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

Posts Tagged ‘Geoff Nicholson’—

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.

Black Clock 7 Sizzles

The seventh issue of Black Clock is the most provocative issue of the journal yet. It features twenty-five stories, one essay and four poems about sex and the erotic by such writers as Samuel R. Delany, Janet Fitch, Aimee Bender, Lynne Tillman, Geoff Nicholson, Francesca Lia Block, Rachel Resnick, Brian Evenson, Lisa Teasley, Seth Greenland, Tara Ison, John Haskell and others. This current issue will begin heating up newsstands and bookstores in late June.

Published by the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in association with the MFA Writing Program, Black Clock features work by prominent national writers, talented regional authors and the very best emerging writers.

Black Clock 7 includes Yxta Maya Murray’s “Girl Called Casanova”, in which the world’s greatest lover takes female form and sets out to seduce Angelina Jolie; Wanda Coleman’s “Howlin’ With the Woofdog”, about a tryst between a well-known radio DJ and a reluctant virgin; Joy Nicholson’s “Manson Girl”, a tale at once sweet, funny and chilling about the sexual dynamics of a murderous cult; and Tom Carson’s “My Mother, Marie Christ, (b. Hope Springs, TN, 1951 d. Memphis, July 4, 1985)”, about a boy named Jesus growing up in Reagan’s America who has a thing for his Mom.

Novelist, critic and CalArts MFA Writing Program faculty member Steve Erickson is the Editor of Black Clock. Dwayne Moser, adjunct faculty and CalArts MFA Writing Program coordinator, and Bruce Bauman, also an adjunct member of the Writing Program faculty, serve as Senior Editors. Gail Swanlund, Graphic Design faculty at CalArts, is the magazine’s art director.