Submissions are CLOSED!
Submissions are now CLOSED, while we get back to everyone and compile the next issue. We’ll be opening back up soon. Thanks for your patience.
Here you will find various short stories, novellas and novel excerpts.
“Giving me a new idea is like handing a cretin a loaded gun, but I do thank you anyhow, bang, bang.”
Philip K. Dick
Prose and verse poetry.
“Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.
One evening I took Beauty in my arms – and I thought her bitter – and I insulted her.”
Arhur Rimbaud
Submissions are now CLOSED, while we get back to everyone and compile the next issue. We’ll be opening back up soon. Thanks for your patience.
Read about the magazine and the people behind it.
Submissions are now CLOSED, while we get back to everyone and compile the next issue. We’ll be opening back up soon. Thanks for your patience.
http://www.outsiderwriters.org/publications/caleb-j-rosss-charactered-pieces
http://www.calebjross.com/works/booklength/charactered-pieces-stories/blog-orgy-tour/
Caleb J. Ross is both a gentleman and filthy scoundrel. His recent book, Charactered Pieces, deals with matters profoundly disturbing and yet they all hit too close to home. The man has been e-touring various sites and blogs ’round the interweb in order to promote Charactered Pieces, and Rotten Leaves is his next stop. The editors agreed to this after Caleb J. Ross left us a twenty minutes long voicemail, recorded in his bathroom, where the author could be heard crying, stomping his feet, and sitting fully clothed in his bathtub while muttering, “Leaf rot, leaf rot, want to be part of the leaf rot.”
From the Outsiter Writers Collective page:
With Charactered Pieces, Caleb J. Ross presents a varied world of familial discord, one where a dead fetus evokes more compassion than its mother (“Charactered Pieces”); where two brothers offer the destruction of a family legacy as a birthday gift for their aging father (“My Family’s Rule”); where one brother’s love of Holocaust documentaries pushes his family through the aftermath of his assumed suicide (“The Camp”).
Charactered Pieces peels away the superficial armor of public life to reveal the flaws beneath and treats those perceived weaknesses not as hidden sources of pain but as reasons to celebrate life.
Without further ado, it is with great pleasure that we bring you the short story “Legs Unwilling”. And once you’re done, why don’t you do your brain a favor and order a copy of Charactered Pieces, right here?
(Note from the editors: we believe this speaks for itself. Feel free to read more about Maxi Kim and the stunningly gorgeous One Break, A Thousand Blows! here:
http://www.bookworks.org.uk/asp/detail.asp?uid=book_7954A75D-5A9C-4337-8ED2-862F746D131B&sub=new
http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2009_01_013997.php
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/random-things-about-maxi-kim/
You can read more about the issue here, too: http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/?p=2769
The editors would also like to legally cover their own asses by saying that they do not condone or support terrorism, in any way, shape or form. We do not write, publish or encourage works that promote terrorism and the mindless killing of civilians.
However, we do support beautiful literature. We’re certainly guilty of that.)
Dear U.S. Department of Homeland Security, I write to you today on an urgent matter. I received news this morning that several hundred copies of my novel One Break, A Thousand Blows (BookWorks 2008) have been effectively destroyed and likely banned in the United States by US customs, to fulfill CBP’s dual mission of “preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States, while also facilitating the flow of legitimate trade and travel.” I do not want to make any final judgments, as I am not aware of all the facts at the moment; I would immensely appreciate clarification and answers on this issue. So far neither U.S. Customs and Border Protection nor the Department of Homeland Security have been of much help.
According to my editor Stewart Home, two weeks ago “an attempt to sell titles in [his] Semina series at the New York Art Book Fare had descended into farce because the books had been impounded by US customs. Book Works told [him] they’d flown from Europe to America to sell the novels, but ended up manning an empty table. The publications have now disappeared and may have been destroyed; from New York any unsold copies should have gone on to a distributor in Los Angeles, but there is still no sign of them on either the east or west coast. . . . Word on the grapevine is that the Semina books were impounded because a US customs official took a look at [Mark Waugh’s novel] Bubble Entendre and decided it was a blue-print for a terrorist attack on the 2012 Olympic Games.”
What was this official’s name? What was his exact reasoning? If this was indeed the case, why was my novel additionally impounded along with Mark Waugh’s book? One Break, A Thousand Blows has its measure of obscenities, pornography and shock – but nowhere does it justify, let alone condone terrorism. If anything I am a literary terrorist. Moreover, why was Jana Leo’s Rape New York impounded? And why were copies of Bridget Penney’s Index impounded? An innocuous title – no? For myself, Penney’s book was the para-literary equivalent of a Richard Serra masterpiece. How could any one, even a government official, see anything terrorizing in it?
Speculations here abound: my Goldsmiths colleague in London thinks the title itself One Break, A Thousand Blows was too connotative of a terrorist plot. That and the fact that the enigmatic cover was colored Communist red with many depictions of wigs (as in disguises). And it probably didn’t help that at the beginning of the book I quoted a phrase from the Bernadette Corporation: “People want to be someone. But the really exciting challenge is to become no one. And where will you find no ones? In nowhere. Where things are exploding.”
A long pause. On second thought (in a parallax way), I can’t really blame US customs for doing what they ultimately did. I can well imagine an average, naive customs official (let’s imagine him to be completely unaware of the avant-garde) coming across the Semina series – totally baffled, and reading something like Bridget Penney’s Index as a highly elaborate coded index on weapons of mass destruction. If all of this seems a bit farfetched, I hate to think what might really be behind the conspiracy; in a word – censorship.
These days I find myself thinking more and more about Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, considered her most popular and best-selling novel – the story is seemingly about Janey Smith, a ten-year-old American girl who has an incestuous sexual relationship with her father, who is also her boyfriend, brother, money, and amusement. Blood and Guts was banned in Germany, and I can’t help but feel that the authorities in New York effectively banned Jana Leo’s Rape New York for similar Blood and Guts reasons concerning taste and decency. Rape New York is a book about a real case in January 2001 where Leo herself was held hostage and raped during the course of an afternoon in her New York apartment. Perhaps the pulping of Kim, Penney and Waugh was simply collateral damage, incidental to the conservative backlash against Leo.
Wherever the truth lies, we here at the New School for Social Research, San Francisco are all tickled pink by it. And if in the end it turns out that this was all just an elaborate media hoax by Arts Council England (like the recent “bomb threat” publicity stunt at Cooper Union for Slavoj Zizek’s new book) – I don’t think I’ll have any regrets on the way that I approached this topic. As Kathy Acker put it, “I think the best thing in cases of censorship or things like this is to get as much media as possible.”
Yours sincerely, Maxi Kim, Beaubourg 268.
Christopher and I are delighted to welcome the badass Nik Korpon ( http://nikkorpon.com/ ) as our new fiction editor. We’re big fans of his writing, so it’s an honor to have him join the ranks.
Meanwhile, this will allow me to focus on poetry submissions, and bring a lot of new features and changes to the website. Expect loads of goodness very soon.
-Axel
Readers,
Our debut issue is now live. Rather than make a long overwritten post, we will let the stories speak for themselves.
We would like to thank the writers who sent us their work. This issue wouldn’t be what it is without their talent. Thanks to all of you, and we’re glad to have you on board.
Now, without further delay: pour yourself some coffee, or tea, or blood, turn off the lights, and enjoy the stories.
And when you’re done, put on your best make-up and costume, and go scare people.
CLICK HERE TO READ OUR FIRST ISSUE
Direct links to each story / poem:
COTTONWOODS – Vincent Louis Carrella
THE SLEEPING ROOM – Erik T. Johnson
ATTENTION DEFICIT – Matthew Dexter
HANGING ON ST. JUDE (An excerpt from the novel CONSTELLATIONS) – Nik Korpon
A SHAPE IN THE NOTHING – Chris Deal
WISTMAN’S JOY – Hereward L. M. Proops
PROUD MUSIC AFTER THE STORM – Kelcey Wells
BRAMBLE MAN – Simon West Bulford
Thorns gouged jagged lines into Arnold’s palm with each desperate yank at the vines. He paid no attention to the bloody stains smeared across his overalls, or to the ever-increasing burn of protest from his muscles as he continued his rescue attempt. But with every root he tore from the soil, and with every sinuous branch he pulled away from the man’s body, there seemed to be another piece of foliage clinging to him like barbed wire to a blanket. And Arnold was too old for this. … Continue Reading
My frayed militia jacket and the dropping a few high ranking names get me through the checkpoints and across McCarren Park. Even in the dead of night the deserted lawns and play fields are lit up like noonday by massive overhead lights. It’s an insane amount of electricity and man power to secure an uninhabited patch of grass and dirt but it’s the only open green from here to Prospect Park and The Counsels intend to protect it. The uneasy silence hurries my steps and it’s not long before I’m exiting the park and crossing Bedford Avenue and what was the high water mark during the last wave of flooding. The stifling scent of the river clings to everything and even though the water has receded there is still the sense that every surface is still damp and rotting below the surface. … Continue Reading
“What I don’t understand is how you can live like that,” Ashford Brookes said, “It’s not right.”
“Right?” Bob Wistman asked, “How can any man say how I choose to live my life is wrong or right? My own business is my own and the meddlers can go to the devil if they think they can change me.” … Continue Reading
The psychiatrist I’d been seeing, a lovely woman by the name of Dawn, with a face pale as the moon and hair like sky between the stars at midnight, she liked to trick me every time we had a session. She would ask me those questions she reserved for her clients, the $250-an-hour housewives, the pro bono cases at the clinic. “Were you abused as a child?” Or the fall back, “How was your relationship with your mother?” Between the sheets, she’d laugh and break confidentiality. … Continue Reading
Rivulets of thin pink blood stream from the sides of his lips. He chews with his mouth open. Bits of raw flesh stuck between his teeth. He dabs the corner of his lips with the cloth napkin tucked into his collar to keep his bolo tie clean and I’ve lost my appetite. I bite an ice cube in half. God damn you, Elroy, how do you find these people? He tears off another piece, looks me up and down, chews and grunts approval. It’s me or the steak but either way I want to break my glass on his neck. I poke the dead flesh lying in front of me, daring it to move. … Continue Reading
Cheryl Braddocks closed her eyes, grit her teeth with determination and pushed. Her husband, Michael, could now see the top of the baby’s head, covered with wet black hair. It was the hair of their first child. Their little boy. Their Hunter. … Continue Reading
