There is, of course, a new issue of PANK with writing by Lisa Fink, Lisa Ahn, Ian Brown, Melissa Yancy, Maria Elvira Vera Tata, Ashley Bethard, Tyler Sage, Hedy Zimra, Kimberly Ann Southwick, Danielle Sellers, Glen Pourciau, Wendy C. Ortiz, Hazel Foster, Carina Finn, Blaze Dzikowski, Dana Diehl, Thomas Busillo, Zach Buscher, Kelly Bright Leidenthal, Richard Bentley, and Anne Barngrover.

JMWW features writing by Barry Graham and many others.

Kill Author Eighteen includes Jenn Marie Nunes, John Mortara, Joseph A.W. Quintela, Matthew Burnside, Meghan Lamb, Sara Crowley, and others.

Book news: Keith Nathan Brown’s Embodied is available from Sententia Books and Sandra Simonds has a new book of poetry, Mother Was a Tragic Girl, out from Cleveland State University Press. Ansley Moon has a chapbook forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. Ryan Bradley’s Code For Failure is also now out. Stefanie Freele’s Surrounded by Water will be released by Press 53 in May. Tania Hershman’s My Mother Was an Upright Piano is available from Tangent Books. Continue reading →

“There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in this game” – that’s what the protagonist of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural wanted people to say when he walked down the street.  And they would have.  He was a baseball prodigy, a natural – ‘The Natural.’ Even before joining The Show, he struck out Walter ‘The Wammer’ Whambold – who Malamud modeled on Babe ‘The Great Bambino’ Ruth – with three pitches.  But then, because of those three pitches, a Bird in black, who was obsessed with killing the best there ever was in the game, changes her plans of shooting ‘The Wammer’ and instead shoots ‘The Natural.’  In Hobbs own words, “My life didn’t turn out the way I expected.” But his life expectations were off base from the start, so it took him over a decade to recover from the gunshot wound and finally get to The Show and on base.

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“Yeah is what we had, no we never knew
Good, good is what we understood”
Grandaddy, Yeah is what we had

I help raise two children. They are young now, and I try to teach them the basics: manners, kindness, goodness. I strive to help them understand what “good” means to them, what it can mean to others.

There is an episode of Backyardigans from which I have stolen our family motto “We are rough and tough and good.”

It is a start for the young kids, a start where I want to linger.

1. We would love to have your support in our Spring Funds Drive. Read about it and donate here. We’re half way through the month, but not quite half way to our goal.

2. The April Issue, it’s alive.

2. Mark your calendar for May 23, [PANK] will be invading New York City. More details to come.

4. You’ve still time to submit to the Special Pulp Issue, guest edited by Court Merrigan. Keep ’em coming until July 1st.

When Robert Johnson went down to the crossroads and called upon Satan to rise from the fires of Hell to tune his guitar, he didn’t have dollar signs in his eyes and titties on his brain.  Material possessions were of no importance to him, and he already had titties . . . they belonged to a married woman whose husband killed – via poisoned whiskey – the young bluesman.  But before that deathly incident, Johnson used his hellishly tuned guitar to strum with the sureness of a savant and sing with the sorrow of a sinner.  He sold his eternal soul for talent, not fame and fortune.  Robert Johnson wasn’t a sellout.

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We made them. It was, as ever, a very difficult choice. We only accept work we believe deserves such recognition. Alas, we can choose only three and this year, those three were:

Congratulations to Martha Williams on winning the Death Wish Book Giveaway. Death Wishing author, Laura Ellen Scott, had this to say about judging the wishes submitted and making the difficult decision to choose just one:

1. OF BIRDS, BINOCULARS & GRADE SCHOOL ANATOMY, poetry by B.J. Love at DIAGRAM

2. Turn Off My Face, poetry by Ben Kopel at La Petite Zine

3. Graphs About Charts and Charts About Graphs, Ben Greenman at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

4. An excerpt from Our Man, Lindsay Hunter at MAKE

5. From poisonhorse, fiction by Brandi Wells at Everyday Genius

Dostoyevsky used to watch his wife shit, G.G. Allin voted for Jimmy Carter, Jerry Garcia tongue-kissed his older sister on her deathbed, Diana Ross hated the movie When Harry Met Sally, Elizabeth Taylor is a beer enthusiast, Kirk Douglas collects Pez dispensers. . . Flavor Flav is a classically trained pianist, Tom Petty has a dirty fish tank, and Selena Gomez is starring in Harmony Korine’s new flick.  All these rumors, except the last one, were written by Korine in A Crackup At The Race Riots.  The last one was written about Korine in a Hollywood tabloid.

Hollywood tabloids don’t fact-check, and Korine is liar, a prankster, a rumor-conjurer.  I doubt G.G. Allin voted for Jimmy Carter, just as I doubt Korine is making a flick starring that shiny prepackaged Disney toy named Gomez.  Korine is a self-mythologizing spinner of tall-tales and pop-culture hearsay.  After writing the pubescent-raping, skateboard-beating, AIDS-spreading realities of Kids, and then directing the glue-sniffing, cat-executing, Down Syndrome-pimping antics of Gummo, and the child-murdering, sister-pregnating, schizophrenic-darkness of Julien Donkey-Boy, Korine vanished – with a Groucho Marx t-shirt and a Black Metal soundtrack – into a cloud of his own rumors.  Continue reading →