Very exciting stuff happening on the internet front. The inimitable Jeff Hamada over at BOOOOOOOM! gave us some cyber ink this afternoon. If you’ve never come across Jeff’s site you’re missing out. It’s a daily-updated compendium of some of the most talented creative people in the world these days and we’re happy beyond the ability to express ourselves to be included among them. Thanks Jeff!

As mentioned last week, Dan Wicket over at EWN is whooping much ass in the name of short fiction everywhere. He started claiming he was gonna post one story a day for the entire month of May. Now EWN, the unnofficial headquarters for Short Story Month, has morphed into an avalanche-like showcase for short fiction all over the web. Guest posts have even started cropping up from writers of all stripes and even former Annalemma contributor John McNally.

So, like last week, in an effort to support the cause, I’m posting an old favorite of mine. Miracle by Judy Budnitz is the story of a young white couple who have a black baby. I probably don’t need to lead you into it anymore than that.

p.s. What ever happened to Judy Budnitz? Haven’t heard much from her after Nice Big American Baby. Someone send out a search party.

So this thing just came in hot off the wire. The second I saw that it had an MSRP of $489.00 I was pretty livid and was all ready to write some tirade about how Amazon is totally out of touch with the modern reader and that this product could, in no way, be the future of books and how I got my hands on an original Kindle a couple years ago and was not that impressed and found it to be a middle piece of technology on the road to something better (iPhone reader? When is this going to happen? Hello?) and how it should be reserved for late 40’s techies who want to get in early on some hot new piece of gear but feel too old to Twitter. Some angry bullshit like that.

But then I looked at the specs.

This thing is 1/3″ thick and has a 9.7″ screen that can show a shitload more detail than the first Kindle. It holds 3500 books and Amazon is now in league with a handful of major colleges to provide this new gadget to students for all their textbook uses. Dare I say it: this thing is kind of cool.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to go out and buy one. $500 for an ebook reader is fucking stupid, I don’t care how much money you have. But if you’re a student getting one for free and you don’t have to pay an ungodly amount for heavy textbooks that you will use once and store on your bookshelf for the rest of your life in hopes that it will serve you at some later date, well, then you’re stoked.

The concept of an ebook is a ways off from being revolutionary. Nothing will replace a real, perfect bound, paperback book. Nothing will replace the ability to dog ear, make notes in the margin, underline. Not to mention a paperback is never subject to battery failure, blunt trauma and if you spill a beer on it all you do is stick it out in the sun for a while. Sure it’s gonna be all puffy and stinky when it dries out, but it will technically still function.

This whole Kindle experiment whiffs of desperation to me: An ailing company trying way too hard to maintain relevancy in an advance technological age. Something tells me Jeff Bezos thinks so too.

The book is not broken, Amazon. Johannes Gutenburg got it right the first time. Quit trying to fix it.

Thanks Gallycat.

Dear friend Jason Gregory just launched a new version of the MAKR site. Jason makes insanely high qulaity leather goods. If you’re into fashion and hand crafted things that carry other things then you should check him out.

After years of silence (for no apparent reason) I just started talking with extreme journalist Brooke Geery today. Turns out she recently blogged about my blog, so in good form I’m blogging about her blog about blogging me. Blog.

I got these guys to print up some post cards for me for this. If you show up this weekend (we’re at booth #146) I will give you one of each of these extremely limited edition postcards. For FREE. That’s right Chicken Little. The sky is falling.

Been a little boring on the blog this week, I know. Life got the best of me. What am I gonna do? Blog about my life? Yeah, right. The internet don’t care about that. All they care about is this. You know it’s true. Admit it.

While trolling the webs for a good (or really shitty) book cover for this week’s BBCDW I came across The Book Design Review which seems to be an extension of the NY Times Book Review. They stole my idea to review book covers about 4 years before I came up with it and compiled the best designs into an annual list. Check them out here.

Not sure if anyone who reads this blog is the same type of person who submits to the magazine. Regardless, figured I’d give this a shot anyway.

ANNALEMMA NEEDS CREATIVE NONFICTION

If you or anyone you know is in possession of any kind of CNF (essays, memoir, interviews) that you’re willing to have published send it ASAP to chris@annalemma.net.

The submissions department is currently drowning in short stories and we need some nonfiction to balance it out. Tell your story people! Your real story. It’s not hard. You’re already doing it. You’re just changing the names and calling it fiction. Keep them names in there! Dish about that time you and your cousin ot stuck in the UN and ended up as Chancellors to Belgium and subsequently caused an international incident when it was learned you only knew how to say, “Where is the H&M?” in German.

Let’s be honest. Your family was going to disown you at some point anyway. May as well make it happen on your terms.  Click here for more details.

Are you going to be in the greater Los Angeles area this coming weekend (25th-26th)? Do you like books? Do you like festivals? Do you like book festivals?

If you said yes to any of these questions then you need to come out to the LA Times Festival of Books where myself and a special mystery guest will be holding court and making friendship bracelets all weekend at the Annalemma booth # 146. Come check us out!

Never reluctant to flaunt star power, La La Land is pulling out the big guns for this event. Ever heard of a little author called Tori Spelling? How about Tom Bergeron? Hello?! It’s called AFV and it’s the funniest program on television.

Here’s a new feature that I’ll try to cram in every Friday wherein I talk about some hot new books I’ve got my hands on. So hot they are steaming. And there’s a lot of them and I’m unorganized so they’re in a pile. Here we go!

The Lost City of Z by David Grann

This book is fucking sick. It’s all over the place right now and there’s talks that Brad Pitt is turning it into a movie so I’m sure you’ve been bombarded with it on your most recent trip to Boarders. Don’t be try to be cool and pretend that you only go to the independant bookstore. We all know you’re a fiend for Barnes and Noble and their infinite racks of magazines. Anyway, I’m only 40 pages into this book and I’m hooked. It’s a real life Indiana Jones story of Percy Harrison Fawcett, one of the last Victorian explorers who was bound and determined to find El Dorado, the lost city of Mayan gold, deep in the Amazon rain forest. He disappeared and was never heard from again. Grann recounts Fawcett’s journey and even takes one himself, trying to find out what drives men to explore and why that drive can lead them to obsession and madness. Creative nonfiction book of the year, so far.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

I started a book club with some friends a few weeks back. We’re called the Hard Covers and I’ll talk more about that in a few weeks. We chose this as our first book. Why? Not sure. There was a list of books that we all wanted to read and this one had the coolest cover. Also, Bolano is credited with being one of the creators of Mexican literature and some of us in the club habla espaniol, so it seemed like the right fit. Bolano’s got an interesting story. According to the introduction in the hard cover edition he was one of those possessed writers who did nothing but read, travel the world on a shoestring budget and write his gosh darn dong off. And that’s really what this book is about. Travel, poetry (I know, I know), Mexico and writing. It starts off real good with steady pace and interesting narrator, but 125 pages or so in he switches to an unconventional form that can come off as annoying at first but once you sink into it, you kind of get what he’s doing, but it doesn’t make the form any more interesting once you know what that form is. Guess you just kind of have to stick with it. Kind of hard to explain. Just read it. It will teach you how to live.

Everything Raved, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

I first came across this dude after reading one of his stories in the most powerful lit mag in all the land. It was a good’n of his that they published so I bought his recently released debut collection. Lemme tell you. If you’re a story writer and you’ve been trying to get your stuff published for a long time to no avail, pick this book up. This is how modern short stories are written. Tower’s main strength is his characters. They’re real, fully-drawn people, not caricatures propped up by disingenuous quirks. Most of them are males careening into a mid-life crisis, coping with the stunted growth of their 20’s and 30’s and waking up to realize that they are nowhere close to where they thought they would be at this age. That, and vikings, apparently. I don’t know, I haven’t read that far. Long story short: good stories, this guy will win awards, hop on the bandwagon early.

That concludes this edition of A Big Steaming Pile of Books. Hope you enjoyed. And if you’ve got your own steaming pile nestled next to your bed or in between the couch and the end table, feel free to share in the comments below.