It occurred to me this morning--maybe not for the first time, but more clearly than ever--how much I love, to intense distraction, every step in this whole long book-building process. Today it's the pleasure of getting a look at the galley cover for the new collection. Huge thanks to Steven Seighman for his great design work, and to Dan Wickett, Steven Gillis and Matt Bell for giving him something of mine to design in the first place.
October 17, 2012, 12:19 p.m.Categories: Any Deadly Thing, Fiction Collections
Some more great news: Pacazo was just awarded Word Riot Inc.'s 2012 Paula Anderson Book Award. Many thanks to Word Riot publisher Jackie Corley, and to everybody at Dzanc who had a hand in bringing Pacazo to life - they've never stopped investing in the book, never stopped looking for opportunities to spread the word, and I am grateful.
Some fantastic news: on February 12 of next year, Dzanc Books will be publishing my new collection of short stories, Any Deadly Thing. February 12! That's both Darwin Day and Paul Bunyan Day! Not to mention Oglethorpe Day! And the feastday of St. Febronia! Highly auspicious, each and every one. My thanks to Dzanc publishers Steven Gillis and Dan Wickett, and especially to my editor and friend and comrade-in-pens Matt Bell.
July 17, 2012, 8:27 a.m.Categories: Any Deadly Thing, Fiction Collections, Short Stories
Dan Wickett kindly gave me space at EWN to talk about the fantastic short story writer (and novelist, and director, etc.) Zhu Wen.
May 31, 2012, 11 a.m.Categories: China, Fiction Collections
Many thanks to editor John Griswold for letting me come play in The McNeese Review's cool new Rec Room.
April 27, 2012, 11:50 a.m.Categories: Nonfiction, Review
Many thanks to Chris Narozny for reading (and recommending) Pacazo: “Roy Kesey’s Pacazo offers just about everything you could ever think to love in a novel: a narrator with a keen mind and a messy life; paragraphs that, structurally, move like sonnets; and a clearly delineated plot serving as a kind of mooring post for digressions that, in true Cervantean fashion, are not digressions at all but rather the real substance of the book... This is the best novel I’ve read in a long while.”
April 11, 2012, 11:41 a.m.Categories: Novels, Pacazo, Peru, Review
Many thanks to Allan Jones and Uncut Magazine for an amazing review of Pacazo in their May issue: "500 pages of mesmerisingly wrought anguish, violence and derangement reminiscent of the best of Robert Stone or Denis Johnson. (…) There's an hallucinatory quality to much of Kesey's writing, feverish connections made between Segovia's present and Peru's past, ...tenses blurred and overlapping, then and now becoming one in stunning juxtaposition."
Some great news - big ups for Pacazo from Malcolm Forbes in this weekend's Times Literary Supplement: “Pacazo is a richly capacious book... a full-blown affair which, once we sift and filter the exhaustive detail, reveals itself to be a searching study of love, loss and the corrupting and redemptive power of time.”
Twice in the past four years, Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights (Bath, England) has been named the U.K's Independent Bookseller of the Year. Also, they really like Pacazo. Coincidence? You be the judge. And many thanks to Lucinda Corby for the kind words: “This is a book of great ambition and scope - including in terms of the writing style itself.”
Many thanks to William Rycroft for his kind words for Pacazo at the great Australian arts and entertainment site, The Blurb: “...it is surprising how many times the real blows to the gut come from a single sentence or image.”
