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From the Editor’s Desk
Winter, 2014
Ducts.org was founded in 1999 and five years later we produced a best of Ducts book – How Not to Greet Famous People – that launched our publishing company, Greenpoint Press. We intended to produce a new book every five years, but it’s taken us until now to produce another. Because producing books is hard work. But I’m excited to announce that we finally got our act together and our new anthology is now available: The Man Who Ate His Book.
Here’s what it says on the back cover:
Ducts.org, one of the first literary magazines on the web, was founded in 1999 and has since grown into a dependable and ambitious resource for readers looking for engaging and thought-provoking essays, memoirs, fiction, poetry, art and humor. In this, our second collection of some of our best, you will spend time with a dangerous SS man in the Warsaw Ghetto, enjoy sensuous cooking, experience a kiss that lasts forever, discover witticisms lost to time and meet The Man Who Ate His Book.
The book will be available in the usual places online very shortly, but for now please feel free to email Charles Salzberg at Charles@greenpointpress.org to get your copy. Ducts continues to publish some of the best writing anywhere and this shiny new book is proof of that. Don’t miss out!
As many of you know, Ducts.org is part of an umbrella organization called New York Writers Resources, dedicated to helping writers everywhere. Also under that umbrella are our two sister organizations. Greenpoint Press has continued the tradition of publishing extraordinary books that are too often over-looked by mainstream publishers. This fall, Greenpoint Press was proud to release Patty Dann’s latest novel, Starfish, which is the sequel to the much revered Mermaids, which you might remember as the iconic movie with Cher, Winona Ryder and Cristina Ricci. The novel picks up the Flax family twenty-five years later. And six years after the publication of our first book, How Not To Greet Famous People, the Best of Ducts.org we finally got around to publish The Man Who Ate His Book, The Best of Ducts.org Volume 2. On January 21st, Greenpoint will publish Ross Klavan’s hilarious novel, Schmuck which takes place in the wacky world of radio in the 1950s and is based in part on the life of his father, Gene Klavan who was part of the legendary radio duo, Klavan and Finch. And finally, in April Greenpoint will return to its roots by publishing Lisa Kirchner’s memoir, Hello, American Lady Creature, which chronicles are time in the Middle East–Qatar–as a single woman.
New York Writers Workshop continues to offer writing classes (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, screenwriting, playwriting, and children’s literature) every fall, winter, and spring at the Manhattan JCC. We also hold free classes at various branches of the New York Public Library, as well as online classes. In addition, NYWW holds Pitch Conferences every spring and fall, where writers from all over the U. S. (and other countries as well) workshop their book ideas and then pitch them to editors from leading publishers. Our track record of books pitched at the conferences and then published includes the recently-released Twerp, a young adult novel by Mark Goldblatt, and Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid, a memoir by Jessica Alexander that will be published in the fall. The fall 2013 pitch conferences will be held October 4-6 for Non-Fiction and November 1-3 for Fiction (for adults and children/young adults). http://newyorkwritersworkshop.com/category/conferences
We continue to raise money as part of our effort to bring you the best personal stories on the web. If you enjoy the thought-provoking essays and memoirs, if you are captivated by our fiction, poetry and art, I urge you to donate whatever amount you can. Every little bit helps!
Thank you for visiting and please return again and again!
-Jonathan Kravetz, Editor-in-Chief
This issue of Ducts is made possible with a regrant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, supported by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.