The Concord Festival of Authors...

...featured several authors from Rose Metal Press, including Rusty Barnes, Stace Budzko, Tara L. Masih, and Pamela Painter. Read all about their flash fiction panel here.

Sample question: How is flash fiction different from prose poetry?

Answer: Flash fiction is about stories; prose poetry is founded in language. But "I don't care what people call it as long as they publish it," said Barnes. Well put.

decomP magazinE likes We Know What We Are

Spencer Dew says that "all of these pieces are like glass shards glued down onto a mosaic, and the pleasure of We know what we are is that this mosaic is never visible as a whole. We see an arch, patches of color, a pickup truck loaded into a pickup truck, but something–like the visions of a fever dream–remains always just out of reach." Read the whole review here. Thanks, Spencer!

The Ithaca Post...

...thinks that Color Plates is "magical" and also "beautifully made." They also say that the museum of stories have "the feeling of being handcrafted, put together piece by piece by a master craftsman in tune with what is really important, lasting, and worthy of examination in each of these paintings and in the narratives they inspire."

We agree. See the whole review here. Thanks, Ithaca Post!

Color Plates sizzles.

So says Sean Lovelace over at HTML GIANT. Check out the whole review here. Thanks, Sean!

John Cotter...

...aka Adam Golaski's trusty tour mate is interviewed in The Cornell Daily Sun.

Read the whole thing here, and--if you live in/near Ithaca--be sure to check their reading out on Saturday, October 23 at Buffalo Street Books.

Love from Connecticut...

...specifically from the UConn Co-op Bookstore,specifically for Adam Golaski's Color Plates.

Kim Halpin wrote yesterday's in-store reading and signing up in the Daily Campus. "He explained the lack of the original artwork to accompany his narratives and even discussed his major use of light and colors throughout the stories as products of his education," she says. Read the whole story here. Thanks, Kim!

Martin Macaulay likes We Know What We Are...

...by Mary Hamilton, and he say so on the PANK blog. "These are stories that sing to you. Loudly. Proper shoulders back, wide mouthed, deep-sea breathing bursting to the surface in a wow-what-the-fuck-was-that kind of way," he says. Read the whole review here.

More love from Iowa....

...this time, in the form of a story about Color Plates author Adam Golaski and his tour mate John Cotter in the Daily Iowan.

According to Samantha Gentry: "It turns out that the two are not only talented writers, they are also very down-to-earth." Indeed. Thanks, Samantha!

Redivider...

...the graduate student-run literary magazine of Emerson College, is having a fiction contest, and perhaps you might like to submit to it.

If so, the details are that submissions must be 8,000 words or less (much, much less, if flash is your thing), and the fee per entry is $15 and includes a one year subscription to Redivider. More information is available here. Good luck!

Love from Iowa City...

...for Adam Golaski's Color Plates. The Iowa City Press-Citizen says that while "many readers might be tempted to read through "Color Plates" while sitting in front of their computers searching for images of Édouard Manet's "White Lilacs and Roses," Edgar Degas's "Café Concert: The Song of the Dog," Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's "La Visite: Rue des Moulins" or Mary Cassatt's "Lydia Leaning on Her Arm, Seated in a Loge" [...]such an anachronistic blend of 19th-century art and 21st-century technology isn't really necessary. Golaski isn't trying to gloss or to dramatize the paintings. He's more focused on describing the memories and fantasies that the paintings inspire."

Thanks to Jeff Charis-Carlson for the thoughtful words.

Open Letters Monthly...

...interviews Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rziczinek, the editors of the Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Flash Fiction here.

ForeWord Reviews...

...will run a review of Color Plates by Adam Golaski in their November/December issue. A sneak preview of what they will say:

"The tales in Color Plates are like this—snapshots of sorts, and each one takes on a life of its own. But together they form a pastiche, a kaleidoscope of worlds fused into a beautiful whole. A narrator says in the epilogue, “The book is a story, but hidden inside that story are other stories, and these are the stories that matter to her, stories unworried about why the gold gears of their clockwork mesh. Let them mesh lovely, she thinks.” And in this shimmering collection, mesh lovely they do."

Thanks to Jessica Henkle for the review!