Our poster for tonight!

Geez, I almost forgot this masterpiece. Worth its own post. By Brian Cook.

Fantasy Night: Tonight! (Wednesday, Dec. 14th)

Tonight’s lineup is downright magical. We’ve got two poets, three personal essays, two pieces of fiction that you might already know and love (or you SHOULD), and one super-fantastic (in every way) ending surprise. Are you ready?

La Paloma Sabanera, 405 Capital Avenue, Hartford. 7:00. Suggested donation $5.

It will be less silly and more awesome than this image:

Call for Submissions: Fantasy

The dictionary says you should spread your idea of fantasy far and wide:

¹fan·ta·sy

noun \ˈfan-tə-sē, -zē\

plural fan·ta·sies

 

Definition of FANTASY

1

obsolete : hallucination

2

: fancy; especially : the free play of creative imagination

3

: a creation of the imaginative faculty whether expressed or merely conceived: asa : a fanciful design or inventionb : a chimerical or fantastic notionc : fantasia 1d : imaginative fiction featuring especially strange settings and grotesque characters —called also fantasy fiction

4

: caprice

5

: the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need<an object of fantasy>; also : a mental image or a series of mental images (as a daydream) so created <sexualfantasies>

6

: a coin usually not intended for circulation as currency and often issued by a dubious authority (as a government-in-exile)

 

Submit your piece about fantasy football, dragons, the perfect boyfriend, your childhood dreams, or whatever you like– any genre– to syllableseries@gmail.com. Deadline: Sunday, December 11th, for Wednedsday, December 14th’s event.

Big book season

Hoo, boy, this is big book season. Some of the ones I scoped on my latest trip to my favorite independent bookstore were:

A Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (author of Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides)

Blue Nights by Joan Didion (one of my favorite writers ever)

Life Itself by Roger Ebert (you know who this guy is)

However, the books I actually ended up buying fit squarely into our upcoming Fantasy theme for our next syllable. I bought this instantaneously:

And then this:

which I’m a little bit embarrassed about (that cover is cheese-tastic), but every time it gets colder, I turn to fantasy and science fiction.

Why is this? Well, usually I’ve come off a period of lots of activities that leave very little time to read. The minute things start slowing down, I desperately want to read my face off. My only desire is to binge on plot, characters, and escapism. I read these books very fast– averaging about 150 pages a day– and I enjoy being a part of the cultural conversation around popular novels. So I just knock ’em down, one after the other.

In the summer, I read very seriously. But winter is for silliness and fantasy.

What’s your seasonal reading schedule? Leave it in the comments!

…. and please don’t forget to submit for this month’s theme, “Fantasy.” That does not have to mean the fantasy genre, but it can. Surprise me.

— Julia