us a little bit, and had a brief case of the ’slush-crazies’, but we finally finished the reading cycle for Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance. According to the Submishmash report (which is incredible, btw, big ups to Michael Fitzgerald and crew) we got almost 340 short stories and essays and accepted a little under 6% of them. God bless everyone for submitting. Even though the odds are not in your favor you did it anyway and for that I give you a very sincere hat tip.
Had a lot of folks helping with this: Thanks to Nathan Goldman who is very enthusiastic about reading and writing and that will take him far. Thanks to Dylan Suher who had responses to some of the pieces that made me laugh my ass off. Thanks to Andrea Kneeland who accepts no guff from fiction and I like that a lot. Thanks to Anika Sabin who only read a couple stories cause there was some confusion with the software and I was on too much of a tear to stop and help her. Sorry Anika. Very special thanks to Janelle Luce who helps me out on tons of other stuff besides reading subs because she has a heart that is devoid of any kind of evil and is purely kind and good and overwhelmingly positive.
Full roster coming Monday. This issue is gonna be a corker. A CORKER.
The following is the first part in an ongoing series highlighting those hidden caches of awesomeness, the independent bookstores that pepper this great land. Subterranean Books is one of the many rad bookstores inhabiting the St. Louis area, and not only are they surviving, but they’re thriving. This short interview with owner, Kelly von Plonski, was conducted via email.
What’s Subterranean’s origin story?
I was working at another bookstore and knew that I wanted to open my own store using my ideas and vision. I had a business partner and together we borrowed money from relatives and opened Subterranean as a mixed-stock new and used bookstore, in October 2000. Along the way I’ve transitioned the store from the mixed-stock to all new books, and shed my partner. This year is our 10th anniversary and we’re still going strong.
What’s the curatorial process when choosing books to stock?
Short version: Gut. Long version: Everyone on staff has input and the stock is reflective of our personalities. If anyone knows something or feels something about a book or a subject, we’ll stock it. We also eavesdrop on our customers, pay attention to what’s being special ordered, read blogs, magazines, newspapers…everything to stay up on what would be interesting to carry. We also carefully track what is already selling so that we are carrying what our customers want. But especially, since we’re a small store we know our customers–we have conversations with them and we always take what they have to say to heart. Many many books are on the shelves now because a customer told us about them.
What’s the arts/literature scene in St. Louis like and what role does Subterranean play within it?
The arts/literature scene is thriving. There are so many small galleries operating right now. So many drama troupes and poetry groups. We’ve had an art gallery in the store pretty much since we opened and we’ve had exhibits by almost 100 different artists up. We help out with Noir at the Bar, a semi-regular literary event that focuses on crime fiction and takes place…in a bar. We’ve hosted traveling authors from Melville House, Soft Skull, Akashic Books, Found vs PostSecret and other really cool edgy publishers.
What helps a book sell? What’s been the most successful book at Subterranean?
A passionate bookseller. People come to us because they trust us so when someone wants a recommendation they almost always take us up on the suggestion. When one of us just loves loves a book, that excitement comes through and customers respond. We have recommendation labels (shelf talkers) on a number of books and sales of those titles directly correlate. Sales will all of a sudden spike for a title and I’ll check, and sure enough, someone has written a shelf talker for it. By a landslide our bestselling title is ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’, second up is ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’.
How does a brick-and-mortar store not only survive, but maintain relevance in the age of Amazon?
Because you can touch them, smell them, flip through the pages and hear that lovely page-flipping sound. Turn the cover over to see the back. You can have a real live conversation, standing at the counter. You can run into someone you haven’t seen in a while or that lives next door. People really appreciate that we curate, that they don’t have to dig through the dreck to get to something good. They like it that they can ride their bicylcle over, take a coffee break next door, and ride home with a book from the Staff Picks shelf.
Please describe the cat that lives in your store. If you don’t have a bookstore cat, please explain why.
My mom and grandmother were horribly allergic to cats so even though I don’t have allergies, I am very sensitive to those that do and we’ve never had a store cat for that reason.
(image via)
Most of the characters in Jeff Parker’s The Taste of Penny are broken, about-to-be broken or are in-the-process-of breaking. Most of them are men, all of them grappling with their own ineptitude. In “Our Cause” a toungeless ski resort worker flees to the prairies of Wyoming into the arms of eco-activism after his girlfriend is wooed by burly bearded townie. In “False Cognate” an American struggles with the language barrier in Russia, accidentally asking women where he can find a whore when all he’s actually asking for is a barber. “Two Hours and Fifty Three Minutes” is an email conversation between a database technician the women he thinks he impregnated in the past only to learn that both women lied to him about his sperm’s potential. The ineptitude reaches a critical mass with The James Stories toward the end of the book. A triptych on uselessness, the stories follow the misadventures of a fuck-up as girlfriends leave and replace him, shamelessly cheat on him right under his nose, and his attempts to pick up the pieces in the aftermath.
Parker’s broken men are lovable goofballs on the surface, but a little dig a little and you’ll find a streak of sadness running deep and wide within in them. Parker struggles with the questions of masculinity that men face in the early 21st century: What does it mean to be a man? What is masculinity? Is it a birthright or is it something to be cultivated? Is it something that must be grown (or beaten) into? The conclusions are unclear, though one thing is certain: the characters are undeniably human.
The voices of the characters are the gems of these stories. Dripping with the residue of childhoods spent smoking weed and skateboarding, these characters engage in incredibly satisfying moments of push-pull dialogue. In the titular story, Sam and Jeremy, two men running a hauling company, are on the phone with a rival hauling company they recently sabotaged:
“What are they saying?” Jeremy said.
“They say we got a problem,” Sam said.
“Talking to your pussy, dick?” one of the two men said. Sam couldn’t tell them apart anymore.
“They ask if I’m talking to my pussy.” Sam said.
“Tell them your pussy takes umbrage at their comment,” Jeremy said.
“Takes what?” Sam said.
“You guys need to watch your backs, this ain’t cool. We let you run your little show around here long enough. Now there may be some action.’
“An equal and opposite reaction?” Sam said in the voice of a black man imitating a white man.
“Um-bridge,” Jeremy said
“Payback action,” the two men said.
“My pussy takes umbrage at your comment,” Sam said.
“Umbrage to your comment,” one of them said and hung up.
For the characters in The Taste of Penny, the stakes are simultaneously low and high. Of course it doesn’t really matter who wins in a game of Jenga cause you can always start another game, it doesn’t really matter if your girlfriend leaves you cause you can always move on, it doesn’t matter if the girl in the apartment below you can hear you masturbating to internet porn because you can always blame it on the guy living above you. The stakes are high in a cosmic, historical and existential sense, as in, why do these men keep finding themselves in these positions of embarrassment, of impotence and shame? The questions remain unresolved. But these are questions that take a lot longer to resolve than the short time Parker gives us to spend with these endearing jokers. But the possibility looms that maybe what we are witnessing in these lives of these men is a turning point.
You’ve got roughly 15 hours before the deadline for Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance closes for good. Deadline for submissions is at 12:00 midnight EST tonight. We’ll be closing submissions for the next week in order to get a breather. After that we’ll only be reading for online publication for a while.
If you want to appear in the print issue this is your very last chance for a very long time. Time’s a-wasting! Submit already!
It’s our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don’t read books, who instead medicate themselves in…
(T)he Web can you leave you feeling lonelier, once you turn off the computer. Fiction and poetry connect you,…
Why not me down the street hanging out with my dementia-struck father who does not remember me anymore but…
The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is…
Every day is a gift. I am probably wasting that gift. – Roxane Gay on writing at Bent Country
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Copyright Annalemma 2009
