Archive for August, 2006

One Story Launches Submission Manager

August 28th, 2006 11:28am by Maribeth Batcha

One Story has been accepting submissions online pretty much since our launch. We chose this route because it allows us better tracking of submissions and saves writers the expense of printing and mailing their work. It also saves quite a bit of paper.

For the past year or so, Devin Emke, the developer of our system, has been working with the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) to develop a customizable version for other literary magazines. We’re pleased to announce that Submission Manager is now available for sale at CLMP’s web site. Several magazines (Fence, Jubilat, and Ploughshares) are already using the system, and quite a few others will be coming online soon.

We’re so proud of this product and can’t wait to show it off. CLMP will be hosting demonstrations in their offices this fall. If you’d like to be invited to these, or if you’ve got questions about Submission Manager, send an email to submgr@one-story.com.

Issue #78: All Good Things

August 23rd, 2006 12:03pm by Hannah Tinti

What I love the most about “All Good Things” is the way that Emily Benz uses the setting of the family lake house to tell the story. It is a sensational backdrop, and pressed against it we can see the character of Lee more clearly, and notice all the small and subtle changes that come as she grows from a girl to a woman. I also thought it captured perfectly the chaos of being a part of a large family, as well as that intangible essence that is summer–scraping your leg on a raft, dipping your feet into a pail of water to remove the sand, the sensation of sleeping in a bunk bed, and the joy of cracking a baseball, hard and high and out of the park. There is something magic about this lake house, and by the end of the story I wanted to be there, just as much as Lee did.

Karl Iagnemma’s The Upgrade

August 19th, 2006 6:30am by Katie Sexton

Recently One Story published its first robot story, and you wouldn’t believe the volume of scrawled-on-invoice positive responses to it. Turns out Paul Maliszewski is not the only one with automatons on the brain.

Enter “The Upgrade”, a futuristic glimpse into the socio-mechanical problems of tomorrow. Where today engineers are pushing polygons in video games past the acceptable “realistic” benchmarks, tomorrow they are surely upgrading the semantic capabilities of machines nearly human. Can you imagine the implications of being able to communicate as well with your machines as with other humans?

Check out Karl’s robotics page, or his website detailing his latest novel.

Valerie Trueblood’s new novel is B&N Discover Pick

August 18th, 2006 9:18pm by Hannah Tinti

Valerie Trueblood, author of One Story issue #35, “The Magic Pebble” has recently published her first novel, Seven Loves. Seven Loves has been chosen by Barnes & Noble for their Discover Great New Writers program for Fall 2006. Seven Loves also received a rave review this past week in the San Francisco Chronicle, which said, “Trueblood has a poet’s eye and ear for description, and she is masterful in bringing uncanny intensity and focus to fragments of experience.” Congratulations, Valerie!

Patrick Somerville in L Magazine

August 16th, 2006 7:37pm by Katie Sexton

Featured in L Magazine’s First Annual Fiction Issue is Patrick Somerville, author of One Story Issue #28. You can find his short story “The Unrealized Subversive Fantasies of a Medium Pizza” online or in an L Magazine on a corner near you.

Welcome to One Story Blog!

August 16th, 2006 5:32am by Hannah Tinti

One Story is now hosting a blog at our website, www.one-story.com. For a long time we’ve been hearing that our readers are looking for a way to discuss One Story online. And here it is! Every three weeks, our editor Hannah Tinti will post a message about the current story, and visitors to the site can then add their own comments. So come by after you’ve read the new issue and let us know what you think.

We’ll also use this space to keep in touch with past One Story authors. Katie Sexton, our main blogger, will let you know where they’re reading, when their books hit bookstores, and if they’re involved in any other exciting pursuits. We’ll talk about the One Story reading series, the role of women in publishing, and also discuss current literature, particularly the world of the short story, and the readers who love them.

We hope you’ll join us at www.one-story.com/blog.

-Maribeth Batcha & Hannah Tinti

Alan DeNiro is August Booksense Pick!

August 15th, 2006 7:40pm by Hannah Tinti

Alan DeNiro’s short story collection, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, which includes One Story issue #22, “Child Assassin” is a Booksense pick for August! Alan is also doing a reading on August 29th, at 6:30 pm at Dreamhaven Books, 912 W Lake Street, Minneapolis MN 55408. To find out more, visit Alan’s weblog at: www.goblinmercantileexchange.com.

Issue #77: Prayer for the Long Life of Certain Inanimate Objects

August 11th, 2006 7:45am by Hannah Tinti

I love robots. So when I read the opening scene of this family portrait, I was thrilled. In Prayer for the Long Life of Certain Inanimate Objects, Paul Maliszewski takes a simple, regular occurrence from life that everyone can relate to–the family picture–and then throws in a robot. It’s a wonderful combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar, and it engages the reader, right from the start. Paul does a great job of threading the mechanics of the robot throughout this story, and ultimately uses it to reveal the inner workings of family relationships. There was also a precision to the language here that I found very engaging; it keeps pushing moments to higher levels, like when the father sees a crack in the wall, and then imagines a spider crawling into the crack, and then imagines building a robot that was as small as a spider that could crawl into the crack. Brilliant.

More Alix Ohlin

August 10th, 2006 1:01pm by Hannah Tinti

Alix Ohlin’s short story collection, Babylon & Other Stories was just given a great review in The New York Times Book Review.

Fan Art

August 3rd, 2006 2:42pm by Katie Sexton

Love that One Story

BRNNR, Austin, TX