Be an indie lit Secret Santa

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The independent literary blog HTMLGIANT has set up a Secret Santa literary gift exchange. It’s a small operation that hopes to spread the cheer of small presses and independent literary magazines.

You send them an e-mail with your name, address and the subject line SECRET SANTA between now and Dec. 5. Then they send you the name and address of someone else who’s signed up (and send yours to someone else). You purchase a literary gift and send it off, then send an e-mail to the HTMLGIANT folks telling them about your gift.

Why do that? Because on Christmas, they’ll post a big list revealing who got what from whom.

You may be concerned that if you give ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,’ your gift recipient will already have gotten three other copies. Well, regifting would be in the spirit of the project. But they suggest that you try for something your recipient might not have, like a new book from an independent press, a subscription to a literary magazine or journal, or a work in translation.

Don’t worry too much about having different taste than your recipient -- if you give a collection of poetry and your recipient likes manga (or vice versa), maybe this will be the reason they give poetry a try. The people who sign up for this like books and stories and are probably happy to read whatever arrives on their doorstep.

I know this is true because I’ve signed up. And I’m game.

-- Carolyn Kellogg