The reader of a good book can hear the narrator speaking, can even envision the narrator’s gestures and facial expressions. Dactyl Review contributing editor, U. R. Bowie consistently produces fiction that animates itself in the reader’s mind. And now this, an audiobook of Bowie’s short story collection, Such Is the Scent of Our Sweet Opalescence (Ogee Zakamora, 148 pages), read by the author. (Paperback also available.) The narrator of title story is Uretherer V. Lamb, a character reminiscent of one of Kurt Vonnegut’s memorable creations. The story opens when U.V. is struck by lighting in the midst of taking a leak roadside. He meets death, in the form of grinning Delmas W. Pruitt, but somehow U.V. cheats Delmas and goes on to live his life as a “backslider” without a soul, it seems.
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Author Archives: VN Alexander
Reviewers: Do you have a book announcement?
Beginning immediately, authors who have reviewed on this site in the past year are encouraged to send in news and announcements about their own books. Let us know if you have a new book out, or your old book just got another good review, or any noteworthy anecdote about your novel or short story collection. Keep it brief. About 500 words.
Also Dactyl Review continues to offer you the opportunity to post your available review copies here.
Platform Cooperative Book Publishing
We have Internet now.
Why hasn’t book publishing improved? Technology has changed a bit since books the days of cut wood blocks and repurposed wine presses. With browser-based editing tools, print-on-demand (POD), ebooks, audiobook files and the Internet, upfront capital investment in the material aspects of publishing is no longer required and the role of the traditional publisher has diminished.
We all have access to this wonderful newish invention called the Internet search engine which should have realized the dream of decentralized connectivity and reduced the need for a middleman to select, distribute, market and sell books. Blocking the way between author and reader are the vestigial organs of the old publishing system that mainly dealt in offset print paper books that had to be produced, stored and distributed at great cost. Technological progress frees human beings from the material drag of the old system and leaves only the tasks that will never be performed by machines: writing, editing, final proofreading and reviewing. The profits from book sales need not be siphoned off by those now useless middlemen, distributor, marketer, and seller. Even though the Internet has made these roles obsolete, they have, monstrously, become even more powerful and centralized than ever. The “big five” publishing industry monopolies, Google and Amazon are the very opposite of what the Internet promised humanity. Good literature is essential for a thriving culture.
What do we need?
A cooperative platform model of publishing and selling, designed to cut out unnecessary middlemen, reward the essential work of those directly involved in writing and editing and ensure that authors can be paid for every book sold or borrowed throughout the extended lifetime of the book.
Small independent presses, that are struggling to turn a profit and whose authors earn too little for their writing, can convert to a cooperative model in order to reduce their financial risk and reduce the workload of the editors while maintaining a high quality booklist by accessing the talent pool of their authors, who, in turn could receive a higher return on their investment of time and effort. Dactyl Foundation proposes to be the umbrella organization that provides online access to a cooperative platform for independent publishers.
The Head & The Hand Press
The Head & The Hand, an independent cooperative press, opened a pop-up bookstore today in the Fishtown/East Kensington area of Philadelphia at 2644 Coral St. The community-focused bookstore will provide curated fiction and local lit and hopes to make it a permanent thing.
Nathaniel Popkin, a Dactyl Reviewer and author of Lion and Leopard , is part of The Head & The Hand press. Find out more, theheadandthehand.com
Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
I happen to be contemplating these days how Artificial Intelligence (AI) differs from Biological Intelligence (BI), and so I finally took down Galatea 2.2 (FS&G, 329 pages) from my bookshelf where it has stood waiting for me for about fifteen years. I may have belatedly cracked the spine, but the pleasure of reading good science fiction only improves as its predictions either come to pass or not.
The main plot turns on a Turing Test. Can scientists train a neural network to pass a comprehensive literature exam? Continue reading
Here’s a Great Idea
Won’t you please support Dactyl Foundation with a generous donation? The first step to making the world a better place is to read books that get you to think more. Your tax-deductible donation will support literary fiction and the Dactyl Review. https://dactylreview.com/about/
The Middle Man
At first I liked the fact that readers could find every one of my books on the shelf at one place. I liked the way Amazon bought directly from the publisher, cutting out Ingram book distributor, which had become a monopoly. But I always wondered how Amazon could sell books so cheap. Now that they’ve put other booksellers out of business and are getting into publishing themselves, Amazon can begin to eliminate less-than-best-selling inventory. Continue reading
Alice and the Time Machine by Victor Fet
Victor Fet, a colleague with whom I have shared adventures in art and science, offers Alice and the Time Machine (Evertype, 134 pages, illustrated by Byron W. Sewell) on the 150 anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the birth of H.G. Wells. The novella brings together Alice Liddell, Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), John Dalton (of atomic theory fame), Charles Darwin, Francis Galton (Darwin’s half-cousin) and Wells, who arrives in Darwin’s time of 1862 from 1892 via a time machine. Together they determine that Alice’s mad tale is actually a message from the future, warning them of coming chaos, bloody wars, catastrophic pollution and tyranny. They form the Time Corps and use the time machine to contact scientists past and future to enlist their aid to try to change the world for the better. As they do their work, they notice changes in their own time. At the beginning of the tale, Wells is a nobody but becomes a famous science-fiction author while the other Wells fades in his memory as if a dream. Continue reading
U. R. Bowie joins Dactyl Review as Contributing Editor
I am happy to announce that U. R. Bowie (pictured left) will be joining Dactyl Review as Contributing Editor. Bowie is the 2017 recipient of the Dactyl Review literary fiction award for his novel The Tale of the Bastard Feverfew. At DR we believe literary fiction writers make the best literary fiction reviewers. And vice versa. Bowie’s work offers substantial support for that premise.
Bowie has been contributing reviews regularly since the spring of 2016. As a professor of Russian literature, he brings special insight to novels that are touched by the Russian soul. His reviews of The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis (both dealing with Russian themes) and his most recent review of The Trick of It by Michael Frayn (a novel about novel writing) stand out as the kind of reviews literary fiction authors want and need. (Read his reviews now, if you haven’t yet.) Unlike a lot of hack reviewers working for pocket change for the prepub make-it-or-break-it publications such as Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, Bowie, working for the love of it alone, has actually read the books he reviews, not just skimmed them. We can tell because he analyzes the actual language used by the author and does not make comments about the characters as if they were real people not literary constructs. Continue reading
Dactyl Foundation 2017 Literary Fiction Award
U.R. Bowie’s The Tale of the Bastard Feverfew: One Man’s Journey into the Land of the Dead wins Dactyl Foundation’s annual award for literary fiction.
Bastard Feverfew is about an insurrection at a maximum security prison. Mike Miller (author of Worthy of this Great City) reviewed this year’s winner, noting that “The book succeeds in that it leaves the reader with a sense of a journey taken. We’ve experienced a reality we’d prefer to deny, we’ve endured and survived but will never completely forget. That’s an accomplishment for both author and reader.”
In addition to publishing six novels/short story collections over the past four years (Gogol’s Head, Hard Mother, GoogleGogol, Disambiguations, Own: The Sad and Like-wike Weepy Tale of Wittle Elkie Selph, and Anyway, Anyways ), Bowie has been a prolific contributor to Dactyl Review in 2017.
Congratulations U. R. Bowie and many thanks to Mike Miller for submitting the review. Bowie and Miller each agreed to a review exchange this year, and we hope other reviewer/writers will be encouraged to support each others’ work.
-VN Alexander, Editor
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