Simon Jacobs's Blog

2018 TOUR!

I'm going on tour for Palaces!

To celebrate, I have inexpertly crafted the above poster. I've always wanted to make a tour flyer, so now that's done (would you believe that it has over 30 photoshop layers? I would not).

I'm incredibly fortunate to have an intimidatingly-talented group of writers and musicians performing alongside me at most of these events, and I couldn't be more excited.

All the details are below, and I'll continue to update this post as further details are finalized (all events are also forever housed on the performances page here).

Come out! All events are free and open to everyone!

(And as ever, if you're planning something and looking for enthusiastic participants or readers, please reach out!)

******HOUSE TOUR 2018******March 29, 2018, 4:30pm
@ Earlham College, Richmond, IN
Reading and Discussion
Details to come!

April 2, 2018, 7pm
@ Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, MI
Reading and Discussion
Event / Facebook event 

April 3, 2018, 7pm
@ Two Dollar Radio HQ, Columbus, OH
Details to come!

April 4, 2018, 7pm
@ Wells & Co. Custom Tattoo, Dayton, OH
Wells & Co. Presents Simon Jacobs and Cricketbows
with Cricketbows!
Facebook event

April 5, 2018, 7pm
@ Volumes Bookcafe, Chicago, IL
Reading with Lindsay Hunter, Alex Higley, and Rachel Hyman
Event / Facebook event

April 6, 2018, 5pm
@ Mission Creek Festival, Iowa City, IA
Lit Walk at Mission Creek 2018
@ RSVP (Round #1)
with Hanif Abdurraqib, Shy Watson, Amy Saul-Zerby, Steven Fletcher, and James D’Agostino.
Event / Facebook event

April 12, 2018
SOMETHING IN THE BAY AREA WITH COLIN WINNETTE, STAY TUNED
Details to come!


******//HOUSE TOUR 2018******

PALACES: BEHIND THE SCENES!

Hi there,

PALACES was officially published last month! As such, there are a couple of reviews, etc that you can read if you're wavering (the full list is on the PALACES page elsewhere on this blog):
starred review from Publisher's Weekly;starred review from Foreword Reviews;review by Toby Carroll on Tor.com;"Hitting Shelves," written by me for Fiction Advocate.Thus far, I've done a couple of cool book-related events, including:

A launch at Bluestockings--

Launch crew (from left): Ross Wagenhofer, Cackler, Dan Schwartz,  Jeanne Thornton,
Freddie Moore, Miracle Jones (photo by Martha Moody, my mother)
A discussion with Leni Zumas (Red Clocks) and Eugene Lim (Dear Cyborgs) at the NYPL--

Eugene Lim, Cackler, Leni Zumas (photo courtesy of Leni Zumas)
Later this month, I'll be performing in Philadelphia at Gina's 45 with Carmen Maria Machado, Colin Winnette, Caren Beilin, and Cynthia Dewi Oka.

I'm also planning a short tour through the midwest (and one stop in San Francisco) for late March/early April (more details soon!).

As ever, if you're interested in learning more, reviewing or covering the book, etc, please get in touch! I am always up for readings et al and would probably love to perform with you.

If you see Palaces out at a bookstore or in the wild, let me know, and send a photo if possible! I am making a list.

ALSO:::: I'm opening for the psych-rock band Cricketbows at Wells and Co. in Dayton and I WOULD LOVE TO DO MORE STUFF LIKE THIS. INVITE ME TO YOUR BASEMENT GIGS!!

INVITE ME TO YOUR HARDCORE SHOWS ! !!

I HAVE A LOUD SPEAKING VOICE!!

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In celebration of the book's launch, here is some secret behind-the-scenes content from the development of PALACES:

WORKING TITLES (some seriously considered, others not)

NEW MONEY, OLD MONEY
FOYER
LAWN
HIS REIGN ENDS
THRONE
PUNK ROCK

"AUTHORS WHO THINK THEY'RE DESIGNERS" SYNDROME
*an early cover concept that I submitted to Two Dollar Radio. I still love it but I understand that it's probably too bleak to ever be used (please also note my skillful integration of the TDR logo at bottom-right). I am also omitting the designs that exhibit blatant copyright infringement.

feat. Michelangelo's Death of Bara
SELECT WORDS FROM THE MS THAT MICROSOFT WORD DOESN'T BELIEVE ARE REAL WORDS

arabesqued
bottleweight
gooily
plasticky
psychosoma
punkhouse
punkroutine
sexcapade
sinkmouth

SOME PHOTOS OF DRAFTS OF KEY SCENES

"Casey Is Dead," early scene, notebook #1,
written early 2014 Preamble to "Mahogany Wardrobe," inside Vivian's
mansion, notebook #2, written late 2014
"Charity," a scene about spurning food, interposed
into notebook #2, written July 2015 in Montreal

SELECTIONS FROM 2017

Here's a list of some things that I've been excited about this year. This isn't meant to be a definitive or comprehensive 'best of 2017' list or anything (despite the subheadings) because there are a lot of 2017 books that I have yet to read (I am very behind on reading this year): it is merely a list of enthusiasms.

also if you have music recommendations, you should send them to me:

BEST ALBUMS
Land Animal , by Bent Knee
--favorite track, "Holy Ghost": I saw this band live for the first time last week and it was unlike anything else; their music is like some muddy dark gospel that someone dug up from the forest and translated for our modern times, just endlessly inspiring and inventive and dense. The band has an incredible camaraderie live, too, like they have their own secret language;

STAO , by Dun-Stao;
--favorite track, "STAO": this is like minimalist zeuhl filtered through black metal and gamelan and chamber music and a million other arcane influences (+ invented language). You should all listen to and buy this EP to encourage this motherfucker to make more stuff;

The Assassination of Julius Caesar , by Ulver
--favorite track, "1969": "a black metal band that just discovered synthesizers and 80s horror movie soundtracks" - Graham;

Stage Four , by Touché Amoré
--favorite track (TIE), "Flowers and You" and "Water Damage": every couple of years TA releases a new, terrific album, and each time it gets a little more melodic and somehow better than the last; this came out late-2016 but this is my list and I mostly listened to the album in 2017. I hope that Jeremy is taking care of his voice because otherwise I wonder how many more albums it can last. Perhaps the most cathartic 35 minutes of 2016 (2017);

Beyond the Fleeting Gales , by Crying
--favorite track, "Well and Spring": it's like being wrapped in a warm blanket, I don't know what else to tell you, this also came out in 2016 but whatever;

Between the Earth and Sky , by Lankum
--favorite track, "The Granite Gaze": Lankum makes all of their songs sound like myths from long-forgotten eras. Maybe some of them are. See also: "What Will We Do When We Have No Money?"

BEST MOVIE
Columbus (dir. Kogonada)
--A perfect, beautifully-shot, understated movie about the midwest.

BEST BOOKS
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, by Hanif Abdurraqib (Two Dollar Radio);
Literally show me a healthy person, by Darcie Wilder (Tyrant Books);
Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood (Penguin Random House);
Hotwriting, by Todd Anderson (Instar Books);
The Grip of It, by Jac Jemc (FSG).

I haven't read the sarah book yet, fuck off

BRUTALEST DEATH SCENE IN LITERATURE
Gutted by a tri-antlered helldemon in The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, by Margaret Killjoy (Tor Books).

BRUTALEST OFFSCREEN SUBTLY IMPLIED DEATH SCENE IN LITERATURE
Every scene in The Buried Giant.

BEST LIVE ACTS
Bent Knee (@ Rough Trade);
Sick Shit (@ Punk Island);
Touché Amoré (@ Bowery Ballroom, see above, also it was a Bad Anniversary and this helped to make it right);
Patti Smith (@ Summerstage).

BEST EP ON A CD-R THAT I GOT AT PUNK ISLAND
Field Goal by Field Goal.

BEST ALBUM IN A JEWEL CASE THAT I GOT AT PUNK ISLAND
Softcore by Sick Shit.

BEST BAND THAT DIDN'T RELEASE SHIT THIS YEAR
Blackbird Raum (which doesn't mean that you shouldn't take this moment to go and listen to Destroying or Caspian's side project Scissorbills' THAN THOU , because these things will change your life).

BEST UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS
Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton (now with more hovercars)
Tyrant by Brandi Wells
Lake Humm by Martha Moody
THE OTHER NOVEL I WROTE (String Follow)

BEST YOUTUBE CHANNEL
atmospheric black metal

BEST BAND NAMES THAT I INVENTED (up for grabs)
House Ghosts (pop punk)
Crop Top (shoegaze)
Golgonooza (black metal)
Alphalpha (regular metal)

BEST RISE AGAINST ALBUM
...the one I made up, Hooves, a higher-concept and more allusive version of their mediocre 2017 album Wolves:


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In other news, if you've found your way here without knowing, Palaces (my first novel), is due out on January 16, 2018 from Two Dollar Radio. I'm pretty excited; there's a whole page on this blog about it, with blurbs et al! If you're interested in learning more, reviewing the book, etc, reach out at jacobs852 [at] gmail [dot] com, as ever!
Booksellers, critics, and librarians can copies from Two Dollar Radio here (available now!).

Palaces

PALACES (Two Dollar Radio, 2017)The most exciting news: my first novel, PALACES, is going to be published by Two Dollar Radio in January of 2018! You can read the announcement and a short interview with me on the TDR site, and even pre-order the book here.

The book is about power and extremism and property and uncertain futures and a whole bunch of other thorny things. And check out the 70s movie poster-style cover!!

One of my favorite writers, Jeanne Thornton - author of The Dream of Doctor Bantam and The Black Emerald, who I have blogged about extensively, yet not nearly enough - has granted a perfectly-summative blurb:

"In this singular debut novel that reads like a cross between Derek Jarman's Jubilee and an unsettling folk ballad, Jacobs narrates the journey of two Midwestern pilgrims, each striving for ascetic purity both in their possessions and in their emotional lives, as they silently war against the ostentation of the wealthy, the dread expectations of gender, maybe against object permanence itself. It feels like The Road, but with less faith in humanity, and this S. Jacobs is a literary talent to watch." —Jeanne Thornton

It's hard to overstate how excited I am about this: Two Dollar Radio was the first indie press that I ever knew about (my first book was Joshua Mohr's Termite Parade in 2010), and they're based in Ohio, so we have Regional Affinity, and most decisively are wonderful people to work with. Publishing with TDR feels like bringing everything full-circle.

I started writing the book in May of 2013, and did my last substantial edits in April of 2017, so it has been a long road and I'm glad to finally get it out into the world. Most of that time I was consistently working on it, though there were a couple of spans of 2-4 months where I let the manuscript rest. I started writing the book when I was 22, and it has changed along with me: it has all of my formative years within it, as well as my shifting preoccupations. I'm excited for you to read it.

Here's a photo of all the cumulative drafts stacked atop one another, all the way down to when it went by - *shudder* - alternate titles (the very first original draft is handwritten and scattered across a few notebooks):

the many drafts of PalacesOnce more: you can order it here. :)

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8 months ago I had a story published in Joyland called "Let Me Take You to Olive Garden" that I'm still tickled with. I think it's indicative of the turns that my writing is taking these days.

What else can I tell you? Earlier this week, I finished another novel ("finished" a "novel"), which is called at this point String Follow (I don't think the title will change) and is about a group of suburban Ohio teens who begin to experience occult phenomenon.

I recently finished Patti Smith's M Train, which was incredible, enormous in feeling, and long overdue. I used to think that if I lived in New York for long enough, one day I would run into David Bowie. David Byrne or David Bowie. Now I'm convinced that if I live in New York for long enough, I'll run into Patti Smith.

And I still walk past David Bowie's apartment on Lafayette sometimes; this photo is old now but it's still with me:

January 10, 2016

Someone Else, Someone Good

Starting on Thursday, November 10, Sotheby's is auctioning off David Bowie's private art collection, almost 400 pieces in all, with an estimated value of $13 million. Bowie's art collection is famously far-ranging - from Tintoretto to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Bowie's spin-painting with Damien Hirst (though there's no sign at Sotheby's of the rumored "small Rubens" he's mentioned in interviews) - and Bowie himself was an avid painter and critic (he served on the editorial board of Modern Painters for many years; his paintings are gestural portraits in the spirit of Bacon et al). From his departure from public life following a heart attack in 2004 until his unexpected reappearance with The Next Day in 2013, most media accounts of his life depicted Bowie settling comfortably into old age and collecting artwork (it was one of these accounts that directly inspired the first stories in SATURN).

It's fascinating to look through the collection (which as far as I know has never been catalogued for the public, only speculated at piecemeal) and trace certain pieces to their particular eras of fascination in Bowie's ouevre, to find their echoes in albums or costumes.

One example: take the series of minotaur prints by Michael Ayrton (undated); a collection of bronze African heads and masks (here's one) acquired from a South African gallery in 1995; the aforementioned Hirst spin painting from 1995; an orgiastic Jacob Epstein illustration for Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (acquired by Bowie in 1994); Odd Nerdrum's Dawn ; Stephen Finer's Head of a Woman : blend them all together, and you effectively have 1995's 1. Outside, a sprawling, atmospheric concept album about mutilation and murder in the name of art, with an artist/murderer called "the Minotaur" at its center, whose cover was a self-portrait by Bowie. Watch the video for "The Hearts Filthy Lesson" and you'll see what I mean.

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I just finished Trinie Dalton's first story collection, Wide Eyed (Akashic, 2005). It's a wonderful book of charming, bizarre stories full of specific knowledge. In essence it's built from the same kind of thematic association as Bowie's art collection (and his music): deep knowledge of salamander anatomy in conversation with Marc Bolan's "Salamanda Palaganda" to service a larger point about wanting to feel protected and small (in "A Giant Loves You"); fixation with A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and an attraction to serial killers/predatory men as a desire to find a moment of perfect innocence ("Chrysalis"); bloodied tiles as the ultimate abhorrent image ("Tiles").

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Inspired by one of the stories in the collection ("Lou in the Moonlight"), I listened to Lou Reed's Transformer again today, and noticed two new things:

1) The coda to "Perfect Day" (a song Dalton describes as "cheerfully sad") repeats the line "You're going to reap just what you sow" through the fade out, adding a level of almost biblical dread to this quintessentially romantic and optimistic song;

2) "Hangin' Round" has a great dig: "You're still doing things that I gave up years ago."

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Luna Luna recently reprinted one of my early stories from Masterworks (a series about reenacting famous works of art), this one on Goya's Witches' Flight , in their Halloween issue. It's one of my favorite stories from the series - if you like that one, you can read the rest here. There will be two final stories in the series, which will be published in Paper Darts in good time.
I also have a story coming up in Joyland later this month that I'm really excited about. Otherwise, I am still trying to get this novel published/finish the next one.

☆｡･*JEANNE THORNTON APPRECIATION DAY*･｡☆

Hello! I’m here today to talk to you endlessly about Jeanne Thornton. She is the author, most recently and transcendently, of THE BLACK EMERALD, a short story collection published this September by Instar Books (their launch title) and the novel THE DREAM OF DOCTOR BANTAM. Her books have the best titles!
I love Jeanne Thornton’s writing, in part, because she allows her characters to be mean, contradictory, arbitrary, and trivial, all of which is extremely important to me. And because, perhaps equally important, all of her characters have meticulous bedrooms, and in my opinion, if you know your characters well enough to describe, exhaustively, what is on the walls, shelves, and carpets of the room in which they sleep, then you have pretty much risen above any critique that could be leveled against you as a writer.
TO WIT:
“The Black Emerald” (the titular novella), basically astounding for these reasons:
begins with an extremely thorough description of watching a movie/being in love, a movie that I assume to be invented, but whose explanation is so spookily detailed that I have to believe it’s real;has one of the most perfectly-described and casually menacing fathers I’ve yet read; he only appears in like three scenes but they are all shockingly, almost criminally good. Here’s a smidgen:

“She woke up to the sound of her father knocking on her door. She could imagine him there: short, balding, eyes big and brown and vulnerable. In one of her cartoons he would be the screaming victim of a titanic monster, the kind of uniquely ugly face that it’s too complicated to draw episode after episode, so it’s best to have the character killed early. It’s more convenient for everyone."

later:

“And it was true; he would do it; he would wait here as long as she and her bad nature let him. He was stronger than her, larger than her; she would die first when they ran out of food and water; he would be here long after she was gone. She was weaker than him. She was weak and she let him do this to her. There was nothing she could do but do the Right Thing, which was shut up, sit as still as she could, leave three fingers pressed to the throb on the side of her skull, try to wait until her feeling got cold enough for her to be the adult in the situation.” 

speaking of cartoons as per the first excerpt, this novella also includes the most vividly imaginable depictions of artwork and its creation (like, can you conjure a picture of a house sketched in “clean lines, romantic manga lines, lots of white space and thick cartoon contours”? of course you can);Jeanne writes about magical happenings absolutely straight;Lava Caves Road;happens to be one of the best and most convincing high school/teenage stories I’ve ever read (I have read a lot of high school stories), for the following undebatable reasons (a sublist):aforementioned bedroom phenomenon;I imagine this as exactly my high school, a southern Ohio to The Black Emerald’s Austin, right down to Miss Stevens, the kindly and sensitive art teacher;the following sentence suite:

“She wished she was an orphan. No, she didn’t. That was a fucked up thing to think. She didn’t want to think fucked up things about the world. The world was a really great place, really, if you just understood why everything happened the way it did, like God could probably."

a guidance counselor is impeccably described;this passage about ‘love for real’:

“And Josephine would have to look at her classy art project every day: something she’d have loved to have done, something far beyond anything she could do for herself. Eventually this would lead to them getting back together and being in love for real. There was no better use for school than promoting love for real. The whole institution ought to be burned down to the extent that it failed to promote love for real. That was what her stupid peers could never understand, but Josephine might be made to.”

(When I was in high school art class probably my junior year (I think, by turns, both the least-alienating and most-alienating part of all high school) I remember one of the girls at my table (on whom I had a pretty large crush at the time) asked me (sad, lumpish) playfully if I’d ever been in love, and I teetered for a while until giving a noncommittal answer while knowing that the proper thing  to do would be to shout “YES I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU,” in any case)
And that’s just the opening novella! Later on, “Chairs” is basically a great, unsettling aspect story (even though it includes sexually entitled college males, which are probably my least-regarded figures in life); it has an exceptional room and here is one part of a perfect paragraph:

“He walked her home after the movie and kissed her on the cheek in the laundry-smelling hallway outside her dorm room, impetuously, like a darting mongoose. Afterward she touched the hot place where his outsider's lips had been while she looked at herself in the mirror, and she wondered at how suddenly that square inch of her body had been taken over, how flagrantly he had colonized it, overturned its old codes. She found it charming, in a mildly disapproving, indulgent manner.”

Like a darting mongoose! The remapped body! Isn’t it great??? [I had long sentence about mixing the corporality of the 1st sentence with the broader metaphorical colonization of the 2nd sentence which I’ve deleted out of mercy. Isn’t it great???]

Basically, The Black Emerald as a whole has just like an unstoppable fountain of magical talent and technique going for it that I am still in the midst of processing, so, yes, check it out and then try to write a room again, I dare you.
As I mentioned, this book is also the launch title from Instar Books, a VERY snazzy new publishing venture with new and varied forms of their books that ‘unlock’ as each title reaches various sales benchmarks. (Right now it’s in ebook format, which means you can have it instantly, so that’s motivation, and don’t you want to feel responsible for making that counter crack 100?)
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THE DREAM OF DOCTOR BANTAM
I can’t talk about Jeanne Thornton without also talking about The Dream of Doctor Bantam (OR Books, 2012), which I think was my favorite novel that I read this year. I’ve talked about it (somewhat obliquely) in another blog-post, but I’ll echo what I said there and say that this is a book I love dearly, find to be shamelessly honest, and would recommend to basically any reader. It has A LOT of heart and its cultishness is described in such an attentive and detailed way that it becomes almost tender and inviting, as well as sinister?
I know less than nothing about Scientology (meaning that in my first read I analyzed the “Scientology-like cult” of Doctor Bantam much as I did the “Scientology-like cult” of The Master, which is I guess like any cult with strange machines), but since I read this novel I have been paying A LOT of attention to the construction of the new Scientology center on 125th street in East Harlem near my apartment, to the chagrin of some who know me (it’s between the public library/’Demolition Depot’ and appears to be permanently in its final stages of renovation). This is exclusively because of this book.
Incidentally I was poking around on Amazon and I found this sentence in the blurb: “In Julie Thatch you cannot help but see shades of Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander.” I have no idea who wrote this sentence but I guess the idea is that they’re both punk-y young non-heteronormative women? Maybe young female punks in literature are so rare but I don’t think so; in any case if you do like punk-y books of any variety this is certainly one of them and don’t let Stieg Larsson trick you. DON’T LET HIM.
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ABJURATION CLUB
Finally: being a writer of the internet means there is quite a bit of stuff ‘freely available’ across these digital spaces, but I would STRONGLY recommend that you check out ‘Abjuration Club,'a monthly Patreon zine by Jeanne (rhymes) in which you get comics, fictions, random writings, paraphernalia, and excerpts from SUMMER FUN. SUMMER FUN is a novel-in-progress that Jeanne is writing about Brian Wilson/the Beach Boys, but rather than explicitly about the Beach Boys the novel is about the Get Happies (their proxy, much like the 1980 Elvis Costello album), and IT IS WONDERFUL. Specifically, spread throughout the last four abjuration clubs, here are some further excellent reasons to be involved:very vivid description of desert witch-practice by the narrator;impractical artist business cards;striptease toothbrushing;a monopoly game with Brian Wilson’s proxy-father that GETS DRAMATIC;etc!
If you’re appropriately intrigued, you can download the first issue of Abjuration Club **for free** here, in which can be found not only an excerpt of Summer Fun (about sadness and paintings and Brian Wilson’s mama), but ALSO a background/history of The Black Emerald, which will perhaps lead you into additional, darker forays. You can download basically any amount each month and in return get all of these prizes!
I cannot wait to read SUMMER FUN. It’s going to be phenomenal. I could revel in Jeanne’s writing for days, and maybe someday you will too?
Until next time,Simon(get happy)

SATURNs for sale / MASTERWORKS

I thought it was worth letting you know here that, if you like, you can buy copies of SATURN—my collection of David Bowie stories recently out from Spork Press—directly from me. Right now, they are $12 (including shipping). Obviously I will sign all of them and additionally include a ripped-out page of a Bowie biography from the era of your choosing. If you’re interested, give me a shout, and prepare to divulge 1) your preferred color (slime or blue, see previous post for evidence), 2) your favorite Bowie era (to determine the biographical excerpt), and 3) mailing address.
In other news, a smallish piece of fiction called “Accession” was published in Everyday Genius earlier this month; it’s kind of about utterly defacing famous works of art, and is a part of the book that I’m working on (thanks to Dolan Morgan for picking this piece up). In case you’re tracking these things, another death-focused part of this book appeared in the latest issue of Forklift, OH , but you’ll have to go to print for that one. (If you do, it comes with a packet of seeds; it also comes with Ben Kopel’s “Sad Punk Sutra,” which you wouldn’t want to miss a word of.)
Since last we spoke (and in direct and pointed contrast to defacing works of art), I’ve also started writing MASTERWORKS, a recurring flash fiction series featured every month in the Paper Darts e-newsletter. It’s about reenactments of famous works of art. Sign up for the mailing list here, or peruse the three installments that have been published so far:       The Death of Marat , by Jacques-Louis David.      The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch.       Witches’ Flight , by Francisco Goya.It’s all paintings as yet, but this month (November) it’s going to be a monolithic stone object, which should be fun. These stories are mostly ornate little echo-boxes, and it’s probably the most fun I’ve had writing in a long time; basically I want my stories to be the written equivalent of this song. 
Let me know what you think, or if you have any artworks you would like to recommend. I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS.
As always,I remain,Simon

SHAMELESS

Here is a selection of the colors in which SATURN is now available, alongside commentary with what movie I was watching when I learned that these covers existed, basically:

1) Red: I am pretty sure that I watched The Skin I Live In the same night that I received these (it was very rainy), which is potentially appropriate because that movie is all about masks, costumed invaders, abuses of the ultra-rich, dastardly medical procedures, and Marisa Paredes (so often does life become an erotic thriller). (Did you ever see The Flower of My Secret? It is EXCELLENT.)
("gory," "blood" version);
2) Silver: when I saw these, I think I was reading The Dream of Doctor Bantam , by Jeanne Thornton, which is a book that I love and which I would recommend to virtually any reader. Here are no. 2-6 on the itemized list of “things that I loved about this book,” as written enthusiastically in an email to its author (no. 1 was incomprehensible even to me):
2. the sentence on p. 91 in which Julie wraps herself up with a sheet "like a human pita";3. the canoe scene, specifically on the rocks;4. when Julie bums a cigarette from the 'patch-and-hemp' kid and thinks, "I do not want to take this cigarette from this person. I hate this person. I despise this person for his weakness," and then takes it anyway;5. when Patrice asks Julie if she's proud of her for being the youngest Unbound;6. the whole freaking opening scene, pants, ihop and all.
Holistically, it kinda reminds me of a World/Inferno Friendship Society song.
(my mother's favorite version of the cover, because it's "less gory" and "less clear what is going on"); 
3) Green: I don't remember what I was doing here. Do you? 
(Speaking of which, I would like to point that there is a Beach Boys song (pt. 2 of "California Saga"), which includes the very traditionally un-Beach Boys-like lyric: "spilled down the hill, a wagon-load of bodies lay scattered.") 
(I call this the "poor little greenie" version, Spork: "Slime and Gilded Blood Edition," which is somewhat more ornate);
4) Blue: I think I saw these on the same day as was released the full cover of David James Keaton's The Last Projector , which comes out Halloween of this year and will probably be the best book about movies ever written. (If you have ever read this blog, you have read of DJK - he wrote a zombie novella, a short story collection called Fish Bites Cop! whose decorative murders rival Nick Cave, and is the subject of an 8,000-word interview that remains unpublished, where the topic that takes up the most space is the physical consistency of blood across several movie-decades.)
(Spork: "summer bluez"; I prefer "cosmic").

 *SATURN has gotten a pretty exciting amount of attention lately - I'll spare you all the grisly details here (you can check the special SATURN tab above for links to pretty much everything including reviews in The Rumpus and NANO Fiction; clicking virtually anywhere on this blog will send you places to buy it), but I am very grateful to everyone who's bought it thus far. If you've done so, let me know what you think! I may have a special surprise for you.
Have a pleasant night (watch a movie you fruitcake),Simon

ON SELLING OUT

SATURN officially launched at AWP in Seattle last weekend. Here is a photo of SATURN on the Spork table, at the beginning:

R3
It sold out. All 50 copies, gone.

Despite what people tell you, it feels very nice to be a sellout. If you bought one of the 50 - let me know! Like any narcissist, I'd love to hear what you think of it, or if you want to debate my facts. Since I wasn't in Seattle to endorse the copies for you, I'll propose something similar: if you let me know that you got the book, I will tear out highlighted/annotated pages of the classic 1986 David Bowie biography Alias David Bowie and mail them to you in lieu of a signature. It's definitely much more practical this way.

Right now, Spork has returned home without SATURNs, but they are always busy, and I expect that very soon there will be more books and it will be available to buy on the Spork website. This offer will stand for as long as I can manage it - even if you don't want a scrap of paper mailed to you, I'd love to hear what you think of it. Or if you have any photos or tactile descriptions (as yet, I haven't held a physical copy, so I am interacting vicariously), by all means, send them along. I would like to thank you, at least.

There are over 500 pages in Alias David Bowie. Plenty to gut.

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While Spork continues making books and books and books, a few SATURN stories have made their way into a couple of new journals: first, online, in the inaugural issue of The Knicknackery (brought to you by the very estimable team of Sonja Vitow and Keren Veisblatt Toledano) you can find "David Bowie Sleeps with 1001 Arabian Nights Next to His Bed," which is, of course, about unending stories.
In print, Skydeer Helpking, a new journal put together by Russ Woods and Jeannette Gomes, also just released their first issue, and inside you can find both "David Bowie Approaches Tilda Swinton to Play Him in the Movie of His Life" and "David Bowie Confronts His Digital Self in Omikron: The Nomad Soul." 
Did you ever play Omikron? This is what he looked like:

"The souls here are grey and withered."Finally, in non-Bowie-related news (thank god), I have a small story called "Booties" in the last (!) issue of Fractured West, a print flash fiction journal from Scotland. It's really beautiful and full of equally tiny things.

Once again, thanks for reading,
Simon

ALL STORIES ARE ABOUT HUNGER AT THEIR CORE

SATURN now has a cover and a release date:


The book will be first available at AWP 2014 in Seattle (Feb 26 - March 1), and then from the Spork website shortly thereafter.

If you're in Seattle, stop by table R3 to get one, and meet the team responsible.

Anything at all SATURN-related, let me know.