A Nigerian Among the Turks

"His daughter," he said. "I’m sorry, Obi. His little daughter. Want to touch you, Kanki. You say yes?"

~~ from "The Desire to Unlearn" by Chigozie Obioma

The Cry of the Sloth

"Meanwhile, I have been practicing, and I believe I have learned to do a pretty good imitation of the sloth's cry. I place my thumbs firmly against the openings of my nostrils, blocking them completely. I then give a vigorous snort and at the same time fling both thumbs away from the nostrils in a decisive forward motion. The result is a woofling whistle which I imagine is quite close to what a young ai must sound like. I did it at the post office the other day when the clerk told me I had insufficient postage on my package."

~~ from The Cry of the Sloth by Sam Savage

short fiction update

"Free Car," "My Father's Great Recession," "Early Morning Train," and "The Betrayal of Times of Peace and Prosperity" are short stories accessible for free online while "Frade Killed Ellen" and "Turquoise Truck" can be accessed for ninety-nine cents wherever reading costs less than a dollar.

R.I.P.

Mary Oliver and Sam Savage passed on. If you are literary and dead as of this week, don't be shy about dropping me a line, so I can add your news here. And I already feel guilty and weird about neglecting or mentioning that Jack Bogle has positioned himself long on the afterlife in the total market index fund in the sky.

Housemates

from "Housemates" by Eric Thurschwell:

"The New Year brought the worst ice storm on record. The roads were impassable. The supermarkets closed. He ate my cat."

Back and Broke in Philly

In 2017, I published a reprint of one of the more polished excerpts of a memoir I hope to publish one day. Enjoy!

Michael A. Ferro

Stuck on an idea for your novel-in-progress? No worries! Just wait until literally seconds before you’re about to finally fall asleep after more than an hour with insomnia and BOOM—the ideas will come. Have your fucking notepad ready!

— Michael A. Ferro (@MichaelFerro) January 10, 2019

The French stole the Grinch for Christmas!

I was all wound up for the wall, intoxicated by French theft of The Grinch gig employment, but then I snoozed and loosed. . . missed the entire airing. . . but who do we blame for this French foreign film tax credit noted near the end of the film credits? Chirac? Hollande? Macron? Le Socialisme? Sylvia Beach? Gertrude Stein? Hemingway? Disney? Des pommes frites? Houellebecq?

Meg's Twisdom

Dear creative writers, don’t quit your day jobs! That’s usually a bad idea. Use what happens in your day jobs as material for your writing, especially if it’s a weird day job and if it drives you crazy. The hardest, saddest jobs inspire the best story material!

— megpokrass (@megpokrass) January 9, 2019

On Happy Meals and more. . .

Listen to William Lessard on Happy Meals, poetry, Heavy Feather Review, and much more at John Madera's Jamming Their Transmission, Episode 1.

escape is not a reality. . .

"It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes. Perhaps, he said, we are all like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him becoming lost."

~~ from Outline by Rachel Cusk

Attention Walmart Shoppers

It's kind of cool that Walmart lists "Turquoise Truck" as an eBook for sale on its website when Amazon doesn't have a version for kindle.

in a European novel

"If his long day were lived in a European novel, he'd become 'D' when on the run or near disappeared."

~~ from Fight for Your Long Day by Alex Kudera

Rachel Cusk's Outline

"The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite--and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves?"

~~ from Outline by Rachel Cusk