By George!

Dark Sky Magazine is looking for a fiction editor. The ideal candidate is a whip-smart literary omnivore, proficient in Word Press, reveres traditional and embraces new publishing models, and can drink his or her fill without completely disgracing our hallowed publication. We’d love to find a person living in the Seattle area, but if you’re elsewhere and confident you’ve got the guts and the glory to help us grow, then by all means, send us an email. Please include relevant experience/education and any other tidbits you think might trick us into thinking you’re the next George Plimpton.

Interested? Let us know.

Not A Nice Young Jewish Boy

Imagine our surprise when we learned from an inside source that DSM contributing editor, Mr. Andrew Geer, is in bed with the Wall Street Journal. Don’t get us wrong, we respect the Journal for regularly publishing journalism of the highest order. But Geer’s allegiance to that prayer-piece of conservative dogma is downright sinful. Word on the street is he sleeps in a pair of WSJ nighties, which is enough to make the subjects of today’s stories micturate in their trousers. Philip Roth doesn’t do conservative, even if his next novel is a slim 160 pages. Edgar Allan Poe died drunk in the gutter — ’nuff said — but at long last Baltimore is giving him a proper burial.  Jean Rhys is known for her saucy demarcations; The Nation dries her out and puts her back together. Michael Jackson, that ambassador of popstar flooziness, is dead. But live on he does in Simon Crump’s new book. The Rumpus has a liberal interview of Alasdair Gray, Salman Rushide gives extremists another reason to hate America, as he is awarded the Carl Sandburg Award, and a documentary about Kerouac’s Big Sur has some left-leaning all-stars riffing to bebop. Where’s Buckley when you need him? — Kevin Murphy

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Getting Ready To Use Our Kindle

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Reading on a Kindle is like masturbating with a condom on. So reading on a Vook must be like settling down with a Thai ladyboy, right? Is this the end of reading as we know it? Has this ongoing debate over print and digital grown cliché? We seem to be the British Expeditionary Force of our beloved print media, leading the way into certain death. But it’s tragically real, positively Yeatsian. Europe might not save us, but that doesn’t mean we’re ready to start calling our fries Freedom Fries. Whatever happens, don’t forget your prophylactics. — Andrew Geer

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Don't Fuck With Oskar

Face it, Monday happens. To ameliorate your drudgery, here are some uplifting literary links. Read them. Weep. And then do it again tomorrow. We of the literary persuasion are gluttons for punishment. We buckle knuckles and twist throats, especially when a colleague does well and gets notice for it. Happy Monday America. Here’s to literacy, and the diminishing fact that any of this, EVER, will matter. God bless Kurt Vonnegut. There, we said it. — Kevin Murphy

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Vincent had a few hours left before he could check into a motel, so he pulled into the right lane of Route 10 to look for a place to eat. At five-thirty in the evening, he watched through his rearview mirror as, all over the highway, cars began turning off the road for food. He had been scared to eat in New Jersey, convinced that all of it would taste like the sewage he breathed in from the turnpike. Fortunately, there were lots of crummy places outside Boston to pick from: fast food joints where you could hear the sizzle of canola oil cooking fries, or large-scale pizza chains with stout delivery men running from the doors, or Chinese carry-outs exuding the stench of greasy sauce and cooked meat. Gyro stands lay scattered in between, as well as a few Indian restaurants with curry spice coming out of the bricks. None of these piqued his appetite.

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