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Black Clock

Singular, idiosyncratic and a little mysterious, Black Clock is one of America's leading literary journals.

Archive for 2009—

Black Clock To Tweet New Fiction From Rick Moody

Black Clock will be joining Electric Literature in publishing a major new work of fiction by Rick Moody via Twitter.

The microserialization of Moody’s story will take place on every co-publisher’s Twitter feed from Monday, November 30th through Wednesday, December 2nd.  Tweets will appear every ten minutes from 10 AM until 6:30 PM.

The first story written expressly for Twitter by a major literary author, Rick Moody’s “Some Contemporary Characters” will be tweeted over the course of three days on Black Clock‘s Twitter channel, @BlackClockmag, beginning Monday, November 30th at 10 AM.  Utilizing social media, followers of the story will re-tweet it in real-time, creating a community-based event that promises to break down the conventional barriers separating readers and publishers.

Moody’s story is broken into 153 bursts of 140 characters or less, each clearly labored over with a precision and lyricism that reveals the surprising literary potential of the tweet.  “It really was like writing Haiku,” says Moody, who went head-to-head with the character limitation of Twitter and used it as a source of inspiration.  “Moody has taken something that could be seen as gimmicky– ‘Twitter-fiction’–and created something transcendent,” says Electric Literature‘s Editor, Scott Lindenbaum.

Electric Literature has extended the invitation to co-publish the piece throughout the literary community, framing the event as “A Grassroots Exercise in Participatory ePublishing.”  We are very excited to partner with Electric Literature–themselves publishers of authors (such as Diana Wagman) who have appeared in the pages of Black Clock 10 in this venture.

If you, your publication, or your organization would like to be part of this project, please email editors_at_electricliterature.com.

For more information, please consult this press release.

Black Clock 11

Forsaken cities and blasted landscapes, characters in exile from their own times, mysterious connections in the air just beyond the grasp of those who barely understand them: Black Clock 11, California Institute of the Arts’ (CalArts) acclaimed literary journal, is slated to arrive on the stands mid-November. This issue features work by such prominent authors as Joanna Scott, Chris Abani and Susan Straight, and introduces the usual selection of dazzling new voices.

In Richard Powers’ “Over the Limit,” freely adapted from his just published novel, a young African woman genetically predisposed to happiness stands at the nexus of a brilliant, narcissistic scientist and the discontented moderator of a TV news magazine.  In Rob Roberge’s “Stooge” and Lou Mathews’ “Hollywoodski,” Vegas drug deals go bad and drunken Tinseltown conversations run wild, and in Antonia Crane’s “Rosebud,” a self-designated “sexual outlaw” and stripper looking to retire gets caught up in the intrigues of an aging decadent Hollywood couple.  In “This Is How the Past Turns Up”, Greil Marcus charts one of his patently revelatory longitudes between Barack Obama’s election-night victory speech, the fiction of Philip Roth, and Sam Cooke’s perennial contender for the greatest record of all time, “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

Singular, idiosyncratic, and a little mysterious, Black Clock has become one of America’s leading literary journals since its inception in 2004, featuring such authors as Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Miranda July, Jonathan Lethem, Darcey Steinke, Rick Moody, Samuel R. Delany, Lynne Tillman, Geoffrey O’Brien, Aimee Bender, William T. Vollmann and many others, along with a growing roster of striking literary debuts. Work appearing in Black Clock has been anthologized in best-of-the-year collections and nominated for O. Henry and Pushcart prizes, and two excerpted novels have gone on to win National Book Awards.

Black Clock‘s staff includes Steve Erickson, acclaimed novelist, critic and member of CalArts MFA Writing Program faculty in addition to being the magazine’s Editor, Senior Editor and adjunct member of CalArts’ Writing Program faculty Bruce Bauman, Managing Editor Michaele Simmering, Production Editor Laura Vena, and Art Director Christopher Morabito.

Black Clock is published semi-annually by the CalArts MFA Writing Program.  One-year subscription (2 issues): $20. Single issue cover price: $13. To subscribe, consult Black Clock subscription agent fictionondemand.com.

For more information see blackclock.org.

Black Clock Now Accepting Submissions

Black Clock is accepting unsolicited fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction from September 18th, 2009 until October 31st, 2009.  If you have a manuscript you would like to submit for consideration, please consult the Black Clock website for details.

Staccato-Like

Attendees of this coming weekend’s 5th anniversary / 10th issue launch reading can look forward to mixing with a special selection of noir sounds as selected and sequenced by Black Clock editor Steve Erickson.

In fact, dig.



Limited Edition Soundtrack CD

1. “Générique” by Miles Davis
2. “The Big Sleep” by Max Steiner
3. “Double Indemnity” by Miklos Rosza
4. “Body Heat” by John Barry
5. “If You Go” by Helen Merrill
6. “Peter Gunn” by Henry Mancini
7. “Vertigo” by Bernard Herrmann
8. “The Bad And The Beautiful” by David Raksin
9. “Harlem Nocturne” by Harry James
10. “Touch Of Evil” by Henry Mancini
11. “It’s A Lonesome Old Town” by Frank Sinatra
12. “Laura” by David Raksin
13. “Marlowe” by David Shire
14. “Taxi Driver” by Bernard Herrmann
15. “Park Avenue Beat” by Fred Steiner
16. “The Fountainhead” by Max Steiner
17. “Long Ago And Far Away” by Jo Stafford
18. “Chinatown” by Jerry Goldsmith


BC V X

With both the occasion of our fifth anniversary and the publication of our tenth issue imminent, Black Clock has asked some of its most frequent (and prominent) contributors to describe their experience as readers of the magazine. The responses we collected are as singular, idiosyncratic and even a little mysterious as the contents of any given issue.

“Black Clock measures the temper of the turning world, ” a journal of ideas, provocations and cultural leaps, with some of the best writing anywhere.” – Don DeLillo

“There’s never before been a literary journal with exactly the power and elegance, even the force of enigma, of Black Clock.  Each issue arrives in the reader’s hands as an artifact throbbing with potential and strangeness, new names and old names in wild conjunctions and brave forays, a journal to drive the collectors of the future into acquisitive frenzies.” – Jonathan Lethem

“Black Clock is one of the literary magazines I can’t wait to see when it arrives in the mail, and the thing I read that night before all else.” – Susan Straight

“Black Clock provides a much needed fix of experimental fiction and adventurous writing.  If you’re getting the itch for some literary stimulation, cut down on the lattes and invest in a subscription.” – Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“One of the contemporary literary magazines with real vision — and they are in short supply.” – Rick Moody

Black Clock is published semi-annually by the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) MFA Writing Program.

Black Clock 10 Darkening The Horizon

Born in the despair of the Great Depression, flourishing in the first radioactive blush of the nuclear age, Noir really is more a sensibility than a style, and the tenth issue of Black Clock operates on the premise that Twenty-First Century Noir is a mutated thing that still bears kinship with the original.  Robert Polito finds early signs of noir all the way back in Eighteenth Century America in “It Would Be a Queer World If,”  and Dana Spiotta takes a look at one of the classic Fifties film noirs in “First is First, Second is Nobody.”  In Diana Wagman’s “The Five Elements of Noir,” some noir archetypes find the movie they’re in has taken them over.  The genre gets decidedly weird with Michael Ventura’s cross-dressing private-eye in “One Marilyn Too Many,” and becomes altogether supernatural in stories by Denise Hamilton and Francesca Lia Block.  And amid work by major contemporary authors Scott Bradfield, Brian Evenson, Geoff Nicholson and others, Black Clock 10 also identifies 70 essential noir movies, novels, comics, poems, paintings, performances and pieces of music.

Now among the nation’s foremost literary magazines, Black Clock has showcased award-winning writing by established and emerging authors, with pieces anthologized in best-of-the-year collections and two excerpted novels going on to win National Book Awards.

Black Clock is published semi-annually by the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) MFA Writing Program.

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