Peculiar Pages

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(what is inktober?)

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(what is inktober?)

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Read it today! It’s another good one!

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Dallas Robbins reviewed The Fob Bible in the fall issue of Dialogue last year. Which issue of Dialogue has been hanging around the office waiting for someone not only to appreciate the article, but to actually review the review here. As you can see, we have been a little slow on that point. What with it being fall of this year, now.

Anyway, the review bears certain similarities to another review he wrote for AML though much more in depth and including additional quotations from additional pieces.

The article is “Re-Creating the Bible” (206-211) and, after reminding the reader of the Bible’s central position in Western Literature, begins by admiring The Fob Bible‘s opening pages, including the family tree and title page and the book’s general design. (When a reviewer can even admire the title page, surely we have done something right.)

The book, Robbins claims, has “too many stories to cover in this review, and each one could be discussed in depth” (209). Naturally, that was impossible in the space allotted, but he did find room to compare “How to Get Over It” to The New Yorker‘s “Shouts & Murmers,” thus near-fulfilling a teenage dream for its author. He then moves on to discuss other humorous pieces (“Ezra’s Inbox” by Eric W Jepson and “The Love Song of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar” by Danny Nelson”), before moving into an extended quotation from “Blood-Red Fruit,” co-written by those two.

Which “story is just one of the many beautiful parts of this collection” which “present challenging experiments that remind the reader of what makes the Bible unique. While much religious fiction based on biblical stories tries to water down the inherent strangeness of the Old Testament for the sake of a commercial audience, The Fob Bible foregrounds the strangeness. By juxtaposing the strangeness with various literary forms and contemporary approaches, it creates  type of meta-scripture, in which literary truth is exalted over doctrinal correctness” (210-1).

Needless to say, we are honored to have The Fob Bible lauded as having literary merit in any way comparable to that of the single most important literary work in Western history (however! although we agree with his hope that reading our book will send readers back the the Bible Bible, we hope that it will also lead to many copies being purchased for friends and family this coming Christmas).

While Fire in the Pasture and Monsters & Mormons are both about to be released, don’t miss this reminder to remember The Fob Bible, the book without which there would be no Peculiar Pages.

And — also worth remembering! — Plain and Precious Parts of the Fob Bible is still available for free download.

Read Plain and Precious Parts of the Fob Bible online or download an e-book file below.

EPUB (free!)
HTML(free!)
IMP(free!)
LIT (free!)
LRF (free!)
PDF (free!)
PRC (free!)
KINDLE (99¢) (blame Amazon)

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Long has it been since I reminded the world they can read selected portions of The Fob Bible free either here or as an e-book file (EPUB, HTML, IMP, LIT, LRF, PDF, PRC).

Amazon will also sell you  a copy for your Kindle if you have 99¢.

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The Hugo Award nominations were revealed yesterday, and Monsters & Mormons writers are well represented.

“That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” (Analog, September 2010) by Eric James Stone  (which will be appearing also in our volume) has been nominated for best novelette and Dan Wells author, in M&M of “Mountain of the Lord”) was been nominated for the prestigious John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Friends, this is the kind of quality Peculiar Pages is bringing you with Monsters & Mormons. Be appropriately excited.

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Exciting times here in Monsters & Mormons headquarters. You can expect, mm, probably one more round of admits after this. We do hope the suspense has been mortifying.

But first, five more tastes of pending excellence:

S.P. Bailey’s The Baby in the Bushes

No supernatural monsters here, so if you can stand a sideways step into a separate genre, then put your gumshoes on and help us solve the mystery of the body in the storage unit. Old Testament law arrives in modern Utah and the consequences are not pretty.

TV McArthur’s The Blues Devil

I don’t think it’s natural for deals with the devil to leave the reader warm and smiling, but somehow TV pulled it off. I can’t explain it. I don’t even want to.

Bridgette Tuckfield’s Experimenting with Life at Extraordinary Depths

As I look back at my notes, I discover that Bridget’s story has “unique and pleasurable elements.” It also has a lot of mud and slime. But it’s unique and pleasurable mud and slime, so no worries. Just stay out of the water.

Brian Gibson’s The Eye Opener

Gibson is clearly wasting his time working in television. I now think about this story every night when we say family prayer. You don’t know how unsettling this is. Yet.

Danny Nelson’s The World

Rarely have I seen stereotypical “Relief Society Ladies” drawn with such love and care and depth and richness that you want to slap anyone who’s ever used that stereotype dismissively. Not to mention perhaps the most original monster I’ve ever read. You can’t predict this story. You can’t you can’t you can’t.

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In the new issue of Dialogue, Dallas Robbins has reviewed The Fob Bible in an article titled “Re-Creating the Bible”; we have ordered a copy and will report as soon as we read the article. Robbins previously wrote a shorter review of TFB for AMV (link) of which we are quite fond.

In this same issue of Dialogue, Fob Bible poet Ryan McIlvain has a piece titled “The Canyon That is Not a Canyon” which we suspect is an essay or possibly a short story. Guess we’ll find out when it arrives in the mail.

In the meantime, why wait for us to tell you what to think? Pick up a copy today!

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The Association of Mormon Letters announced the winners of the Irreantum Fiction Contest and the Charlotte and Eugene England Personal Essay Contest. Among the honorees are James Goldberg whose work appears in Out of the Mount and Eric W Jepson, coeditor of The Fob Bible and Monsters & Mormons. Goldberg won third place in the fiction contest and second in the essay; Jepson received an honorable mention for fiction. Congratulations, gentlemen!

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Just a reminder, eighteen works from The Fob Bible are available here at Peculiar Pages.

Also, in addition to the hardback and paperback version, we are working to bring forth electronic copies. Because of the beauty of the book, this is somewhat complex, but for starters, we have a pdf. You can find all three versions available for purchase here.

Finally, since we have not listed the available reviews of The Fob Bible for some time, here’s the list to date. Reviews and commendations we have not previously posted are followed by an asterisk:

A Motley Vision (part one)

A Motley Vision (part two)

C. L. Hanson

Dallas Robbins for AML*

Feminist Mormon Housewives*

Galen Dara*

Finally, two additional excerpts from The Fob Bible have appeared online which are not part of Plain and Precious Parts: “The Changing of the God” by B.G. Christensen and “Sustain-Abel” by Danny Nelson.

Enjoy!