This latest issue of the JEF is dedicated to Bizarro Fiction, and contains fresh works from well-known authors and newcomers alike. Gina Ranalli’s intense THREE STORIES, Cameron Pierce’s flash-romance CRAZY LOVE and Forrest Armstrong’s lyrical ARIAS OVER THE DRUM MACHINE are all excellent pieces worthy of the admission price, and that’s just a quarter of what you get.

Provocatively, editor Echkard Gerdes’s introduction fires a shot across the bow of Carlton Mellick III’s widely-read essay EXPERIMENTAL FICTION VS. BIZARRO, taking umbrage at the core arguments of that piece and flinging back a mini-manifesto of what makes the JEF tick. Will CM3 respond? Is a literary cat-fight in the brewing? If it sheds more light than blood and fur, we say “bring it on!”

Mykle Hansen discusses writing, publishing and arson with the charming Lori Hettler over at The Next Best Book Blog.  Check it out!

Kevin Sampsell is so many things at once!  Author, editor, small-press booster and publisher of Future Tense Books, he is also the curator of charming series of co-interviews on the Powell’s Books blog, titled Small Press Converstations.

This month’s conversation, between Mykle Hansen and bizarro rising star Andersen Prunty, contains much witty heart-wringing over the travails of writerdom, plus a few veiled threats.  All of us at FAMH wholeheartedly endorse the entire series of interviews.

image: Pablo Picasso

There once was a chicken, silver and gray. It was broody and uncooperative at our friends’ farm. We got it for free; we thought a change of scenery might help it. But in sixteen months it never laid one egg. Worse, it became tangled up in an underground egg-eating ring — a ring that we recently busted.

Over at my other blog: an ode to autumn suppertime in the Pacific Northwest.

“Dear Reverend Hanson: Praise Jesus! I have walked the straight and narrow path for 93 years now, doing the Lord’s work gladly and earnestly. Today, I’ve learned that He is calling me home! The cancer has spread all through my bones, but I feel no pain, only His Love. I’m cleared for take-off on that heavenly runway, my soul tucked safely beneath the seat in front of me!

The trouble is, my granddaughter is a sodomist. She’s been sodomizing ever since she was 20. I have spoken earnestly and lovingly with her about the evils of sodomy and the peril of each sodom she commits with her “partner.” She denies her sodomy, but I can tell it just from the clothes they wear and the way they look at each other. I fear terribly that she will continue to sodomize herself and others, debase the temple of her body, and surely endanger her soul.

Yesterday, I was visited by a friend of hers, a so-called “woman of the cloth,” who claimed that the sodomies committed by my granddaughter are not sin at all, merely expressions of Christian love. She went so far as to suggest that Heaven is a place where sodomists are allowed to openly sodomize one another! Please tell me this is not so! I would hate to enter those wide pearly gates I’ve dreamed of for so long, only to be sodomized.

Reverend Hanson, for my granddaughter’s sake, I ask you: Is there sodomy in Heaven?”

Me, Jesus and You was a religious advice column that graced the humor page of the Portland Mercury between 2001 and 2003.   The author, “M. Leon Hanson”, purported to be a charismatic minister, a successful salesman of Christian-themed exercise videos, and the only connection to Jesus you’ll ever need.

For the time being, these columns are still archived on the Mercury’s website. Nobody’s heard from The Right Reverend in some time, but he is rumored to be working with Tim LaHay on an early-reader book titled “Left Behind: The Kittens!”

Order it at Amazon.com

“Biking in Portland is a social thing – you run into people you know all over town, maybe take a detour with them so you can talk a bit. There’s a plethora of bike clubs and regular monthly fun-rides. Biking gets you out of glass boxes and puts you into the world – we all know that – and in Portland the world is smooth, flat and smells like fresh rain. It is also full of front-yard gardens and old wooden houses, street art, bridges, waterways, and nice people who’ll talk to you.”

Bicycle Dream Date is the title of a mushy ode to “la vida bicycle” in Portland, Oregon. It appeared in Momentum Magazine, the truly awesome bike-culture mag from Vancouver, BC. (See all of Mykle’s Momentum articles here.)

… but don’t take my word for it. Instead, download the free web-anthology Bradley Sands Is A Dick, edited by Andersen Prunty and featuring work by a host of bizarros and their special friends, including Carlton Mellick III, Jordan Krall, D. Harlan Wilson, Garrett Cook, and Famous Author Mykle Hansen.

Mykle’s story is called “Bradley Sands Is A Dick.” Every other story in the anthology also has that name, which lends the whole thing a pleasant symmetry, I think.

Free download! Get it here, courtesy of Bust Down The Doors And Eat All The Chickens, the premier journal of Bizarro fiction.