Author James D. Best has graced FC’s ‘zine pages on two occasions in the past. He’s offering free Kindle copies of two of his novels until Thursday, May 2. The first free book is The Shopkeeper, the first Steve Dancey tale. It’s the first of six. The second free book is The Shut Mouth Society ,a mystery concerning a recently discovered document of Abraham Lincoln’s. Thanks, Jim!
We’re very fortunate to have a brand spanking new novel to begin podcasting tonight: SuperGuy by Kurt Clopton. Oliver is a Milwaukee, Wisconsin desk jockey who suddenly finds himself transformed into a superhero. If you’re a desk jockey, you can probably tilt back in your faux Aeron, close your eyes and totally imagine what this feels like. If not, perhaps at least you’re wondering what it would feel like? Well, here’s your chance, and instead of having to read about it on your Kindle, lucky you! Listen to it right here, exclusively on the Fictional Café. At least for the next four weeks, as we present two chapters each Saturday night. Enjoy! Please click on the arrow below to listen to the first chapter of SuperGuy. Please click on the arrow below to listen to…
Artist’s Statement: My work explores my anxieties. I work to externalize those anxieties in a visually interesting way. The image of a Hungry Ghost (in Buddhism, a person doomed to wander the earth, unable to satisfy their overwhelming desires) has always been a recurrent theme in my work, but in the last two years it has taken a more central role. Who knew there were so many of them? I find the image of the Hungry Ghost useful in explaining to myself the current political state of things and at the same time externalizing my emotions to reduce the angst I feel. In some Buddhist cosmology, a person can be reborn as either a human being, into the realm of the Gods, or as a Hungry Ghost; Hungry Ghost being the worst rebirth. I find…
A Note on Jealousy When I ran into Heather at Union and said hello Jennifer asked who’s Heather with smoke alarm eyes I said a friend I meant it jealousy is the kind of thing that puts teeth in a line of vision I was jealous of your Emi too sometimes one must chomp the string one time I believed I could love without caring about the past but stones settled along the path can still be pushed by gusts under a sky wherein there is no ceiling or ending except for the vastness of our longing in space Terminated Rip the last life-supporting limb off the tree; no money grows here now, no more sustaining green glints the grass, just faces of dead men we don’t know preside over lives with a capital…
By Ann Davis Editor’s note: Here is Part II of Ann Davis’ experimental fiction, guaranteed to open your eyes. The featured image, “Collapse of the Mind,” is courtesy Steve Sangapore, our Fine Arts Barista. But . . . before you begin reading, listen: Morris could not remember the last morning the sunlight had looked so golden, or when he had had such a refreshing sleep. Woke up entirely on his own too, before his alarm even, a whole hour before he usually did. Especially surprising was that he felt perfectly awake, with no urge to lie back down whatsoever. Must be from his long nap during the insertion the other day. Oh yes, the insertion! Suddenly driven by an urge to check the mirror, Morris darted out of bed and straight for the looking glass…
Editor’s note: We met Ann Davis at a writers conference in December, 2018. She wanted to know more about the Fictional Cafe and then told us the writer’s lament: her hard drive had crashed and she’d lost all her writing. Well, a year passes and we’re back at the same writing conference again when Ann walks up to the Fictional Cafe booth with a two-inch stack of printout in her hands. She had recovered her work! We told her we were entertaining manuscripts that were a little, ah, different for 2019, and she tugged this one out from her stack. We read it, liked it, and accepted it. Of course it had to go through the submissions process as a Word file, but here it is. We’re calling it “experimental fiction.” Due to its length…
Third and Final Episode Here we are folks, as promised, at the same time and same station, headphones poised to listen to the last episode of our mystery-adventure in 3-D sound from our friends and fortunately frequent contributors at ZBS. I do want to give them a great big fist bump from Fictional Café and a nudge for you to go check out their site, because it is full to overflowing with great stories and tales for listening. You’ll recall that “‘The Maltese Goddess’ is “a detective story set in the 1930s, with voodoo, mobsters, goddess worshippers, a snake cult, and an ancient, priceless, statue from Malta.” And, as you remember, it won first prize in the Prix Italia audio arts contest a few years ago (you’ll hear about this again in the Introduction). It’s…
Creative Nonfiction by Vlad Linder Translated from the Russian by Marika Marina One can travel in different ways: observe the surroundings comfortably through a car window, or blend into the local people’s lives, experiencing and going through their pain and joy, troubles and concerns, just as the author of ‘The Chronicles of Cambodia” did. Vlad Linder describes in detail his journey to the land of The Khmer Rouge, which took place in April 2012 . . .. Part I A week after my arrival in Sihanoukville, I was rather tired of the predictable life of a settled tourist. Staying at a snug little house right on the shore of the Gulf of Siam, I kept feeling I was looking at the world through a well-polished, barely visible glass. I set off to a place, where…
A Novel in Ten 140-Word Tweets by John Gantz We’ve intentionally chosen today, April First – AKA All Fool’s Day – to publish this wise, witty, sex-and-death novel. We leave it to you to discern exactly what this Mayan love story means. You may want to re-read it a few times. Oh, and figure out why we’re publishing it today. 1. The body lay at his feet, desiccated, looking up. He nudged it. Another one, he mumbled. Time is short. 2. What is it she asked, hookah smoke curling around her head? ’’’Nother roach. I thought they could survive an A-bomb.” 3. TS Elliot was wrong. It wouldn’t end with a whimper, OR a bang, but a cloud, a cloud of alien germs bathing the earth. 4. Come here, she said, opening her blouse. He…
Saturday Night at the Podcasts As promised, here’s the second episode of ZBS Media’s incredible noir detective opera. If you missed Part 1, you should definitely click back through the slider on our home page and listen to it first. There is one more episode, which will “air” here next week. Or, as we used to say in radio, “same time, same station.” As we did last week, we’re also posting the Introduction as a separate audio file. There’s a technical, not aesthetic, reason for this. Because “The Maltese Goddess” was produced in 3-D sound, these episodes are large files. So large, in fact, that they exceed WordPress’s size limit. But through the miracle of audio editing technology, we were able to separate the intro from the story itself and . . . Voila! Here…