Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Pistol Press & Matt Jasper

Got the first issue of PISTOL, a new Canadian journal of fiction & poetry & art that just launched.



The issue is very nice looking and feels like a manual in my hand. It has work by Sheila Heti, and the rest are mostly authors I haven't heard of. This is awesome. I haven't read a lot of it yet but the two first pieces I read at random by Nick McArthur and Mike Spry were fresh and mean. The images are odd and diagrammatic. I feel energy holding the book. I recommend people get on it and check out the first issue and perhaps submit. Their current call for asks for work in the vein of: "John Hodgeman, Pataphysics, Church of the subGenius, Rube Goldberg, Ben Marcus, George Saunders, David Ohle, Matthew Derby, Douglas Adams, Vonnegut Vonnegut Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, Jorge Borges, Italo Calvino, Pseudoscience, and Disinformation."

I can get behind that. Check them out.

Also: NOO Journal released a mini-chapbook of bad poetry. They do a bad poetry fundraiser where you can pay a couple bucks and people will write bad poems for you. I wrote a couple once, and one is in this echapbook: Matt Jasper: A Collection of Bad Poetry. I don't know who Matt Jasper is, but the poems in it are funny, including shit by K. Silem Mohammed, Tao Lin, etc.etc.

5 comments:

Bradley Sands said...

I would like to submit, but I am confused by their guidelines. Maybe it is because he woke up an hour ago and haven't eaten anything yet and didn't give the guidelines a thorough enough reading.

The guidelines don't specify whether the submissions are for the journal or the press.

Then they write this in bold: "Submit work steadily and excitedly until July 15th 2008."

Then it says this near the bottom: "We’re not currently accepting unsolicited manuscripts, as we have only six eyes and three dollars a day for coffee."

I am going to get some food now.

Adam R said...

I didn't know who Matt Jasper was either but he wrote something nice that will become into This PDF Chapbook series later on.

I recently got a good bad poem from NOO Journal called "ADAM (All Rights Reserved)" by Bryan Coffelt.

BLAKE BUTLER said...

bradley, i think the top set of guidelines is for the magazine.

then they say they aren't looking for stuff for the press.

press & magazine have same name, magazine is open, press is not.

BLAKE BUTLER said...

adam, bryan coffelt is good

Unknown said...

Let us try to clarify this for you.

There is no "Pistol" magazine. The open submissions are for "The Future Hygienic", which is the only book we're accepting unsolicited submissions for. Otherwise, at least for the moment, submissions are closed. We'll make all this info a bit more clear in the near future.

Really,
PistolPress