HAL and MKU in the Media

Press for H.A.L. Publishing, its writers, its new book, MIDDLE KINGDOM UNDERGROUND and its events. Check it out, and while you’re at it, check out The Shanghai Tunnels Project. Get involved!

Enjoy Shanghai : HAL Puplishing (MKU Launch and SLAMHAI 3!)

The World of Chinese: Bjorn Wahlstrom on guerilla publishing

That’s Magazine : MKU Review

Vimeo MKU book Trailer

MKU: Press Release

Asian Cha:  Dena Rash Guzman and MKU/River South Arts Festival

Pipe Dream Publishing: two articles -
MKU/Book Launch and interview with DRG

The Shanghai Tunnels Project

INTERNATIONAL VIDEO POETRY FESTIVAL

HAL and UNSHOD QUILLS have teamed up with Portland’s Monica Storss to produce a cross-cultural, trans-Pacific video poetry film festival. Hosting bi-lateral events in Shanghai and Portland, the festival will celebrate the spoken word as infused by the medium of film, promoting and connecting artists from around the world.

Shanghai and Portland, Oregon have more in common than meets the untrained eye. Dark, busy, and both studded with Shanghai tunnels (those in Portland were used in the insidious pursuit of many illegal activities, including the kidnapping of young men for use as slave sailors on the Pacific; Shanghai’s own tunnels transport people in cars beneath the river to do whatever the hell they want). Both cities are divided by a river of trade and both cities are booming with literary communities as vibrant as anywhere else in the world. Both cities lay claim to Unshod Quills and HAL Publishing, sister sites and companies united in the pursuit of promoting excellent art and literature the world over.

$300 USD (RMB 1900) Grand Prize – Judges Choice for Best Video Poem – Second and Third Prizes – Screening Events in Shanghai and Portland, Oregon – Publication on HAL and Unshod Quills –

Guidelines and Submission forms after the jump. Continue reading…

Stained

Sketchbook

by Lindsay Redifer

illustrated by Robin Wang

Bang!

The metro doors bulge for a second and the train seems to go faster. It’s as if someone trapped in the tunnel has made a desperate attempt to get through the doors shoulders first. The sound is angry. I’ve only slept a few hours, I remind myself. I could be hallucinating.

Deep breath.

Continue reading…

Down in the Depths, the Very Very Depths

By JC

Sitting on the subway train thinking about rain Damon watched the man trying trying trying to touch a young woman. The train lurched, the woman leaned, then the man lunged. Paw. Breast. Contact.

When he’d awoken that cold windswept snowsleet Sunday afternoon, his apartment felt claustrophobic, a cluster-wart. Crust everywhere. He’d gone out out, into the air, the dim winter light but oh the cold. He needed to examine the city like an etherized patient, poke and prod its under-bits – how else could he experience it? and yet it was too cold and he was too hungover/dessicated/frailsick to do it aboveground.

You learn a city from its subways – he coined the aphorism as he bumped down the first flight of stairs, his body bumping down like a dragged suitcase. As he bought a fare card he decided he liked the idea – nearly everyone congregates here, and you can get a good look at them in a way you can’t when passing on a street.

He’d once thought of writing on the subway but he was too hungover. All he could come up with were titles.

My second novel will be called ‘Dark Star: a Memoir of Addiction.’ It will be about a nine-year old girl and her very happy childhood. It’s like, something something something about how that happy childhood feeling won’t last, it’s transitory, just like addiction? Or drugs. Something like that.

The subway squealed to a stop: eeeesh, his cotton candy brain. His brainbox felt drier than a Kleenex in the desert. Continue reading…

The Beautiful Country

by Katrina Hamlin

My name is Xiao Yu. I am nineteen.

I have eaten KFC fried chicken and onion rings, washed down with milk tea. Then I ate a doughnut, which is an incomplete cake with a hole in the middle.

I have heard rap, which is when you have a song but you don’t sing. I can do that at the KTV.

I have seen their TV show series, which are about real life, but with shiny teeth and hair and perfect love.

So I already knew quite a lot about the Beautiful Country when I met my first Beautiful Person.

The Beautiful Person, whose name was Sam, was still in some way not what I expected.

Continue reading…

Nine Ways to Eat a Watermelon

By Robin Silver

Cut in half, with a spoon, immersed in a wartime movie. The Great War is best, followed by Vietnam, but any will do. Hopefully, there will be at least one passionate kiss before you hit the rind.

Off a paper plate, sliced in triangles, fingers of your writing hand grasped around the green, the other hand under the table, to hide the discreet reserve of seeds.

Sucked through a straw placed in a hole carved with a penknife and spit into the trash can. Carefully, so as not to ruin the integrity of the rind. It is the best bong you’ve ever smoked.

In the fifth grade, on a class picnic. Jeremy, who everyone calls Germy, who sits across from you in math, tells you that if you swallow the black seeds a watermelon tree will grow inside your belly. You tell him that watermelons don’t grow on trees. It is years before you drunkenly make the connection between “seed” and something else, quite similar in size to a watermelon, growing inside your belly. Continue reading…

Mary

By Fei Wu

It has been six months since my epiphany.

On the morning of my conversion, I was staring at the sterile white linoleum that lines the floor of the underground lab where I spend my days, indolent in artificial light.

Mary, the peroxide-blonde office slut had ensnared me in a tiresome flirtation. She slid up to me that morning wearing too much lipstick and much more eye-shadow. She purred a greeting, and brushed her arm casually against mine. The smell of her overwhelmed me, it was rosy and rotten. Her scent distracted me from my work with its fetid desperation. I stared at her through my glasses; making sure the glare obscured my disgust, and forced a smirk that I knew would make her thighs twitch. Mary was puppyish in her devotion to me, convinced I was a genius, that my aloof exterior was a shell for a lonely, suffering soul. This was partly due to a bored manipulation on my part, I’d casually left some scribbled lines of maniac poetry on my desk for her to see, and she’d eaten it up. The rest of her delusion stemmed from a deep, almost dogmatic faith in clichés. Her cubicle was covered with inspirational quotes, some of which she had written out in painstakingly cramped calligraphy — because a personal touch is never too much!

Continue reading…

PROFIT

By David Foote

I am…that is, I was, a broker with Dalian Futures in Shanghai. I had a gorgeous 3 bedroom apartment in Century Park with wood floors through-out, views of the river and a hot tub in the ensuite bathroom. Bay windows like you wouldn’t believe and a pretty but boring, blue eyed bitch of a girlfriend. She wrote “Celebrity Image Consultant” under profession on her visa forms, and didn’t give a tupenny fuck how many kids in Guangzhou she’d sent blind hand-stitching her new gucci pumps. The jungle is no place for bleeding hearts after all.

If that all sounds like some gutless middle manager’s twisted wank fantasy… if indeed you should experience jealousy, do not panic. That is the reaction my lifestyle was intended to provoke. Every empire has it’s Nero after all. In the sage words of Axyl Rose, “nothing lasts forever not even cold November rain”. Continue reading…

A Story that Kills Dreams

By Ryan Carter

We were riding beside one another, cutting off traffic. He said, “I want to cut off a piece of your cheek and keep it in my pocket. I can carry it with me.”

He said, “I want to cut off one of your lips and keep it with me.”

I said, “Would you pull out my eyelashes?” He said, “What is the meaning of eyelash?”

I said, “After you pulled out all my eyelashes, you could blow dust in my face? You could tie me up in a chair, and throw dust through a fan, into my face?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “Would you enjoy pulling out my fingernails with pliers?”

He said, “Yes, of course.”

Continue reading…

Serene: The Green Eyed Monster

By Darcy Fisher

The monster hides in the closet waiting for my lights to turn off because, at that time, it is not seen. Only felt in the winds of darkness, its green eyes peak through the slats defending its status and staring at me when I sleep.  Its big teeth bearing, sharp, as it rubs its bloated Buddha belly growling for my attention.

The monster was first sighted at the market hiding in the aisles of oranges in peak season. The apples stared violently, while customers picked the oranges over them.  “I was always chosen!” said the apples.  “We were chosen over any other since the beginning of man!” the apples muttered.  “Now I am the apple of their eye,” the oranges said with condescension and winked at the apples. The apples pouted, thick-skinned, wakened and bruised. The monster hid in the dark corner of the mom and pop fruit stand on Fu Min Lu laughing, and then vanished in the misty air of morning.

Continue reading…

HAL’s Mad Tea Party: Two Lumps

That’s right folks, time for more tea, check out these lovely little crumpets from our gals D and K below!

Dena Rash Guzman – All the Tea in China

Katrina Hamlin – New Home

Shanghai Erotic Fiction Guidelines

Second Annual Shanghai Erotica on the Bund

Good news kids and kiddets, It seems that we are back for another swank evening of erotic readings at the Glamour Bar this coming February! HAL has been asked to send the word out to our writers.

We want you to produce some bad ass erotica for the event! Check out the deets and get your literary engines purring!

Submission Guidelines

1.) Shanghai based Erotica

(We want erotica not letters to Hustler, wiki erotica if you don’t know what it means or check out some of the links provided for you below of some of HAL’s past writers doing their erotic thang.)

2.) 1000 Word limit

3.) Justified margins, 1.5 spacing, font times new roman in a WORD.DOC

3.) Send all submissions to butler@haliterature.com

4.) At the top of the Word.doc include name, 60 word bio, and contact details.

5.) Deadline Feb 15th by 11:59PM

6.) Subject line of email should read HAL SUBMISSION-EROTICA-AUTHOR NAME

Expect to experience a great evening and event. This event is being put on by Glamour Bar, Thats Mag, HAL and some other big hitters so if your story is selected expect to see some love around the interwebs and all around Shanghai!

Get writing!

The Policy

By Lindsay Redifer

Lee is sitting on the newest HP Inkjet in a just a blouse and heels. I frame the shot one more time — the logo has to be nice and clear.

“Lee, move your feet a bit. I need to see those ink cartridges on the desk.”

“Okay!”

God, that voice. It’s like a cat whining into a garbage disposal. I try not to think. Just work. Just do. “Action!”

The printer starts spitting out glossy pictures of female eyes, crystal clear and beautiful on double-bond off-white paper. Lee moans and begins to masturbate wildly.

“Urrrhhhhnnnnoooohhhh!!!! The quality! Oooaarrggghhhh!!!” I shudder, but I seem to be the only one.

Ang, our script girl, stands watching without expression. Ang is Burmese and therefore banished to behind the scenes while Lee moans and grunts in the spotlight. Ang’s big, soft eyes are the same as those spewing out of the printer, over and over and over.
“And cut! Okay, let’s set for scene 8. Someone get Fat Man.”

Continue reading…