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Artifice Magazine is devoted to fiction and poetry aware of its own artifice: pastiche, mash-ups, cut-ups, experiments gone awry, sly metafiction with heart, whatever.

We're a print magazine tentatively scheduled to put out our first issue in Jan 2010 (tell your friends!).

Reach us with questions and comments at editors at artificemag dot com.

t & r, editors

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Seriously, y’all?  This bookstore is awesome.  Give them money. tylercoates: Save Women and Children First! Linda Bubon is no stranger to battling the economy. The co-owner of Women and Children First sounded the alarm two years ago, when it became clear the bookstore might not make it through the end of the year. Co-owner Ann Christophersen took another full-time job and pared down her duties at the store, but it still wasn’t enough. So in April 2007, WCF made a plea to its customers: Save us. “The story got legs really fast,” Bubon says. “In-store sales that May were up nearly 70 percent.” Membership at the store—for $25 a year, you get a 10 percent storewide discount—grew from about 300 to 1,000. Donations poured in, and the store finished up over the previous year’s profits for the first time in five years. It wasn’t a stay of execution so much as a vote of confidence from the citizenry. Women and Children First is one of the last feminist bookstores in the country and is revered for its selection and programming, which often features prominent women and gay authors. In 2004, Bubon and Christophersen created the nonprofit Women’s Voices Fund to support the programming. But just as WCF seemed to have turned everything around, last fall’s downturn hit the store hard. Sales in October were 23 percent below the previous year’s, and the holiday season clocked in 13 percent under. With online megaretailers like Amazon exempt from charging sales tax and able to procure sweetheart discounts on bulk orders, Bubon says she’s not so sure Women and Children First can even compete in the business anymore.

Seriously, y’all?  This bookstore is awesome.  Give them money.

tylercoates:

Save Women and Children First!

Linda Bubon is no stranger to battling the economy. The co-owner of Women and Children First sounded the alarm two years ago, when it became clear the bookstore might not make it through the end of the year. Co-owner Ann Christophersen took another full-time job and pared down her duties at the store, but it still wasn’t enough. So in April 2007, WCF made a plea to its customers: Save us.

“The story got legs really fast,” Bubon says. “In-store sales that May were up nearly 70 percent.”

Membership at the store—for $25 a year, you get a 10 percent storewide discount—grew from about 300 to 1,000. Donations poured in, and the store finished up over the previous year’s profits for the first time in five years. It wasn’t a stay of execution so much as a vote of confidence from the citizenry. Women and Children First is one of the last feminist bookstores in the country and is revered for its selection and programming, which often features prominent women and gay authors. In 2004, Bubon and Christophersen created the nonprofit Women’s Voices Fund to support the programming.

But just as WCF seemed to have turned everything around, last fall’s downturn hit the store hard. Sales in October were 23 percent below the previous year’s, and the holiday season clocked in 13 percent under. With online megaretailers like Amazon exempt from charging sales tax and able to procure sweetheart discounts on bulk orders, Bubon says she’s not so sure Women and Children First can even compete in the business anymore.