Publications

Another week’s roundup

| Matthew Salesses

The latest in my Love, Recorded column: “Yes, Honey.”

I tell her I will lose weight with her after the baby is born. Though five to eight pounds will come out of her and become a person, automatically. I think I am imagining this incorrectly.

Also, a story of mine in the latest issue of Storyglossia: “At Least I Felt Bad Afterward.” Thanks, Steven McDermott!

It took a lot out of me to be nice and I needed to dump my self-respect.

And I made a page at about.me: http://about.me/salesses.

Lastly, I wrote a post on the Good Men Project blog about one of the stories that we published. The post was supposed to be part of a four-post series for Short Story Month, but due to some GMP scheduling issues, it is only one.

Profile and Stories

| Matthew Salesses

1. A profile of me exists in the Harvard Gazette. Really.

2. Three pieces from I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying appear in Issue 3 of The Literarian, the Center for Fiction’s lit mag. The awesome Dawn Raffel is the editor.

Here’s an excerpt from “We Were Not Always Like This”:

The cops came so quickly we hardly earned the cuffs. Later, in the station, Randy cried, on the hook for his weapon of minor destruction. I tried to be sorry, too. Yet I felt only wonder at our idea of pleasure.

Kelly Luce rocks the Good Men Project Weekend Fiction section this week.

Link Roundup

| Matthew Salesses

Here are some links from the world of Matt over the last week:

1. The Wigleaf Top 50 chose the first of the Epidemics stories as one of the 50 best stories under 1000 words published online last year. Lots of good stuff on this list from people who are far more interesting than me. Thanks to Scott Garson and Ravi Mangla and Lily Hoang.

2. I said something about reading and (while?) being snobbish here on Shome Dasgupta’s blog. Thanks, Shome!

3. Chris Newgent is running a contest to win Our Island of Epidemics over at Vouched Books. I will judge tomorrow. Click here and leave a disease in the comments.

4. HTMLGIANT threw Bill Knott week and I popped in for a visit. Kyle Minor assigned me some reading, and I asked Bill two questions he didn’t answer. I don’t think.

5. MAKE Magazine made a couple of my nonfiction pieces available online. Here (“Valentine’s Day”) and here (“5”).

6. For some reason, Ethel Rohan trusted me to blurb her beautiful book, Hard to Say, which is forthcoming from PANK. How badly did I screw it up?

Cut it out, Spring

| Matthew Salesses

So spring is here, and with it its annual beatdown of my nose and eyes. I write about crying in birthing class, cat hair, threats, learning Korean, and sadly even suicide, in this week’s column: “Perpetually Unprepared.” Check out an excerpt:

How strange it is to be certain that in your future is fear. Sometimes Cathreen threatens to talk about me with our daughter in Korean, jokes I will never understand. I am learning in class how to say it is sunny outside.

Also, heard in the Korean grocery store yesterday that people shouldn’t buy drinks imported from Korea. Because the Japanese radiation is getting into the Korean water and making people sick. Not sure how true this is, but it’s scary. And that’s good enough for me.

Scaredy Cats

| Matthew Salesses

Oh, the endless worry that is pregnancy. There’s more craziness in this week’s “Love, Recorded” column, in which we get another ultrasound, Bear jumps into the window pane, and my two cousins are let loose on Boston. “Getting Ready.”

An excerpt:

“You’re very protective of her,” my aunt says. The other day, we went to a noisy bar and I worried about the baby’s hearing. I wonder what I am supposed to do, just hand over our child to Michael Jackson?

In other news, a tiny piece of I’M NOT SAYING, I’M JUST SAYING went up at Blip Magazine (formerly Rick, formerly Mississippi Review online). It’s called, “What’s the Opposite of Succubus?”

Anthologies

| Matthew Salesses

Here are two forthcoming anthologies to check out, which I will have work in:
 

From the mainstream perspective, tired stereotypes about Asian people as model minorities, asexual techno-geeks, hypersexual dragon ladies, or perpetual foreigners still persist–though often concealed behind politically correct slogans like colorblindness and diversity…

The Way We Sleep

Beds are the most intimate of places, where you spend a third of your life (or more if you’re C. James Bye). They are quiet places, they are rambunctious places. Submissions don’t have to be solely about beds and sleep, but should have some image, some theme, some tangent that is bed-related. We will be combining stories and photography into a fantastic little book and we’d like you to be a part of that…

Itch Till It Hurts

| Matthew Salesses

The itch is unbearable, so Cathreen goes on steroids, takes the cats, and leaves me in an empty house. Adventures. “The Missing Itch of Dreams.” Love, Recorded.

Here’s an excerpt:

There aren’t even those littler bodies walking around purring, demanding.

Come back this weekend, I tell her. The weekend passes.

Thanks to all those who keep following the column!

 

Hot Flash

| Matthew Salesses

I have two little things in Thunderclap! Magazine‘s latest issue–you can get it as a print thing or free e-book thing here. Thanks to Robert Vaughan.

Also had some good news from The Literarian and nthWORD this week on a few tiny pieces that are part of a bigger piece, called, for now:

I’M NOT SAYING, I’M JUST SAYING.

Like it?