Since the nebulous birth of the internet, online literary
journals have been bridge-dwelling trolls of cyberspace. Like the
journals you hold in your hand (or don’t, if you are most people),
their digital counterparts are assemblages of short stories, poems,
interviews, criticism, essays, and various writerly things. Initially,
these journals were considered to be literati bottom-feeders, leftovers
that didn’t meet the standards of MFA students who edit print journals;
but in their extremely short existence, the online community has
created a significant burp in literary history.
While the inner circle of print journals is full with academically
funded enterprises (e.g., the Bellingham Review, published
through WWU, or the Seattle Review, published through UW), the
online lit journal community is dominated by an almost antiacademic
attitude. Instead of publishing the so-called “traditional workshop
short story,” the online community generates an endless string of
bizarre, experimental writing that characterizes blog-style journalism.
For no price at all, you could easily spend the rest of your life
swimming through the vast sea of online journals. (And if you do, start
off with these:
5_Trope, Pindeldyboz,
Lamination Colony, and Failbetter.)
The most recent development in online literature is the e-book, a
vague term that refers to any book published online. Within the last
year or so, e-books have started popping up on these online journals,
because, other than a few extra kilobytes, there’s no real difference
between publishing an e-book or an e-story.
Take elimae. Since 1996, it’s been one of the princes of
online lit journals, publishing fingernail-size short stories (aka
flash fiction or short shorts) and poetry of consistently high quality.
Recently, it added e-books to its table of contents. It has already
published two books by the insanely prolific Norman Lock, including
Grim Tales, which is one of the more ambitious renovations of
the fairy-tale form since Robert Coover’s Pricksongs &
Descants. Also on the site is editor Cooper Renner’s translation
of Lovers Hate, a book written, in part, by a deeply important
(but underappreciated) writer in Argentine literary history, Adolfo
Bioy Casares (1914–1999).
Bear Parade has published a long list of poetry and short
stories by writers such as Matthew Rohrer and Noah Cicero, and refers
to its contents in a sort of communist-anarchist-hippie way, as “free
for everyone.” Kelly Link, with her cultlike following, is indulging a
similar philosophy, putting her already-printed books online. And
appropriately, Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book has found its
way into free, downloadable form.
Seattle writer Matthew Simmons just published an extremely creative
first book, Creation Stories (subtitled “short prose things”),
through his own publisher, Happy Cobra Books. He’s printed a handful of
classy-
looking chapbooks, but like any respectable writer, he’d
rather put his time into writing than schmoozing and cold-calling
publishers.
For all those soothsayers who looked to the music industry and
portended the literary apocalypse, it was never “the end of literature
as we know it” but “the end of literature, period.” While the latter is
horseshit, the former has a little truth to it. The term “publish” will
take a new meaning. Gene Morgan, the editor of Bear Parade,
presents a sober argument for e-books: “The same impulses that drive
people to download MP3s and torrent movies will push literature
forward. People want to consume art as relentlessly and cheaply as
possible.”
Some of these sites encourage creative reading through clicks and
scrolls, hinting at what was happening in the 1980s with hypertext,
when metafiction writers started using computers to organize their
stories into little choose-your-own-adventure mazes (e.g., click on the
right button to talk with the old man, click on the left button to spit
on the old man).
Then there’s something that Simmons refers to as “the move toward
compression.” The editors of these publications aren’t ignorant;
they’ve heard the “I can’t read on the computer ” complaint a thousand
times, and most of the stories—and now, books—cater to a
preference for digital brevity. Grim Tales, for instance,
comes to 14,000 words, which is measly compared to the standard book
length of around 70,000 words, but is an asset on the computer. It’s a
change that challenges the archetype of the long-winded, brick-size
romantic masterpiece, and reasserts the possibilities of the terse
novella.
So let’s welcome the e-book. But at the same time, let’s recelebrate
another brilliant technology: the actual book. You can touch it, smell
it, and experience many days worth of cheap, battery-free
entertainment. The words on the pages will never mysteriously
disappear. You can borrow them from the government. You can drop it,
kick it, spill beer on it, ignore it for most of your life, and one day
it can still change the way you think about absolutely everything.
