Todd Dills

Stop Smiling Magazine bills itself as "the magazine for high minded lowlifes." This issue focuses on The South and has articles about Stax Records, Booker T. & the MG's, Otis Redding, and Luther Ingram.

An anthology of works published in THE2NDHAND, a Chicago broadsheet and online magazine for new writing.

"Broadly speaking, Bush and his posse haveb been really good for creating a global surrealist movement. This mafia has a real talent for transforming personal headspace, for challenging our whole notions of truth and reality. We're dedicating this issue to this evil sense of psychological psychedelia and a radically detached personal point of view."

"...Paw Paw's got a rabbit and three legs on us and he's been holding the thing for two months. My brother Glen was hot on his weekly phone call to the city. You gotta get out here and take it back, man..."

A collection of short stories and itineraries on South-meets-Midwest cultural differences, strained familial and romantic relationships, catching up with old friends, dead rats tied together at the tail, and various things to do with vegetables, including shooting string beans at strangers through a straw, and searching for things like sunglasses, grits, and skunk-apes.

THE2NDHAND publishes short work by the established, the first timers, and those in between.

"Billy Jones and his dad have a score to settle. Up in Chicago, Billy drowns his past in Booze. In South Carolina, his father saddles up for a drive to reclaim him. Caught in this perfect storm is a ragged assortment of savants: shape-shifting doctor, despairingly bisexual bombshell, tiara-crowned trumpeter, zombie senator. A stampede is coming for them all, and it's carrying the weight of America's forgotten revolutionary heritage." - from back cover.