The Quick and The Dead: A Review by Matthew Salesses

This is the fourteenth of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project

“Thoughts are infusorial,” says Nurse Daisy, bard of Green Palms nursing home and one of the many characters populating Joy Williams’s sharp-as-the-reaper’s-scythe The Quick [...]

Last Chance for Ethnos and 25 Books!

The end of the year approaches, and so does the end of Ethnos submissions and our 25 Books project.
This week is your last chance to submit writing on ethnicity and race for our second anniversary issue. We are particularly in need of art submissions!
Also, the 25 Books polls close December 31. So speed-read [...]

Poor Jessica Simpson (Really)

I’m not Jessica Simpson’s biggest fan. In fact, her (father’s??) strategy of dumbing herself down in order to sell her persona makes my blood boil. But I have to draw the line somewhere.
In my opinion, Terrell Owens can go screw. He’s the one being the most vocal about blaming Jessica for the Dallas Cowboys loss [...]

Listening

Greetings from Korea (insert postcard of neon crosses lighting up the Busan skyline here). I’ve been thinking, probably unsurprisingly, about communication. Maybe it’s that I’ve been reading Joy Williams’s The Quick and the Dead, with its fantastically strange dialogue (review pending), or maybe it’s just the whole idea of two weddings, one Korean and one [...]

Vote for Your Favorite Books

The end of the year approaches, and with it, the closing of Fringe’s 25 Books Poll.
In a nutshell, we were appalled that the New York Times top 25 list included only 2 women, one of whom was the only writer of color on the list. We vowed to make our own list, where the [...]

A Dysfunctional Family Holiday

Fringe is once again teaming up with Redivider, Black Ocean, and Quick Fiction to host the Dirty Water Reading Series’ 2nd Annual Dysfunctional Family Holiday.

There will be holiday-themed mad-libs and short readings by Fringe contributor Steve Himmer, as well as Sommer Browning, Stace Budzko, and Tao Lin.

Oh, and there will also be free food, spiked [...]

Thanks a lot, Dave Obey.

Full disclosure: I’m cross-pollinating. The publishing company I work for, Beacon Press, has a great blog (the Beacon Broadside) and a terrific and thoughtful blog editor.
I just do not understand why this country keeps throwing money at abstinence-only education. Clearly, it doesn’t work; clearly, we don’t have the best interests of our youth at heart [...]

The Witch of Portobello: A Review by Julia Henderson

Okay, I know. I wrote my review of The History of Love and gushed about it, and now you’re all going to think that I only write gushy reviews. But here’s the thing…this book *really* made me think about who I am and where I am going, and who I want to be as a [...]

Guyliner

Here it is ladies, evidence of a drastic advance in gender equality…guyliner.
Before you know it, we’ll be making 100 cents on the dollar.

Support the Small Stuff: Juno

Brook Busey-Hunt went from working in a cubicle to stripping a la stage name Diablo Cody to blogging on The Pussy Ranch to writing a memoir called Candy Girl: A Year in The Life of an Unlikely Stripper all by the age of 28. It isn’t a traditional path for a screenwriter, but [...]