You must believe me: I was as tired of all the Best of the Month/Year/Decade lists as everyone else. But then I found one with my name on it! Nate Brown over at The L Magazine decided that All Over was one of the 111 best books of the Aughts! Thank you, Nate and L, and Happy 2010 to you both.
December 30, 2009, 9:57 p.m.Category: Fiction Collections
Allow me to posit that it is fun to talk about things that don't yet exist, like flying cars and justice and Issue 6.2 of The Cincinnati Review.
Let me further suggest that we now take the advice of Christ and consider that last item first.
Fiction by Micah Riecker and Kevin Wilson. Poetry by Sherman Alexie and William Logan and Chase Twichell. Nonfiction by Khaled Mattawa, and poetry reviews by Norman Finkelstein, and then of course the other things. The fiction reviews. There are at least two of them: one by Keith Lee Morris and one by Erin McGraw.
The issue in question also claims to have a fiction review by me. I shall not cavil with the 'by' part of those last four words, or the 'me' part, or the 'fiction' part. As for the sole remaining cavilable word, well, feel free to make the call yourself.
One thing I know surely: it was as much fun to put to paper as anything I've ever done, and many thanks to Nicola Mason and Michael Griffith for letting me play on their field. Flying cars and justice have got nothing on these folks.
October 16, 2009, 3:40 p.m.Categories: Fiction Collections, Litmags, Review
I just now learned that McSweeney's is about to launch The Better of McSweeney's, Volume 2, with stories selected from Issues 11 through 20 of the Quarterly Concern, including work by most of my personal heroes: Stephen Millhauser, Chris Adrian, Stephen Elliott, Brian Evenson, Yannick Murphy, Tom Bissell and Tony D'Souza, among others.
The alley-oop you've been suspecting all along: it will also have a story of mine.
Asparagus spritzers for everyone!
September 26, 2009, 11:43 a.m.Category: Fiction Collections
And here I sit, wearing my GCC t-shirt, drinking coffee from my GCC mug, thinking, Reading Swag is the best swag of all.
Many thanks to everyone at GCCs Batavia and Medina for turning Monday into such a good thing. Special thanks to my old friend Tracy Ford for causing the ball to begin rolling months ago, and for prodding it onward so consistently and well. And lastly, congratulations to the students: your questions were superb, and I thank you for them.
April 29, 2009, 8:31 a.m.Categories: Fiction Collections, Interviews, Short Stories
WAB! Not the sound a superhero's fist makes when she punches a jellyfish, but Writers and Books in Rochester, New York. I read there last night--good reading, good crowd, great acoustics, fun intro by Steve Huff, great lead-off by the delightful Sarah Freligh. But beyond the reading itself, I think WAB is an important place: the y in an important equation.
You know how every ten or fifteen minutes we hear about another landmark independent bookstore closing? And how also the chains are mostly in the shitter too? And how in six weeks, the Kindle is going to be as ubiquitous as the Ipod? How this coming September it will be as necessary a part of the going-to-college kit as a laptop and a 72-pack of strawberry flavored condoms? And once we're buying almost everything on line (like we do now, but more so) what chance will an actual book-selling-type-building have?
(Full disclosure: it's not that I think the Kindle will be bad for books, or writers, or readers--I think it will end up being, on balance, quite good for all those things and people. But it's really going to suck for bookstores. And I do worry a little about what happens when Amazon is the only place on earth to buy any text of any kind in any language, but hey, that's still years away. At least a year. Probably at least a year!) (And another disclosure: these thoughts were not developed in isolation, but in conversation, mainly with the good John Warner. So if any of them are crap, blame him.)
Well.
Maybe bookstores are going to survive to the extent that they become other things too. Lots already are, of course. Most, even. But maybe they will all need to be other things--a community space, a place of union, whether that means gallery and/or stage and/or mixing board and/or cafe and/or dunk tank. And then also sell books. (Which is why WAB is the y, not the x and the y: they don't actually sell books there, except ones related to visiting writers, writing classes, reading projects and the like.)
And even then the books sold will have to be the kind that bring something to the table beyond content--but I'm still thinking about that.
March 6, 2009, 8:43 a.m.Categories: Fiction Collections, Short Stories
The cycle seems predictable: the reviews come, if we're lucky, in the month or two after the book is released, and tail off fairly quickly thereafter, with maybe a few here and there in the subsequent six months. And that's pretty much your load, shot. But every so often, months and months later, a really nice review comes out to give the book one more good goosing. This time it was John Domini giving All Over all kinds of good juju in the latest issue of American Book Review.
February 11, 2009, 9:08 a.m.Categories: Fiction Collections, Review, Short Stories
