GUD Reading
Fiction, information, poetry, art. The best of the best. We can print the quality that we do because our business model is built for artists and consumers, not for ourselves. We want to grow a business, but we want to grow the complete circuit of the business, the great circle of life, not just ourselves. And GUD is flexible—if you know you just have to read one particular piece, you can do a partial content order, buying the relevant pages of the magazine.
We are currently accepting submissions for Issue 9.
Issue 7 :: Spring 2016
From the cover art, “Danzante” by Fernando Martí, to the “Invitation” from poet Alicia Hoffman at the close of the issue, GUD 7 will entice you into a dance with words and images that will grab hold of you, take you out of yourself, and leave you breathless. Joseph A. W. Quintela’s “Witches’ Dance” leads off, followed across the stage by a bamba with the (very earthy) divine, choreographed by Okasha Skat’si. “Coconut Pie” by Joshua Ben-Noah Carlson takes you for a turn in an awkward two-step, while David Gullen’s “Just War” whirls you smoothly into an alternate world that nonetheless moves to the inexorable rhythm of history.
As with any good collection of art, GUD 7 has love, death, family, conflict, loss, and healing. But though the themes are timeless, we guarantee you’ve never experienced anything quite like the stories, poetry, and art you’ll find juxtaposed here. The work in GUD 7 spans every kind of stylistic approach and throws down the gauntlet to traditional genre categories--there’s even an essay on genre categories themselves, by cognitive scientist Eve Sweetser. GUD 7 will stretch your ideas of the possible: what art can be, what humans can be, what reality can be. It will pick you up out of the world you thought you knew and set you down somewhere totally unknown, where you can’t even trust your own perceptions--but when you look back, maybe you’ll understand something new about where you came from.
GUD 7 opened to submissions in 2009 and, due to setbacks and circumstances, it was seven years in the making. But the writing and art wouldn’t let us go--we couldn’t abandon the dance. So here it is!
Issue 6 :: Summer 2010
Issue 6 bounds onto the scene with a bright and blooming selection of prose, poetry, and art. Whether it's old tales retold with a new face, like an irreverent version of Sleeping Beauty, or a tale of renewal on the Wheel of Life, Issue 6 has a fresh feel to it. We're stepping through doors into unexpected places, washing our brains clean of memories, and getting a shiny coat of paint.
As always, GUD brings you the cream: haunting stories, evocative poetry, and art that you'll want to frame and hang on the wall. Issue 6 has a fantastic alternate history from Lou Antonelli that'll make you look at US/Irish connections in a whole new way. Issue 6 has weird and wonderful art from Andy B. Clarkson. Issue 6 has poetry from Rose Lemberg and Jim Pascual Agustin. Issue 6 has...way too much to summarise.
It's all in GUD Issue 6. Come get it.
Issue 5 :: Winter 2009
Issue 5 wraps a scientific core with our most eclectic selection to date—including two mini graphic novels and a script that will have you bubbling over with mirth.
We open with Rose Lemberg's "Imperfect Verse", a tale of poetry, deception, and warring gods; then span the years to Andrew N. Tisbert's "Getting Yourself On", which sees mankind taken to the stars but suffering new forms of wage-slavery.
There's science fiction that stretches to the fantastic, science that once stretched the fantastic and has now become brilliantly pervasive, and dollops of science in otherwise mundane lives (see "The Prettiest Crayon in the Box").
Of course, we've got fantasy, psychological horror, humor, and drama; poetry serious, sublime, and satirical; and art that stretches from the real, to the surreal, to the violently semi-abstract.
Issue 4 :: Spring 2009
Issue 4 begins with the end of the world and moves on from there. From the unromantically magical take on Ragnarøk in the lead story "Unbound" to the curious history of squid in "A Man of Kiri Maru", this issue is steeped in mythos, making use of the old familiar tales and some new ones, mixing cosmologies from around the world--and from other worlds as well.
But the focus, be it of prose, poetry, or art, is always on the human--on the clashes between imagination and reality, on choices and redemption, on what the Other can tell us about ourselves. And like any GUD magazine, this one's eclectic; browse around between the covers and you're sure to come upon some things you'll like, whether you're a genre junkie or a generalist. We hope you'll find some beauty, something uncommon, and that, for just a moment, the angle of the light will seem a little bit different.
Issue 3 :: Autumn 2008
Issue 3 is crammed full of stories and art, with poems, Flash fiction and an entertaining report to leaven the mix. Whether we're battling a mechanical daemon in "A Song, a Prayer, an Empty Space" or experiencing jealousy towards unusual rivals in "Soon You Will Be Gone and Possibly Eaten", we're following the theme of Mechanical Flight into strange and unexpected places.
Flight, the dream of humanity for years without number, has come a long way since the Wright brothers flew almost the length of a Boeing 747 using a lawnmower engine. The US Space Shuttle takes off like a rocket and lands like a plane. An ice runway has been built in Antarctica to facilitate flights from Hobart. Solar-powered aircraft grace our skies. And GUD Issue Three seeks to fly to even stranger places--why not take your seat, buckle yourself in, and enjoy the ride?
Issue 2 :: Spring 2008
Issue 2 celebrates Heaven, Earth, and Space in-between; it is touched by religion, grounded in technology and comfortable with the occult.
Including a language-stretching piece triggered by the Talmud from the legendary Hugh Fox, poems by haiku heavy-hitter Jim Kacian, the surprisingly touching “By Zombies; Eaten†from Christopher William Buecheler, and an alien perspective on human spirituality by Tina Connolly in the remarkable “The Salivary Reflexâ€
— all part of a drool-worthy two-hundred page selection of over twenty authors and artists.
Issue 1 :: Autumn 2007
Issue 1 comes to life with Darby Larson's "Electroencephalography" where an experiment in robot-building goes terribly awry. And if you've ever woken up with an unexpected physical deformity—say, an arrow in your heart—you'll truly enjoy the next story.
There's also a smattering of flash fiction and psychedelia; a straight-out story where things aren't what they seem, poetry that takes you from the perverse to the sublime, some magic realism, science fiction, and a few letters to another species thrown in for good measure. We haven't forgotten those of you with a literary bent.
In addition, the artwork in this issue is particularly strong, with oil paintings, watercolors, photography, and photo illustrations complementing the words with which they are paired.
Issue 0 :: Spring 2007
Issue 0 leads with Debbie Moorhouse’s Sundown, a near-future science fiction reflection on death and life. It follows through with a solid variety of works from semi-gritty fantasy; far-future time travel; modern sci-fi humor; historical paranormal; mainstream literary; a fable; poetry that doesn’t rhyme but has a rhythm (involving coffee, mayhem, love, death, and television); reports concerning poetry and software and narrating a journey to a poetry conference in Taiwan; and art of all sorts, from humorous and surreal line drawings through haunting brush work and even a single-panel comic from a celebrated illustrator.
While I found the cover off-putting for a handful of reasons, once inside I was caught in the flow of the narrative. Roberts realizes her players well, showing multiple sides to mythic characters, and the details she puts into this historical re-imagining of "The Epic of Gilgamesh" really bring the story to life.
