I have just been informed that video footage of the reading I did with Benjamin Percy and Min Jin Lee at the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series is now live online.
May 16, 2008, 9:51 a.m.Categories: Fiction Collections, Short Stories
Magnificent and well-earned news: Ron Currie, Jr.'s God is Dead has won The New York Public Library’s 2008 Young Lions Fiction Award. I'd call Ron an old friend, but if he's young enough to have won that award, I guess that won't quite do.
April 30, 2008, 10:34 p.m.Categories: Fiction Collections, Short Stories
I've been hearing the rumors for a few weeks now, and it looks like they're true: according to Crossing the Border, the venerable litmag Ontario Review is shutting down after thirty-four years of good work. Joyce Carol Oates and her husband Raymond Smith were the bituminous coal on which it ran, and with his passing, I guess she just decided the time had come.
I submitted to the magazine fairly regularly for a number of years, and finally gave up--made my peace with the fact that my work wasn't much of a fit for their project. And it was, in all honesty, something of a relief not to get any more of what surely must have been the smallest, bluest rejection notices on this planet. Did they really have to be so small? And so blue? I could have lived with one or the other, but...
Sure, I bitch a bit now, but the fact is, anybody who keeps a litmag alive for three decades and change, who publishes the work of Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Donald Barthelme, Saul Bellow, Pinckney Benedict, Joseph Brodsky, Hayden Carruth, Raymond Carver, Annie Dillard, Rita Dove, Margaret Drabble, Stuart Dybek, Carlos Fuentes, Tess Gallagher, Albert Goldbarth, Nadine Gordimer, Eaman Grennan, Donald Hall, Ted Hughes, Maxine Kumin, Doris Lessing, Alistair MacLeod, W. S. Merwin, Mary Morris, Gloria Naylor, Philip Roth, Gary Soto, Elizabeth Spencer, William Stafford, Mark Strand, Melanie Rae Thon, Chase Twichell, John Updike, Robert Penn Warren, C. K. Williams and Charles Wright, and of hundreds if not thousands of less well-known but equally worthy workers in the trade, well, they're more than all right by me.
April 27, 2008, 8:57 p.m.Category: Short Stories
A very short piece called "Flies" just went live on Hobart, one of my favorite litmags, as part of their annual Baseball Issue. Many thanks to old friend John Slootweg for gifting me the nut of this story... thirty years ago? Or nearly so. And while you're there, spend some time with Jim Ruland and Andrew Ervin--great pieces, both.
April 21, 2008, 12 a.m.Category: Short Stories
Subtropics is a magazine that's been bright on my radar ever since its first issue back in 2006. David Leavitt's been picking terrific work, they pay their authors well, and they print the magazine on that beautiful opus dull 80 lb. paper.
(Yes, I admit it, I asked.)
So it was really gratifying to hear back in October of last year that he'd picked a story of mine called "Stump," and the issue in question (Winter/Spring 2008) is now out and about, bearing Chris Bachelder and Owen King and Ben Stroud and Bob Hicok and Mark Jarman and Mark Doty to your very doorstep.
I got the nut for this one from an old friend named Marco: he and a mutual friend named Craig had gotten into some good trouble, and gotten out, and the story Marco told me about that day was, frankly, way too good to be true--both in the sense that it was just an extraordinarily perfect gift as the base of a future story, and in the sense that Marco was obviously exaggerating to hit the punchlines with extra oomph.
Anyway, I sat on the anecdote for a couple of months, and then called Craig, and it turned out that Marco had actually been downplaying the thing--not something I'd ever known him to do. I had to tame the afternoon down even a bit more to make the story work as anything like realism.
February 1, 2008, 9:12 p.m.Category: Short Stories
Xiaowei Su first interviewed me about a year and a half ago, right after Nothing in the World came out, and we recently went another round over All Over. The results are right here for your listening pleasure.
January 4, 2008, 12:02 p.m.Categories: China, Fiction Collections, Interviews, Short Stories
