Luna Digest, 12/8

‘Tis the season to support small presses. Once again HTMLGIANT is hosting its Annual Indie Lit Secret Santa. Lots of indie publishers like The Lifted Brow and Keyhole have already begun offering up special offers for Secret Santa participants. Here are some details:

From now till December 15, sign up to play Secret Santa at HTMLGiant. It’s easy! On the sign-deadline, you will find out your recipient and her or his address, and by Christmas (it’s December 25, this year, I think), send them a book from an indie press or a subscription to an indie mag. And you get one too! Sounds like it was a great success last year, and it’s sure to be this year, too.

Today’s the day The San Francisco Panorama from McSweeney’s hits the streets. The idea is to put out an exciting newspaper edition to show the power of the medium in a world of declining newspaper publishing incentives. (Click image at right for more details.) Flavorwire put up some last minute news on the event along with a brief interview with publisher Oscar Villalon.

Though not a literary magazine, exactly, this is not to be missed: The New Yorker has published an excerpt of David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming posthumous novel Pale King. (Via Flavorwire.) Here’s how it starts:

Once when I was a little boy I received as a gift a toy cement mixer. It was made of wood except for its wheels—axles—which, as I remember, were thin metal rods. I’m ninety per cent sure it was a Christmas gift. I liked it the same way a boy that age likes toy dump trucks, ambulances, tractor-trailers, and whatnot. There are little boys who like trains and little boys who like vehicles—I liked the latter.

The translation of Maupassant’s story “A Parisian Affair” in the new Five Dials 8b starts with the intriguing line: “Is there any keener sense known to man than woman’s curiosity?”

PANK magazine interviews Linebreak magazine editor Johnathon Williams:

No, I don’t think all online magazines have print aspirations. In fact, I’d argue that most of the best online magazines, by which I mean the magazines best adapted to the web, have no print aspirations, and that the lack of print aspirations (by which I mean the desire to produce a regular print edition of the magazine, rather than an annual anthology or some another less regular print product) is one of the common denominators of success on the web.

Another literary magazine iPhone app has hit the stores: Opium Magazine‘s Quick Fix.

The new story “The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kálmán Once Lived” from the November 2009 issue of One Story sounds highly interesting—as are story author Tamas Dobozy’s thoughts regarding historical accuracy in fiction:

I’m not someone who feels an ethical need to be absolutely true to history. If I can invent a better way of dealing with the events than the way they actually happened, then I’ll do that. And “better” here means aesthetically, so the story can be more satisfying on that level. I guess I’ve always felt that literature is more entertainment than information, or that the kind of information it presents is not redeemable along some index of real-world verification.

An absolutely fantastic new online resource from the University of Utah: Eclipse. This is a free digital facsimile archive of some radical small press magazines from the past 25 years, which means some amazing publishing events, such as this James Schuyler poem “Bleeding Gums” from the first issue of L Magazine.

American Short Fiction asks: “Rick Moody, what does online publishing mean to you?”

“The return of Ice Floe.”

Finally, The Literary Review‘s summer 2009 Manifest Destiny issue is available in its entirety online. Here is a nice moment to take with you on those holiday shopping events, from Clea Roberts’s poem “I Have a List of Things”:

Shopping at Wal-Mart is that easy.
I glide between the things that people need and want
separate the lovable from the unlovable—
our souls jangling like quarters,
as full and as empty as plastic bags
rolling in the wind.