Has reading aloud with friends become a thing of the past?

One of the many pleasures in my life is watching my friends and family read to their young children.  We put so much care into the choices of stories we read to these impressionable minds and the tone in which we present the stories.  They soak up the words, characters, and the plots asking us to read them over and over until they can “read” them back to us from memory.  As we get older we seem to gravitate to the television in order to share the experience of stories instead of reading them to each other.  But I believe there is immense value in reading to each other throughout our lives.  I have delightful memories of my parents loading us all up into a canoe so my mom could read us The Secret Garden while we leisurely paddled around a lake.  Later, when my sister and I moved into an apartment together, with no television, we entertained ourselves by reading books to each other.  Steinbeck was a favorite to read aloud.  A book I have read over and over with friends on traveling adventures is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole for its bizarre humor that you just can’t help but share with the people around you.  I have even earned a good scolding at a campground for laughing too loud while a good friend of mine read me excerpts from a David Sedaris book.  And what romantic hasn’t read poetry to their lovers?  I am getting warm fuzzy feelings recalling these times but it occurred to me that I have not shared a book or story with someone in this fashion in quite a while.   I wonder… has reading aloud with friends become a thing of the past? In this modern time when everything moves so fast and time seems so hard to come by, we should still be able to find the time to at least share short stories with each other.  If you don’t already do this, give it a try.  We would love to hear about your experiences.

Emily Lahut

Publisher

Katherine Press

Seeking longer submissions

We are always looking for submissions of all kinds from talented writers, but what we haven't received much of is medium lenth pieces.  We've gotten a ton of short stories (which have been so much fun to read through - thanks, guys!), and we've gotten several full length novels.  However, we've gotten almost no 10,000 to 40,000 word pieces.

I'm beginning to think that maybe people just don't write novellas anymore.  And I understand why: up until now there simply hasn't been a market for them.  However, e-books mean that we don't have to print in larger volumes, and can sell pieces that are going to retail for $2.50 a piece.  Considering how busy we all are, it would be nice to have some pieces that can be read in the span of a few hours or a day or two.  Nothing against full length novels - goodness knows I love them.  But it would be great to see some medium length pieces as well. 

If you've got a piece like this kicking around your hard drive, go ahead and send it along to us at KatherinePress@Hotmail.com!  We can't wait to read them.

Inga Gardner
Editor

October Issue of the Katherine Press Review is up!

The October issue of the Katherine Press Review is now up and, if we do say so ourselves, it's a really good one!  Here's the letter from the editor that accompanies the issue:

Welcome back to the Katherine Press Review!

By far one of the greatest and most unexpected pleasures of editing the Katherine Press Review has been the sheer amount and quality of the writing talent that is just... out there.  It's not even hiding; it's just waiting to be noticed.  This issue is a perfect example of some of the wonderful writing that only had to be discovered.

Take Isadora Gruye's 3C.  By the end of the story, I was literally in tears.  And yet there were moments when I laughed out loud.  Stories that can do that to a reader and not feel remotely manipulative are a rare and wonderful treat (on a related note, Ms. Gruye has completed a novel and I would be lying if I said I wasn't kind of dying to read it).

On the other hand, I wasn't sure how I felt about If You Knew Mary, Rehka Ambardar's story of expats in Sri Lanka.  I knew I liked the setting and I knew I liked the idea of the story, but as I was reading it, I wasn't sure whether I liked the story itself.  In the following days, though, I found myself thinking about the titular character, thinking about her as though she was someone that I, well, knew.  A story that stays with you for days after you've read it is a story worth returning to.

And of course, there is Shelley Burbank's unspeakably delightful I Was Never That Fond of Kafka.  It should surprise exactly no one to learn that I am a bit of a literature geek.  Mashing Kafka-esque themes with chick lit was truly inspired and I can only say that I wish I had thought of it first.  And if you're not a literature geek and have never read Kafka, don't be put off: the story is funny and charming and weird and absolutely wonderful.

I would love to say that my editing had anything to do with the strength of this issue of the Katherine Press Review, but all Emily and I have done here is recognize that these were talented writers and give them a forum.  I will be very surprised if these writers don't turn up again in settings much more prestigious than ours.  Honestly, though, and I think I speak for Emily here as well, we're just thrilled to be a part of these exciting writers' careers.

Happy reading! 

Inga Gardner
Editor-in-Chief

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Also, if you were unlucky enough to miss the September issue, don't worry: you've still got time to read it before it disappears into the internet ether.  Click here to check out our previous issue.

*cough* *cough* *achoo*

On a note completely unrelated to anything, it's cold and flu season again so (at the risk of sounding like your mom) make sure to wash your hands and take your vitamins.  Emily was laid low by a nasty respiratory infection and I got gut punched by a bit of stomach flu unpleasantness.  We're both either mended or mending, but damn this is not an auspicious start to the season. 

Okay, carry on.

Inga Gardner
Editor

New Amazon Kindles!

I'm not going to bother pretending that Amazon's announcement of a whole line of Kindles today is not super exciting.  There's a $79 Kindle.  Granted it has ads, but still!  There's a Kindle Touch!  And, most knee-quakingly exciting of all, there's the Kindle Fire.  Even the name is exciting.  And it's $199.  I was pretty much resigned to not getting an iPad until the price came down and everyone else already had one (you know, like it was with the iPod).  But $199--that's, like, affordable.  And it uses Cloud computing, which the nerd in me absolutely loves.

But more than that, this is a step in the right direction: toward getting everyone reading on e-book.  Yes, I know, there will always be the paper snobs who go on about the feel of books and the smell of books.  And that's fine.  But the Kindle (or the Nook, or the Sony eReader or whatever) is light and convenient, it's easy to read and it makes books accessible anywhere and everywhere.  What's not to love about that? 

More than that, I was out walking one of my dogs the other day and a neighbor was coming back from the bus stop with her third grade daughter.  "Feel this," my neighbor said, holding up her daughter's book bag.  It was so heavy.  I'm a grown woman and I wouldn't want to carry that bag every day.  I can't imagine allowing my third grader to carry that.  $79 is a step in the direction of children using e-readers instead of text books.  And saving a few third grade backs (not to mention a few million trees) sounds like a really, really good thing.

Inga Gardner
Editor

What do you think?

In the coming months, Katherine Press has got some great stories and essays lined up for publication.  Emily and I really can't wait to share them with you, and we think that you're going to find them interesting and thought provoking.  So, at the outset, I wanted to invite you to share your thoughts on the writing we publish.  If you have a strong reaction to any of our stories -- positive or negative -- we want to hear them.  You can leave them in the comments section below, leave them on the comment page of our website, or email them to KatherinePress@hotmail.com.  Any really interesting or thought provoking letters, we'll publish here on the blog. 

Thanks and happy reading!

Inga Gardner
Editor
Katherine Press

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
Virginia Woolf