HiLobrow’s 2013 — so far
By:
June 20, 2013
We have many great posts planned for this summer — including the series HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25 posts, by 25 contributors, about old-school hip hop); the series REGRESSION TOWARD THE ZINE (about the 1984–1993 Zine Revolution); HiLoBooks’ serialization of Muriel Jaeger’s forgotten science fiction novel The Man with Six Senses; dozens of HiLo Hero items; and much more. Before the solstice arrives, we thought we’d pause to celebrate what we’ve accomplished so far, in 2013, here at HILOBROW.
ALSO READ: BEST OF HILOBROW: 2010 | BEST OF HILOBROW: 2011 | BEST OF HILOBROW: 2012 | BEST OF HILOBROW: 2013
- Calvin Peeing Meme — Secret Origin! by Joshua Glenn
- Best 19th Century Adventure by Joshua Glenn
- The Clockwork Man (serialization) by E.V. Odle
- Asteroid Meme by Peggy Nelson
- The Zine Revolution by Joshua Glenn
- HiLo Hero: Eartha Kitt by Lynn Peril
- Herc Your Enthusiasm (series) by 25 contributors
- Aaron Swartz by Matthew Battles
- HiLo Hero: Luc Sante by Jacob Mikanowski
- Eye Candy 13 by Peggy Nelson
- Voyager Ex Voto by Matthew Battles
- HiLo Hero: Walter M. Miller Jr. by Mark Kingwell
- Sex and the Single Superhero (fanfiction contest-winning story) by Lyette Mercier
- HiLo Hero: Ellen Page by Jerrold Freitag
- HiLo Hero: Steve-O by Patrick Cates
- HiLo Hero: Drew Friedman by Brian Berger
- Brick Jokes by Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons
- HiLo Hero: Frank Miller by Adam McGovern
- 1765–74: Original Romantics by Joshua Glenn
- HiLo Hero: Michael Chapman by Brian Berger
- Slow Ride by Peggy Nelson
- HiLo Hero: Shepard Fairey by Marilyn Berlin Snell
- HiLo Hero: Harold Bloom by Anthony Miller
- 1785–94: Original Prometheans by Joshua Glenn
- Galactus Lives! (series) by Rob Steibel
* Note that this list was created in September 2013.
We’ve published over 100 HiLo Hero items so far this year, including posts on Palmolive, Luc Sante, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Swartz, Yukio Mishima, Antonio Gramsci, Vito Acconci, Derek Jarman, David Graeber, Shepard Fairey, Cindy Sherman, Jonathan Lethem, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Severo Sarduy, John Fahey, Hester Lucy Stanhope, Gilbert Hernandez, The Iron Sheik, Bayard Rustin, Yoko Kanno, Věra Chytilová, Tommy Cooper, Tod Dockstader, Thomas Frank, Jay DeFeo, Crystal Skillman, Jane Digby, Joe Meek, Leonora Carrington, Biz Markie, Afrika Bambaataa, Bruce Sterling, DJ Kool Herc, Katia Krafft, John Waters, Lars Von Trier, Keith Haring, Delia Derbeyshire, G.K. Chesterton, D.M.C., Chuck Barris, Kira Roessler [pictured], Steve-O, and Neil Patrick Harris. (Click here for all HiLo Hero items.)
HiLo Hero writers include: Tor Aarestad, Joe Alterio, Matthew Battles, Brian Berger, Franklin Bruno, Patrick Cates, Deb Chachra, Adrienne Crew, Tucker Cummings, Erik Davis, Mike Fleisch, Jerrold Freitag, Amanda French, Katie Hennessey, Mark Kingwell, Flourish Klink, Alix Lambert, Mimi Lipson, Adam McGovern, Devin McKinney, Jacob Mikanowksi, Anthony Miller, Tom Nealon, William Nericcio, Gary Panter, Lynn Peril, Dan Reines, Greg Rowland, Luc Sante, Elina Shatkin, Marilyn Berlin Snell, and Robert Wringham. We’re very grateful to them!
STAY TUNED: There are scores more HiLo Hero items still to come before the end of the year. NB: Joshua Glenn, who edits the HiLo Heroes series, is working on a HiLo Heroes book project — to be circulated to publishers later this year.
The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize (via HiLobrow.com) and sometimes republish — in gorgeous paperback editions — overlooked classics of Radium Age science fiction. In 2012, we serialized and then published five Radium Age science fiction novels (visit the HiLoBooks homepage for more info). In 2013, so far, we have serialized and published the following two titles.
- William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (April; Introduction by Erik Davis; PURCHASE NOW). “For all its flaws and idiosyncracies, The Night Land is utterly unsurpassed, unique, astounding,” says China Miéville. “A mutant vision like nothing else there has ever been.”
- J.D. Beresford’s Goslings (June; Introduction by Astra Taylor; PURCHASE NOW). “At once a postapocalyptic adventure, a comedy of manners, and a tract on sexual and social equality, Goslings is by turns funny, horrifying, and politically stirring,” says Benjamin Kunkel. “Most remarkable of all may be that it has not yet been recognized as a classic.”
STAY TUNED! Later this year we’ll also publish gorgeous paperback editions of the following titles:
- E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man (September; Introduction by Annalee Newitz; ORDER NOW). “Edwin Vincent Odle’s ominous, droll, and unforgettable The Clockwork Man is a missing link between Lewis Carroll and John Sladek or Philip K. Dick,” says Jonathan Lethem. “Considered with them, it suggests an alternate lineage for SF, springing as much from G.K. Chesterton’s sensibility as from H.G. Wells’s.”
- Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage (October; Introduction by Gary Panter; ORDER NOW). “Like Colson Whitehead’s Zone One without the zombie camp and idiom, Theodore Savage is a dark, strange, and cruelly contemporary tale of The Ruin and the post-apocalyptic condition that follows,” says Alexis Madrigal. “The book makes a spirited argument against science and machines, disputing itself viciously to the last word.”
- Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses (December; Introduction by Mark Kingwell; ORDER NOW)
Also this year, HiLoBooks partnered with the digital pulp publisher (and Brooklyn bookstore) Singularity & Co. to make selected HiLoBooks titles available as e-books. (Here’s a nice post about both Singularity & Co. and HiLoBooks from the sci-fi blog io9.) AND we’ve partnered with Dreamscape to make all 10 HiLoBooks titles available as audiobooks. You can buy an MP3 CD (or 7 audio CDs) of Goslings right now.
If you can’t wait to read this year’s forthcoming books, we’ve begun serializing The Clockwork Man (here) and Theodore Savage (here). We’ll begin serializing The Man with Six Senses in July.
In 2013 so far, HiLoBooks has also serialized these Radium Age sf stories, none of which we have plans to publish in print:
* Philip Francis Nowlan’s 1928 novella Armageddon — 2419 A.D., the inspiration for the Buck Rogers franchise.
* Homer Eon Flint’s 1921 novella The Devolutionist, in which Dr. Kinney and his companions enter the minds and share the sensations of the inhabitants of a double planet: Hafen is the abode of capitalists, Holl of workers.
* W.E.B. DuBois’s apocalyptic 1920 story “The Comet”.
* More to come! Including Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Moon Men, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, and Sax Rohmer’s The Zayat Kiss.
In February, HiLoBooks began its serialization — here at HILOBROW, as always — of Robert Waldron’s campus novel The School on the Fens, which takes place in the 1970s at a prestigious Boston public school. New installments will appear each Saturday for thirty-eight weeks. Click here to read all installments published so far.
Earlier this week, we published our friend Charlie Mitchell’s story “A Fantasy Land.” The story recently took first place in the Wyoming State Reading Council’s Young Authors Competition, in the 10th Grade Fiction category. HILOBROW is grateful for the opportunity to be Mitchell’s (first) publisher.
In March, HiLobrow announced our eighth micro-fiction contest. The theme was fanfiction! Pazzo Books provided beautiful and apropos rare books as prizes. In May, we announced the winning stories. Lyette Mercier took first place with “Sex and the Single Superhero”. (Illustration created for HiLobrow by Rick Pinchera.)
Second-runner up from our fanfiction contest: “Weren’t Your Eyes Blue?”, by Joe Coen (of Houston, Texas). First-runner up: An untitled Scooby-Doo fanfiction by classics major Jason Matthews (of Halifax, Nova Scotia), which we’ve titled “Mystery Machine”.
HILOBROW’s Arts Editor Peggy Nelson took April and May off to focus on her Ernest Shackleton twitter novel, among other projects. (She was interviewed about her work here.) Still, Peggy found time to publish two dozen fascinating HiLobrow posts. More to come!
HILOBROW’s editor has published several items so far in 2013, including…
A newly invented holiday, MICAWBER DAY. Each year from now on, on January 18, we invite idlers and would-be idlers around the world to celebrate and emulate Charles Dickens’ great character Wilkins Micawber, whose name has become synonymous with someone who lives in optimistic expectation of better fortune, but won’t lift a finger to make it come any sooner.
Several new installments — on Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, Bernard Rose’s Candyman, Don Siegel’s Escape from Alcatraz, Jared Hess’s Nacho Libre, Allan Arkush’s Rock’n’Roll High School, and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction — in his ongoing series, SHOCKING BLOCKING.
The final four installments in his series of generational periodization posts. Glenn has now re-periodized the generations (formerly known as Boomers, Silent Generation, Generation X, etc.) going back 250 years. The newly added installments are: ORIGINAL PROMETHEANS (born 1785–94), IRONIC IDEALISTS (born 1775–84), ORIGINAL ROMANTICS (1765–74), and PERFECTIBILISTS (1755–64).
A coming-attractions-type preview of a series of 25 posts planned for this summer on the topic of the Zine Revolution. Recently, the University of Iowa Libraries acquired the Joshua Glenn Zine Collection — hundreds and hundreds of zines that Glenn squirreled away during the the 1984–1993 Zine Revolution, plus scores of letters from zine publishers, plus all sorts of ephemera related to the printing, distribution, and promotion of zines including his own: Luvboat Earth and Hermenaut.
An item revealing the long-unknown true origin of the CALVIN PEEING meme! This item sent a shock-wave throughout the Internet; its reverberations are still spreading.
HiLo Hero items on Radium Age science fiction authors S. Fowler Wright, Abraham Merritt, John Taine, David Lindsay, J.D. Beresford, Cicely Hamilton, and Murray Leinster. Plus a HiLo Hero item on the aesthetic separatist Gérard de Nerval.
* HILOBROW’s former co-editor Matthew Battles returned, for a brief period early this year, and published nearly a dozen excellent posts which you can see here. These days, Matthew is associate director of the metaLAB (at) Harvard, which keeps him very busy.
We have begun publishing THE RED MEN EDITS, a series of posts by Matthew De Abaitua (originally published on his own blog) in which he rereads his own cult science fiction novel, The Red Men, and explicates the process of editing and rewriting it for this month’s ebook edition. PS: This month also sees the release of the short film Dr Easy, an intensive expansion of the first chapter of The Red Men.
We published GALACTUS LIVES!, a six-part series, by Rob Steibel, offering a close reading of Jack Kirby’s pencil work (and notes to Stan Lee) on a single page from Thor #162 (1969).
We published another installment in David Smay’s excellent series on early ’60s horror movies. This time, Smay wrote about Jack Clayton’s 1961 film The Innocents.
Back in January, we published a few stories, by HiLobrow contributors James Parker, Greg Rowland, Luc Sante, and Douglas Wolk, from SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS — the literary-anthropological project co-edited by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, a book version of which appeared in 2012. The full series of twelve posts is here.
At the beginning of each new year, Joshua Glenn writes a rondel celebrating thirteen of the HiLo Heroes about whom HiLobrow’s contributors wrote during the preceding year. The latest rondel celebrates Brion Gysin, Eddie Cochran, Hedy Lamarr, Eduardo Paolozzi, Robert Desnos, Marcus Aurelius, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Neneh Cherry, Angela Carter, U-God, Tristan Tzara, Inez Hayes Irwin, and Calamity Jane.
Several installments in the ongoing CHESS MATCH series. A few installments in the ongoing LATF HIPSTER series. And a new PLUPERFECT PDA installment.
READ: BEST OF HILOBROW: 2010 | BEST OF HILOBROW: 2011 | BEST OF HILOBROW: 2012 | BEST OF HILOBROW: 2013
HILOBROW is grateful to its contributors, without whom none of this would have been possible; our readers; and our publisher, KING MIXER LLC.