Get Lit: Zoetrope All-Story

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Get Lit: Zoetrope All-Story

POSTED: Tuesday, July 22, 2008, 3:00 PM

Filed Under: Arts

Francis Ford Coppola’s farm team.

Zoetrope All-Story, quarterly, $8

There are only so many bucks to made in books, especially the literary kind, so it’s to a writer’s benefit to at least consider thinking about resorting to stooping to experimenting with telling a story that could one day become a movie. No shame in it.

Zoetrope All-Story, founded by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997, is very upfront about its cinematic underpinnings. For one thing, every issue features a “Classic Reprint” of a work which ended up a motion picture. The current issue includes “Vacation ’58” by John Hughes. (First line: “If Dad hadn’t shot Walt Disney in the leg it would have been our best vacation ever!”)

But Zoetrope’s got its eyes on the future, too. The magazine “considers submission of stories and one-act plays under seven thousand words; first serial rights and one year film option are required.” Signing over your soul or pulling off the ultimate publishing two-fer? I could think of worse fates for a short story than having a guy like Coppola try to make a movie out of it.

Every issue’s got a guest illustrator which means each one looks different and some are tough to look at. (Sorry, Tim Roth. No design awards for Mr. Orange.) The current edition is a pleasantly wide and simply arranged booklet put together by Mark Mothersbaugh (yep, from Devo). He went with a lot of weird oversized cartoon drawings that break up the text nicely.

The issue features Marissa Perry, Shaena Lambert, Yasutaka Tsutuni, Sana Karasikov and that John Hughes thing mentioned earlier. So, yeah, you only get five stories and a couple periphery pieces, but the batting average is high; Zoetrope rarely prints crap. Previous issues star Miranda July, Pinckney Benedict, Woody Allen, Adrienne Brodeur, John Barth, lots of good stuff. If they’re gonna sell us on this idea of cinema-friendly short stories, it doesn’t hurt to have some starpower.

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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