Christopher Barzak's Blog, page 4

At the end of this past week, I took a spontaneous trip to upstate New York to visit the film set for the movie “Jamie Marks is Dead” which is based on my first novel,One for Sorrow. The director and script writer, Carter Smith, had sent me an email earlier in the week inviting me to come see things in action if I had the chance, and since it was Spring Break week at my university, I hurried to finish up some other tasks I had on my desk, then got in the car to head across the great sea of hi...

Hey, there’s a giveaway for my next book, Before and Afterlives, at Goodreads.com. Head over and enter to win a copy!

Giveaway ends March 18, 2013.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Another new development for 2013 is that Interfictions, the anthology series that Delia Sherman launched first with co-editor Theodora Goss and then with me as co-editor of the second volume, will be moving into an online incarnation, including poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and hybrids forms.

Fiction editors are myself and Meghan McCarron.

Nonfiction and poetry editor is Sofia Samatar.

Submission guidelines and the submission portal can be found by clicking here.

But here’s the skinny: We’ll be op...

I have good news at the end of 2012. My novel One for Sorrow‘s film rights have officially been sold, and filming will begin shortly in the new year, from what I understand. This has been a long-term project for the director/script writer and the production company he has assembled since he first optioned the rights several years ago. To be honest, most book-to-film options never come to fruition, and I knew that from the beginning, so I never got my hopes up that I’d see my book truly made i...

Just a short note to say my novelette, “Invisible Men,” has been published on Eclipse Online. You can read it by clicking here. And don’t forget to leave a comment at the end of the story’s page if you enjoyed it. It’s a retelling of The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells. Thanks for reading!

I was tagged by Charles Tanto take part in The Next Big Thing meme, which occurs every Friday, in which writers talk about their next book project. It’s an interesting meme, though the questions seem more pointed toward novels than any other kind of book, so I’ve tweaked some of the questions to better answer them for my next book, which is a full length short story collection. Some of the writers I’ve tagged at the end of the post for next week write poetry, not short stories or novels, so I...

Dear Readers (specifically, dear book review bloggers),

As a lead-up to the release of my first full-length collection of short stories, I’ll be giving away an advance review PDF copy to book bloggers who promise to write an honest review of the book in the months prior to the release date.

Before and Afterlives will release on March 18, 2013. I’d love to give away enough advance review copies that would enable a book review per week between the months of January and late March. If you review b...

I’m so excited to see my full length collection of short stories, Before and Afterlives, coming together in advance of its March 2013 release. Below is the pre-visualisation for the cover, front, back and spine, by the book’s designer. It will of course later have a description of the contents added to the back and blurbs, but this is the general look. I’m really excited to see it out. Can. not. wait.

You can click to make the image larger, of course.

Dorothea Tanning is the third artist I discovered in this paper-doll of a writing project I took on back in the early 2000s. Just as I discovered Leonora Carrington’s art via her fiction, and then Remedios varo via a biography of Carrington, I found Dorothea Tanning by way of her relationship with Carrington’s former lover, the famous surrealist Max Ernst, who left his wife Peggy Guggenheim for Tanning. They married in a double wedding with the surrealist Man Ray and his wife Juliet Browner....

After writing about Leonora Carrington today, I was perusing Youtube and came across this clip from a documentary about her life, which also includes a filmed rendition of her short story, “The Debutante,” which is both humorous and grotesque, as you’ll see if you watch the clip.  It’s about ten minutes in length, and my favorite part is toward the end when Carrington, while being interviewed, says, “My anger is that I was put on the market,” in reference to the compulsory selling of upper class daughters into marriage during her youth.  In a world where women are still being bought and sold and controlled, I think the voice of an old crone (I mean this positively) like Carrington still resonates.