Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the summer 2003 edition of Inkblots Magazine. For all of you here via Kevin Smokler and Susan Kaup's Virtual Book Tour, we've included the first 1,000 words from Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers ($23.95, W.W. Norton) in our Features section. It's a wonderfully funny book, especially considering the fairly macabre nature of her subject matter, and it's a lot of fun to read. I'll be posting more thoughts about her book a bit later today.

Until then, though, we have hundreds of pages of new content now available. A quick table of contents for the new edition:

Voice

• Commentary: My To-Do List, Now That I've Been Laid Off from a Dot-Com for the Third Time by Ernie Hsiung (of littleyellowdifferent.com)


• Personal Stories: Desperation and Apathy in Mississippi by Leia Scofield (of alargehead.com)


• Personal Stories: In the Whale's Throat: or, How I Spent a Single Afternoon at Book Expo America and Lived to Tell About It by Kevin Smokler (of wheretheressmoke.net)

Features

• On the Road: Sarajevo by Jay Allen (of jayallen.org)


• On the Road: Arizona by Heather Champ (of The Mirror Project and harrumph.com) and Derek M. Powazek (of {fray} and powazek.com)


• Essays: An Excerpt from Stiff by Mary Roach (columnist for Reader's Digest and contributing editor to Discover magazine)


• On the Road: New York, New York by Rannie Turingan (of photojunkie.org)

Fiction and Poetry

• Poetry: From Owl to Raven Girl by DC poet and Inkblots alum Aurelia Flaming


• Fiction: An Excerpt from TV! TV! by Ben Brown (of benbrown.com and So New Media)


• Poetry: Norwegian Graveyard by Ohio poet and Inkblots alum Emily Anne Leachman

Portfolio

• Illustration: These Words Float by Matthew Curry (of ninjacruise.com)


• Photography: Diptychs by Mark R. Jones (of The Blue Sea and Sails)


• Illustration: Secret Satellite by Kristian Olson (of secretsatellite.com)


• Photography: Nomadic Series by Jason Tlush (of tlush.com)

Critiques

• Film: Citizen Kane reviewed by Inkblots film critic William R. Coughlan (of Prometheus Unleashed)


• Music: PuffiAmiYumi, An Illustrated History reviewed by Inkblots music critic Cassie Wagner

There may still be a few last-minute additions over the weekend, which I'll be announcing here. A great big thank-you to all our contributors, who have made this issue one of the very best we've ever done!

What's that, you say? Still not enough to keep you occupied on a lazy July weekend? Well, fear not -- there's more!

In addition to the summer issue, if you click back one screen in each section you'll find that there's also a brand-new "Director's Cut" version of our spring issue. If you've been here before (especially in the last couple of months), you'll know that we experimented with going daily back in February. Unfortunately, that experiment didn't go as well as I'd hoped, and our spring issue was left unfinished. Today, you'll find a good deal of the intended content from that issue has been posted (and some more is likely to appear over the weekend). The new content includes:

Voice

• Political Commentary: Why Did the Chicken Cross the Atlantic? by Ian Millhiser

Features

• On the Road: The Apple Store, Michigan Avenue by Geoffrey Long

Portfolio

• Mixed Media: Inner Excavations by Jessica Maloney


• Photography: Entropy by Tina Bell Vance (of bellvanceart.com)

In total, there are several hundred new pages' worth of content for visitors to explore. What better way to kick off the weekend?

Finally, as always, please feel free to drop me a line if you find anything wrong. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the new edition!