The winner of The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has been announced (terrible website btw, check the wiki for better info). This particular contest (named after Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, author of the infamous line, “It was a dark and stormy night…”) is a test of not how good you are at writing, but at how good you are at writing bad. The person who comes up with the best (worst) opening sentence of an imagined (bad) novel wins. David McKenzie took home this year’s prize with the following hum-dinger:

Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.

I chuckled a bit when I read that one, then I read the wiki page for some of the past entrants and I didn’t find it so funny anymore. Observational humor (funny cause it’s true) reaches a breaking point where too much honesty is no longer funny and it’s just depressing. That’s kind of the way I felt reading these. Whoever wrote them was spot-on in their attempts at bad writing. I should know. 90% of story submissions I get start out like this. Pretentious, disengenuous, and, worst of all, dishonest. People desparately pretending to be something that they aren’t, which almost always makes me want to punch things and vomit simultaniously.

Kudos, Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winners. You’re bringing laughter through the tears.

I don’t know if I’m just really uninspired this week or if there’s an exceptional amount of bland shit being churned out lately, but the covers of this weeks new releases are neither rocking me or bumming me out. As if I’m standing in a hot driveway, sweating, after just having jogged three miles and I’m waiting for the publishing world to come bring me a nitrogen-cold strawberry daiquiri they promised, but instead they show up and offer me a tepid glass of milk. Here’s a round-up of this weeks book covers that are totally devoid of harm, risk and fun. Wallow in the mediocrity! Wallow, I say!

For the amature mortician and/or zombie enthusiast there’s Larry King’s new memoir. Might want to think twice about putting that mug on a book cover in order to sell books instead of inducing panic trips to the botox clinic.

Photographer: Larry, give us a big warm smile.

Larry King: I am smiling.

Photographer: No, that’s more of a Dick-Cheney-evil-genius-predator sneer you’ve got happening there. Think more “I’d like to share my life story with you” and less “I’d like to lure you to my dungeon and feast on your innards.”

Larry King: …

Photographer: Larry?

Larry King: …

Photographer: Jesus. Will somebody poke him with a stick or something?

More like The Forgotten Use of Restraint Concerning Vine Embellishments and Sepia Filters.

Sure, Allen was a living legend in the skin moisturizer advertising comunity, but designing a book cover would be a new challenge entirely.

The man who owns this book…

a. leaves his television on the History Channel at all times.

b. owns an impressive collection of guns and cleans them regularly. While watching the History Channel.

c. prays for provocation.

d. secretly wears a sports bra he stole from The Finish Line in the mall.

e. All of the above.

I mentioned Stephen Elliot’s newest book last week for BBCDW and also touched upon the cool project surrounding it’s marketing, but just to recap:

Stephen is circulating copies of his new true-crime memoir to anyone who would care to read it. All you do is email him, prove that you’re a real person, he sends you the book, you get a week to read it and when that week is up you send it to the next person on the list. Pretty cool buzz-generating idea that I will most likely steal in the forthcoming months. So I signed up and just finished it last night and I’m glad that I did.

Not only is this a great book, but it’s a cool thing to be involved with. It’s not too often that the general public not only gets to read advance copies of books but also gets to be given the chance to by the author himself. Which, I think, is the way it should be. You should be able to reach out to these people and have them reach back to you. That’s what creative writing is all about, for me at least. To connect with people. And it really bugs me when authors are reclusive, don’t do interviews, don’t do readings, don’t really make any sort of effort to engage their audience outside of publishing. So it really pumps me up when you see a talented author getting in the mix and reaching out to people.

Anyway. I think this thing is still going on and you should sign up for it so you can be a part of it too.

I was going to wait about a week to get to this, but I couldn’t wait.

Stephen Elliott’s been circulating pre-release copies of his new book, a true-crime memoir, as sort of a DIY marketing buzz generator. The gist is you email Stephen, ask him if you can read his book, convince him that you’re a real person, he mails you the book and you have a week to finish it, then you mail it to someone else. Sounds like a really cool idea, no? I thought so too, so I emailed him. He sent me the book and I’m reading it right now and I’m pretty blown away by it so far. But this isn’t a review of the contents inside the book.

(Disclaimer: This is kind of a soft edge image that’s supposed to be used for wheat pasting I think. It was the highest res image I could find. You get the idea. I’ll post a sharper one next week.)

The cover graphic for The Adderall Diaries has all the elements that make a stop-you-in-your-tracks image. Loss, abandonment and confusion are conveyed with a few colors, a few layers and a healthy dose of taste. What else do you need to know? Simple, beautiful, creative. Well done.

P.S. The project is still going on if you want to read the book. Click the link above or right here if you’re lazy. Highly recommended.

Back when I was a cocky, naive young man in his beginning months at writing school I was under the delusion that no novel existed that could mystify or confuse me, no book could sway my lazer-like focus, and no writer existed that could bury me in weighty ideas. It’s with this attitude that I picked up Infinite Jest. I got about 200 pages in and I quit. Main reason being the sheer size of it. I read that fucker like a bomb squad officer clipping at colored wires and I couldn’t even make a dent in it.

Other people have apparently experienced the same thing when trying to undertake IJ. They decided to take action. Infinite Summer is an online book club of sorts that challenges readers all over the globe to read Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009:

“June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.”

I’ve been putting this book off for a long time and now it’s time to climb this mountain. I going to do it. Who’s with me?

Thanks TheRumpus.net

Welcome to a semi-weekly segment wherein I chronicle a selection of modern classics that I have started reading but subsequently given up on for various reasons. Let the failure begin!

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

I love, love, love Salinger’s Nine Stories. Probably the best collection I’ve ever read. A true master of character, dialogue, interaction, humor and pathos. But something about his novels never really did it for me. I thought Catcher in the Rye was whatevs to be quite honest. I realize that the reason it was such a groundbreaking book was because of when it was published. Reading that book in 2003 kind of takes a bit of the subversive oomph out of it.

I got about a third of the way through F & Z before I called it quits. I don’t know. I just had a hard time sympathizing with the young socialite crowd of New York in the 1950’s. I know with Salinger there’s an eventual payoff. I just lost patience I guess. I’ll come back to by, my love. Someday.

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

Probably the most important book I’ve ever given up on. Filkins has been writing about his encounters with Islamic fundamentalism for over ten years now and it’s all in this here book. Every savage detail from a public beheading he attended in a burnt out soccer stadium to wandering the ruins of the twin towers on September 11th.

I don’t think there’s any surprise why I gave up on this one. It’s an amazing book, but I simply got tired of being bummed out and scared shitless when I picked it up.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

I’ve got very little tolerance for stories that go nowhere. Apparently that’s just how Murakami rolls. The only thing keeping you going in this book is his voice. Slow, languid, cool, matter-of-fact, almost in total antithesis of his American conteporaries who feel the need to belt you over the head with an intense storytelling style.

It’s a little harsh to say that this story goes nowhere. He sets his characters a course, but where that course is going is a mystery to anyone. An unemployed man goes searching for his wife’s lost cat and along the way he encounters a surly nine-year-old girl, a mysterious abandoned house and it’s all  supposed be a story about a deteriorating marriage. Sounds like a blast.

Kind of off topic here but did you hear that he just sold roughly one bajillion copies of his new book?

Man, must be doing something right. Does this make me an idiot for not getting what the big deal is? I’ll give him another shot when his new 1,005 page jam comes out in English I guess. But if there’s a missing cat in it, so help me…

Seeing that this is a concept that I spend probably 60-70% of my day focusing on/wrestling with/ralleying against/crying shamefully in a corner about, I was pumped to see that someone made a documentary on the subject.

I hope it turns out to be something along the lines of an orientation video for anyone thinking about committing something to paper and/or cyber paper.

Thanks Papercuts.

A few weeks ago wildly successful writer and educational emporer, Dave Eggers, spoke at an Author’s Guild dinner about how things in print aren’t as bad as one would think and that everyone should just chill the fuck out. In the speech he gave out his email address with the instruction, “If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.”

And me being a publisher myself, someone with a vested interest in the future of print (and, really, just a person wanting to get some of his concerns off his chest) I emailed him. And I heard back from him yesterday. Click through to read our correspondence.

Short Story Month is coming to a close this week. I just want to go on record saying how awesome of an idea I think this is and I want to personally thank Dan Wickett over at EWN for not only tirelessly promoting the artform that I truly, deeply love and believe can change peoples lives, but also for promoting talented writers that have yet to make a name for themselves in the world. Both highly commendable efforts. I’m looking forward to next year when I plan on taking Short Story Month events out of the blogosphere and into the real world!

So to wrap SSM up here at VigLaze I decided to link a story from a man whom I believe is the greatest short story writer that ever lived: Raymond Carver. It’s a story called A Small Good Thing. It’s from his collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. If you plan on picking this collection up in the near future, make sure you’ve got a bag with a nice and sturdy strap to carry it around in because these stories are heavy. They may look like stylistically simple tales, but these stories will sneak in through the window of your mind when you’re not paying attention and sit themselves down on your mind-couch and never leave.

May 15th’s entry of BBCDW got me digging through all sorts of Flickr pools in search of the perfect cover. I’ve yet to find it, but in the meantime there’s some pretty stellar gems laying around.

Check out this paperback pool I found this morning that seems to be loosely centered around Penguin and Pelican releases from the 60’s and 70’s. Must’ve been nice to be around in a time when people were a little more artful in their decisions for reprints seeing as it’s mostly a snooze-fest now.