News and Notes

© Pushcart Press

Pushcart honor for piece first published right the heck here

We often ask ourselves, Just how far ahead of the times is failbetter.com? About six years, it turns out. We're very pleased to announce that the Pushcart Prize folks have given a coveted 'honorable mention' to Martha Cooley for a piece we published back in the fall of 2000. Congratulations, Martha! Kudos as well to Agni, which later picked up and republished it, under the title "Dogs: A Moscow Triptych."

Goin' south

Congratulations to Matt Leibel ("Paper Girl," Issue 18) and Russell Rowland ("Ed Got a Job," Issue 16), whose stories have been recognized by storySouth as among the best stories published online in 2005.

Alumni news

Greg Ames ("The Biographers," Issue 2; "The Snowing Loneliness of Buffalo," Issue 17) has stories in recent or forthcoming issues of Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Opium. For more info, visit his website.

William Auten's ("Golgotha" et al., Issue 19) paintings continue to win friends and influence people. Sycamore Review featured one on the cover of a recent issue, and he has another forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review.

David Barringer ("The Vampires," Issue 8) has two articles forthcoming in I.D. Magazine, and did the design for Opium's second print issue. Signed copies of his debut novel, Johnny Red, are available via his website.

T.C. Boyle ("Interview," Issue 12) had a story, "Question 62," in a recent Harper's, and has new work forthcoming in McSweeney's and Playboy.

Suzanne Burns ("Ballad of the Strong Man in New York" et al., Issue 6) has a story in the anthology The Best Underground Fiction Volume One, forthcoming from Stolen Time Publishing. TBUFV1 also includes work by Irvine Welsh, Anthony Doerr, and fellow failbetter.com alum Steve Almond ("Law of Sugar," Issue 8; "A Happy Dream", Issue 17).

Matthew Byrne ("In Defense of the Book" et al., Issue 13) has had poems published in recent numbers of Antietam Review, The Antioch Review, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Harpur Palate, Poet Lore, and The Portland Review.

© Harper Perennial

Michael Chabon (Interview, Issue 1) recently won a National Jewish Book Award for his latest book, The Final Solution.

E.L. Doctorow's (Interview, Issue 14) recently won the PEN/Faulkner award for his historical novel The March.

Mary Gaitskill's (Interview, Issue 19) novel, Veronica, was recently nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

The members of Girlstory, a performance collective featuring Ellen Hagan ("Old Bardstown," Issue 10), were recently honored as Vagina Warriors at an Adelphi University performance of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues.

Doug Hamill ("Blue Nanos" et al., Issue 2), who is a visual artist as well as a poet, recently signed a representation agreement with Los Angeles's Bank gallery. For more details, check out Bank's website.

Nick Hornby (Interview, Issue 9) has joined the Love Libraries initiative, which aims to transform Britain's public libraries into a "21st-century reading service" that will make collections easier to access both in person and online. For more information check out the Love Libraries website.

Heidi Julavits (Interview, Issue 4) recently published an article in the New York Times on traveling to Baja California with children.

Shelly Lependorf and Stan Shire ("Horizon Fields III" et al., Issue 18) have shows forthcoming at the Carrie Haddad Gallery, in Hudson, NY, and Gallery Siano and the Sande Webster Gallery, in Philadelphia. They also have new work available for viewing on their website.

Douglas Light's ("Break Up," Issue 18) short story "Wedding Factory" will appear in Hobart 6.

Nathan Long ("Form of Things," Issue 5) has moved to Philadelphia to teach creative writing at Richard Stockton College. He has work forthcoming in Tusculum Review, Dispatch Literary Journal, Fringe Journal, and Lodestar Quarterly.

Robert Lopez ("Essentials," Issue 15) has fiction forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, elimae, DIAGRAM, and SmokeLong Quarterly, and is the new co-editor of SleepingFish.

Peter Markus's ("Our Father Who Walks On Water Comes Home With Two Buckets Of Fish," Issue 2) first book of brothers, Good, Brother, is slated for reissue by Calamari Press. Meanwhile, his story "Good, Brother" is forthcoming in the Norton anthology New Sudden Fiction. And he has stories in the new issues of Unsaid and Phoebe, and another in the Starcherone Books anthology PP/FF.

Lou Mathews's ("The Garlic Eater," Issue 19) memoir "The End of the Line", about one of the world's worst jobs, appears in Tin House 25. His long short story "The Moon Reaches Down for Me Like the Fist in a Siquieros Painting" will appear in the next issue of Black Clock. "The Garlic Eater" and "The Moon..." are part of his forthcoming story collection Shaky Town.

Karyna McGlynn ("Cypress Point," Issue 13) has poetry forthcoming in La Petite Zine, Typo Magazine, Kulture Vulture, 42opus, Moria, and eratio. She recently won the Michael R. Gutterman Award at the University of Michigan, where she is pursuing her MFA.

failbetter.com founding editor David McLendon's journal Unsaid recently published its second issue, featuring work by Peter Markus and M Sarki.

Jen Michalski's ("The Movie Version of My Life," Issue 18) story "The Situation," has been nominated by the editors of Lily for storySouth's Million Writers Awards.

Mary Morris's (Interview, Issue 16) novel, Revenge, is just out in paperback from Picador. Her travel memoir about the Mississippi River, The River Queen, will be published next spring by Henry Holt.

© Persea

Thylias Moss's ("Prologue of the Book of Hallowed Verses of the Holy Circus of Decent Girls," Issue 18) film Place Value was recently screened by San Francisco's Museum of the African Diaspora, while Ann Arbor's Work Gallery mounted a related installation. Tokyo Butter, her collection of limited fork poems, is due from Persea this July.

Hal Niedzviecki's ("Camp Gesher," Issue 18) Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity, is just out from City Lights Books. Check his website for more details.

Mia Pearlman ("The Galaxies in My Veins Still Waltzing," et al., Issue 16) has a piece in "Making Your Mark: On Paper," which is up through April 21 at the Brooklyn Arts Council gallery in DUMBO. She has five works in "Wood Water and War, A National Exhibit of Resource, Disposal and Rebirth," which runs through April 15th at the Starpin Gallery in Shelton, CT.

© Ravenna Press

Kathryn Rantala's ("The Crow," et al., Issue 7) illustrated poetry collection The Plant Waterer is just out from Ravenna Press.

Cooper Renner ("Origami" and "Untitled," published under the name Cooper Esteban, Issue 4) is in his second year editing elimae, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary. Chinese Checkers, his translation of three works by the Mexican writer Mario Bellatin, is due this spring from Ravenna Press.

Thaddeus Rutkowski ("Dear Daughter" and "Waiting for the Phone to Ring," Issue 15) recently gave three readings and made aSearching For Mary Poppins recording for the blind in London.

M. Sammons ("Human Condition," Issue 6) is currently working on a novel and refusing to do anything but. He will finish by summer's end.

M Sarki ("Daniella in the Palace" et al., Issue 3) has eighteen—that's eighteenUnsaid.

Karen Shepard's ("Like Love," Issue 14) third novel, Don't I Know You?, is due out in May from William Morrow. She also has a short story, "In My Country," slated to run in Glimmer Train, and an essay, "The Unflappable Lina G.," due out in "Searching for Mary Poppins," a forthcoming anthology about mothers' relationships with their children's nannies.

Ed Skoog ("Art History" and "Darwin," Issue 7) has work slated for inclusion in Intersections, a postdeluvian New Orleans anthology, and cartoons and commentary up now at the Crescent City diaspora site nolafugees.com. He also has poems in recent issues of The Literary Review and sidebrow.net, and others due out this spring in Blackbird, New Orleans Review, and Ploughshares.

Claudia Smith's ("Cherry," Issue 15) story "My Robot," which ran last year on Juked, has been selected for inclusion in The New Sudden Fiction, an anthology edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas, due out next year from Norton.

Lee Upton ("Apology to Keats" and "The Broom," Issue 1; "The Decorator Crab," Issue 17) has poems forthcoming in New England Review and Massachusetts Review. Next year, New Issues Press will publish her fifth poetry collection, Undid in the Land of Undone.

Jim Zervanos ("Behind Curtains," Issue 2) has a story in Phillyfiction, an anthology of works by Philadelphia writers, and another in a recent issue of Cimarron Review.

We encourage all our alumni to keep us updated on the latest in their lives, by dropping us a line at alumni@failbetter.com.

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