Goodbye, 2009. You were pretty good, as far as years go. But can I offer you the tiniest bit of constructive criticism? That thing you did with the Publishers Weekly list of the top 100 books of the year? It really rankled some folks. The aftershocks are still rolling.

This fall, Publishers Weekly named the top 100 books of 2009. How many female writers were in the top 10? Zero. How many on the entire list? Twenty-nine.

I wish I were scandalized, or at least surprised. I'm not. I understand the invisible prejudice -- from the inside out. I'm a woman, but I've been a sexist, too.

In my grad school thesis, written at 23, you'll find young men coming of age, old men haunted by war, Oedipus complexes galore. If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.

Also, you sucked at economics. That's all. Sleep tight, 2009.

George Singleton, the Chuck Norris of Literature?

Steve Almond: I remember seeing [George Singleton] at some civic lit fest in the South—Nashville or Charlotte, one of those cities with a flower for a theme and lots of corporate sponsorship. I’m taking this elevator downstairs to the lobby and the door opens and there’s George, stinking of cigarettes with a can of beer in his hand. It’s, like, 8am and he starts howling “Steve Almond! Steve Almond!” because, see, the first time we met was in New York, at some Book Magazine junket, where he got plastered and I was (of course) stoned out of my fucking mind.

Anyways, down in Nashville or Charlotte or Richmond or wherever it was, George drags me to an abandoned bar in the hotel where he continues to drink and smoke. It emerges that he did not, in fact, sleep the previous evening. Then he looks at his watch and says, “Shit! I’ve got a panel.” And he lurches over to the panel, where he reads beautifully and answers questions in his big booming voice, very relaxed and exuberant, so that everybody is thinking, “Wow, The George seems like he must be drunk but it’s 8:30 in the morning so he’s clearly just PRETENDING to be drunk.”

At this point Almond added that he and George had been lovers, but those of you who know Almond understand that this is just a nervous tic of his.

Mark Franks: One day we were hanging out at a “classy” bar downtown with the drama teacher who was teaching me and George fake fighting moves. We were asked to leave and went to a less classy bar where George trapped the drama teacher in the men’s room with an orange traffic pylon. When the thespian forced his way out of the toilet, he threw the pylon at George and we moved on to an even less classy bar.

Why am I posting these? Because they're funny, and I like Singleton's work. And he has a piece coming out in the next issue of Booth. More snakes and cigarettes and faculty-terrorism here.

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Can I toss out one tiny bit of self-promotion? Barrelhouse just posted my (very) short story, "On Tubes, by Ted Stevens."

If that title makes you go whaaa?, here's a little refresher.

The poem is called "Lechleiter's Tragic Ambition," and deals with (Lilly's) upcoming patent expiration of top-selling drug Zyprexa.

Inspired by her beauty
our great achievement stands
the largest moving object
built by management's own hand

The name we gave is fitting
and helped us to believe
"Lilly" is unsinkable
a long life she will lead

The 10th of April 2011
and "zyprexa" sails at noon
shouts of joy come from the crowd
but silence follows soon . . .

(the rest is here)

There's no way to know if this author is actually a Lilly insider. But it sure sounds like it. Anyone want to guess on this person's identity?

My money's on Ruth.

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I get a lot of rejection slips, and most of them are about the same. But sometimes I get a strange one. Like this one:

Dear Writer:

Thank you for submitting your work to (name redacted). Unfortunately we are able to use it at this time. This could be due to any number of reasons. Ideally, we would be able to write a personal letter to each writer and provide comments, but the size of our staff and volume of submissions make personal responses extremely difficult. We apologize for the excruciating delay for this response, the financial climate has forced us into spending too much extra time at budget meetings and has made unpaid volunteers and interns a rarity.

Hey, I'm the one getting rejected here. Quit yer bitching.

Sorry, posting's been a little spotty lately. Not only because of end-of-year weariness, but also because my writing is really rolling, and whenever that happens I get cranky and resentful when I think about doing anything else. This makes me happy, though:

The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have chosen Butler Professor of English Andy Levy's memoir A Brain Wider Than the Sky as one of the best books of 2009.

In the book, Levy writes about his history with, and the history of, migraines.

The Post called the book "a harrowing descent as Levy changes from a man who has suffered from occasional headaches into the victim of an unremitting, four-month-long, life-altering migraine."The Journal said Levy "provides an eloquent treatise on a malady that affects more than 1 in 10 Americans."

Levy said the migraine "completely takes over your brain, and then it goes away and leaves your brain refreshed. It’s like: What just happened? And why do I have no control over this?”

To find out, Levy wrote, he scoured “everything from two-thousand-year-old medical textbooks to medieval religious texts translated from Latin to semi-autobiographical novels by surrealist painters. Glossy art books. Thick biographies. Books of ancient incantation and of cutting-edge neurology. And lots of letter collections.”

Levy has suffered from serious episodic headaches since his early 20s (he’s 46 now), A Brain Wider Than the Sky deals mostly with a debilitating four-month period during 2006 when his recurring migraines made even simple acts like eating painful.

He's not really a tiny man. That book in his lap is just enormous.

Kirkus dies. Kindle blooms, sort of.

Let the iTunes-ization of short fiction begin.

Starting on Monday, Amazon will sell two stories, one by Christopher Buckley and the other by Edna O’Brien, through its Kindle store. The stories have been selected and edited by the staff at The Atlantic, the venerable magazine that once published short fiction in its print pages monthly.

Priced at $3.99 each, the stories, which will bear the Atlantic logo, are exclusively available on the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic reader, and will not appear in the print version of the magazine. The Atlantic’s editors plan to offer about two Kindle stories every month.

I would love to live in a world where a reader would pay $4 for a short story—but does anyone think that world actually exists? Four bucks for a story makes even less sense in the context of the $9 benchmark for e-bestsellers. I know the industry's kind of muddling around, trying to figure out price points, but this one comes straight out of someone's ass.

Some Indiana poetry news, courtesy of JL Kato's blog:

The 2009 edition of The Best American Poetry series has some Indiana connections. The guest editor is David Wagoner, who grew up in the state. His selections include "The Doctor," by Marianne Boruch (Purdue University), and "Getting Serious," by Alice Friman (formerly of the University of Indianapolis). Other selections include "Freud," by James Cummins (who grew up in Indianapolis), "Houses," by Jerry Harp (grew up in Mount Vernon), and "I shall be released," by Kevin Young (formerly of Indiana University and who explains that the poem was "written in one of those cold Indiana winters where you freeze all the way to your mailbox: good writing weather you could say."

Hey, just like today! And here's a snippet from Guardian's digested read of Going Rogue, Sarah Palin's, um, "book."

My parents moved to Alaska when I was three and I fell in love with the outdoors and killing things. Swearing the Oath of Allegiance in school gave me a sense of civic pride and I vowed to serve America and go to church a lot.
After coming runner-up, and last, in the Miss Alaska pageant, I married Todd Palin, a guy with his own snow mobile who blessed me with five children: Track, "we'd have called him hockey if he'd been born in the winter"; Bristol, "Todd said he hoped she'd have a rack like mine"; Willow, "we misspelled pillow"; Piper, "after our light aircraft"; and Trig, "short for the trigger on our AK47".

How do I make this into my screensaver?


Or maybe it should be this.

Bookchoy pal Christopher "The Nooge" Newgent* sent me a link to an interview at Pank with an editor from the poetry journal Linebreak. Much of it continues our conversation about print vs. online journals. Here are a few choice cuts:

The weekly format was an idea we had from the start, mostly as a reaction against the many online lit magazines that continue to publish issues in a quarterly (or even less frequent) format. Bundling content into infrequent issues makes a lot of sense in print but very little sense online.

I suppose we could add the use of multimedia to the list (of ways that online magazines could innovate). And allowing some kind of interactivity — whether through comments or other kinds of contributions from readers — is another way. But going back to what I said above about flux, one aspect of that is the endless number of alternative formats that online publications can produce: syndication formats such as RSS, mobile formats for devices like the iPhone & Kindle, etc. Part of producing a first-rate online magazine is realizing that you no longer get to determine the format through which readers enjoy your content.

I’m remarkably traditional when it comes to content. I like poems (and short stories, novels, etc) just the way they are, just the way they’ve always been, and have no interest in what some folks call e-lit, those annoying Flash mashups that, more often than not, provide little more than choose-your-own adventure navigation coupled with animated text. I refuse to believe that people won’t read long-form text online, because I do it all the time. If your visitors refuse to read long pieces, it’s probably because your web site is poorly designed, or festooned with ads, or doesn’t play nicely with Instapaper.

You can add Twitter literature (twittature?) to the list of annoying e-lit. Maybe it's revolutionary, but it feels gimicky to me. Though maybe that's just because Rick Moody is doing it. Thanks to Linda Brundage for giving me a heads-up on Tweeting the Whole Story: How Fiction Writers are using Twitter to Publish a New Generation of Books.

*Other possible nicknames include: New Gent City, C-New, and Frosty Manchild. Vote for your favorite or add your own suggestion in the comment section.

I got into an interesting discussion the other day with Simon Smith, a writer and editor, about print vs. online journals. While Simon understood why most new journals were online—"It's cheaper and easier," he says—he would rather read ink on paper. "I don't think I'll ever be able to stop preferring journals in print."

He thinks that most writers would prefer print because they want to see their names on something they can put on a shelf (my note: guilty as charged), but that readers of journals may actually prefer an online model because there are no subscription charges.

I see it a little differently. As an editor, I prefer an online journal because we don't have to deal with the nightmare of distribution. As a writer, I'm kind of split. I like holding a journal in my hand and seeing it on my shelf and all that, but I also like the "long tail" that comes from publishing in an online mag. As a reader, though, I have to admit that I prefer print. Sure, there are subscription costs involved, but the only way I can read even a semi-long story is on paper. My attention span on the computer screen is about forty-five seconds . . . but then again, I'm old. That kind of thing may not even be an issue for people under 30.

I'd love to hear what you think about this subject, from whatever point of view you'd like to take: editor, writer, reader, hater.

Delurk. Comment. Your ideas may shape the future form of Booth.

End-of-year update from Second Story, the writing project for Indy's youth:


Second Story has enjoyed a great 2009. We appreciate your support in helping us continue to succeed. This year, with many excellent volunteers joining our team, we’ve helped lots of kids in Indianapolis find joy in writing and improve their literacy skills.

Here’s how:

- with summer programs on East 10th Street (in partnership with Y-Press) on the Near Eastside and in Garfield Park (in partnership with Indy Parks);

- with in-school programs at IPS School 15 (4th graders) and IPS School 2 (7th graders in partnership with Butler University and Central Library);

- with after-school programs at the Wheeler Arts Community in Fountain Square, Kaleidoscope Youth Center and MLK Center.

Now, we’re looking forward to 2010 with plans to continue our after-school and in-school efforts while also working with high school kids for the first time as we team up with University of Indianapolis to help students at Manual High School bring back their yearbook and newspaper publications.

In late 2008 and in 2009, we received some great support from the Indianapolis Foundation, State Farm and from individuals like you. But times are tight and foundation and corporate support has been very slim - especially for a newer organization like ours.

So we need your help. The more we are able to raise, the more we can expand our programs to reach more children in 2010. It’s easy to donate through our Donate/PayPal button on our website at http://www.secondstoryindy.org or by sending us a check to 1014 Prospect St. Indianapolis, IN 46203.

Thanks for your help!

Also, please vote for Second Story on the Chase Community Giving page through Facebook. We might end up with some money to help more kids.

http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/charities/639822
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New picks up at Andrew's Book Club. Ha Jin, Terese Svoboda, and a note from Kyle Minor about Alice Munro's latest book of stories.

Andrew's note to me said that these are the final picks of the year. Can you believe it? The year is almost over. The decade is almost over. Did it fly by, or what? I still have a survival bag of rice from Y2K in my pantry.

In 2000, I was twenty-five years old, working in advertising at the Indianapolis Star. I had no children, and I thought I was soooo busy. That was the year I applied to Purdue's MFA program on a last-second whim. When the rejection slip came back about two days later, it was the first time I realized that I might not be An Awesome Talent Just Waiting to be Recognized.

Forget what I said about the decade going by fast. That time seems like a hundred years ago.