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Black Clock 13

A good mix-tape isn’t a collection of greatest hits. Rather it provides the revelation of familiar work placed in different contexts and thereby rendered new. “From the beginning,” writes editor Steve Erickson in Black Clock 13‘s introduction, “this is a magazine that has sought to define itself by its voices, and to that end, this particular issue means not to be a ‘best-of’ but an autobiographical document of what the magazine has been so far.” Black Clock’s biggest issue yet, lucky number 13 is a self-portrait, amassing from the previous twelve issues more than thirty visions and sensibilities representing the magazine’s constant evolution since its inception in 2004.

In Black Clock 13, we are pleased to bring you work by the following authors:

AIMEE BENDER On a Saturday Afternoon
TOM CARSON Katmandu
SAMUEL R. DELANY A Conversation
DON DELILLO Woman in the Distance
ROBERT EISELE Threnodies
STEVE ERICKSON The Art of the Mix-Tape
BRIAN EVENSON Invisible Box
MONICA FERRELL The Third One
JANET FITCH Room 721
ANDREW HULTKRANS Revolution Blues
SHELLEY JACKSON Here is the Church
HEIDI JULAVITS The Eternal Helen
JONATHAN LETHEM Monster Eyes
GREIL MARCUS This is How the Past Turns Up
LOU MATHEWS The Moon Reaches Down for Me Like the Fist in a Siqueiros Painting
JOSEPH MCELROY Annals of Plagiary
ANGE MLINKO Art Hotels and the Global Café
ALBERT MOBILIO Emergency Ruin
RICK MOODY The Republican Diaries
REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN The Afterlife of Skeptics
GEOFF NICHOLSON A Walk Around the World
ROBERT POLITO Paris Hilton Calls on Jesus
RICHARD POWERS Over the Limit
NINA REVOYR Charlie and Me
HOWARD A. RODMAN The Double-Goer
JOANNA SCOTT The Sting of Irrelevancy
DARCEY STEINKE Milk
SUSAN STRAIGHT Her Royal Highness
LISA TEASLEY Joie de Vivre
LYNNE TILLMAN Later
MICHAEL VENTURA A Strange Up-Flinging
DIANA WAGMAN The Five Elements of Noir
EMILY WHITE The Romance

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‘s subscription agent fictionondemand.com or write to [email protected]. For more information see blackclock.org.

Black Clock 12

Black Clock 12 takes you out to the ball game, where obsessions abound inside and outside the white lines. In these stories, essays and poems, the demarcation between winning and losing, humor and sadness is blurred; coaches may claim, “There is no ‘I’ in team,” but when you look closely enough there is always a “me,” and in sports, whether participating, watching or rejecting, you discover who you are and who you’re not. As the writers in Black Clock know, the game may be played under bright lights but it’s in the crevices of darkness where the true game is found, because sports lie beyond the pleasure principle.

In Black Clock 12, we are pleased to bring you work by the following authors:

RAJ BAHADUR Bambino Calls His Shot
MONICA CARTER The Retirement Plan
PAUL CULLUM Why I Hate Sports
DENNIS DANZIGER Hoop Schemes
KENNETH DEIFIK The Horse Finds His Own Way Home, Even Without Clues
KATHERINE DUNN Listening
SAMANTHA DUNN The Tortilla Construction Handbook
ROBERT EISELE Catch and Release
COLIN FLEMING Dare Me to Breathe
TOD GOLDBERG Welcome to Thousand Palms
JOHN HARLOW Will the People
CAROLYN KELLOGG Stroke
ANNE-MARIE KINNEY Zizou Président
ELOISE KLEIN HEALY The Season
JONATHAN LETHEM + CHRISTOPHER SORRENTINO Poem by Harris Conklin / Reply by Ivan Felt
KARA LINDSTROM My Own Private Ashtanga
CHRIS LOWRY Cricket’s Crashing Continents
LOU MATHEWS Racing in the Streets
RICHARD PEABODY Shirts and Skinjobs
KATY PETTY Fathom
LISA TEASLEY Beach Volleyball is Church
RICHARD TERRILL Found Poems
LYNNE TILLMAN The Unconscious is Also Ridiculous
RICHARD RAYNER Shoot the Ref
NINA REVOYR Charlie and Me
BRAD SCHREIBER George Blanda Ate My Homework
DAVID L. ULIN Member of the Tribe
OSCAR VILLALON The Roar
MATTHEW ZAPRUDER Poem for Jim Zorn
ALAN ZAREMBO Going Fast
DANTE ZÜNIGA-WEST This Is Not a Sport

Excerpts from Black Clock 12 can be read online. The issue can be purchased at these local area bookstores and online in both print and PDF format.

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.

David Foster Wallace: 1962-2008

I never met David Foster Wallace. My first contact with him was by a postcard from out of the Pomona desert, when he wrote to confess he had attended a reading I gave at the Hammer Museum and then had not introduced himself — all of which seems sadder now, since no such opportunity can present itself again. There are no statistics to prove it, but the anecdotal evidence is that he may have influenced the upcoming generation of writers more than almost anyone else; six or seven years ago, every other piece of fiction that floated through the workshop I taught was distinguished by an ecstasy of footnotes,homages to Wallace’s revolutionary form even if they missed Wallace’s point, which was a larger ecstasy: the cosmos broken down into particles of words that each constituted tiny cosmos unto themselves. In Wallace’s fiction, every shard of existence seemed to be a thing of wonder; but that wonder clearly could not sustain an existence wracked by whatever it was that wracked his. It is the psychosis of writers to be most alive when they’re at work on something that matters to them. Not at work, writers are beset by the lethality of their own lostness; no time is more dangerous for a novelist than that between novels. In the brief correspondence that he and I had, Wallace conveyed the quiet kindness attributed to him by those who knew him much better, and his contribution to this magazine in its very first issue was only one small gesture of a larger generosity that, in the end, he extended to everyone but himself.

by Steve Erickson
Editor of Black Clock

Archive for the ‘13th Hour’ Category—

Black Clock 13

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Black Clock 11

David Foster Wallace: 1962-2008

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