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3/6/26: Zombies, Pittsburgh, NeMLA
While most everyone else will be in Baltimore at AWP, I’ll be hanging out in Pittsburgh, where I’ll be doing one of my first presentations of my novel-in-progress, The Stills, at the Northeast Modern Language Association conference. I’m very much excited for this panel, entitled “Autotheoretical Practice: Writing in the Anthropocene,” and grateful to Ciara […]
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2/13/25: Review of Ray Levy’s School
I’m happy to say that the wonderful online journal Big Other has published my review of Ray Levy’s novel School. I’m hoping you’ll read the review, and pick up a copy of one of the most challenging, yet rewarding books I’ve read in a long time. Please support presses like FC2 that champion experimental fiction […]
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7/15/21: Reading and Conversation with Te-Ping Chen
On Thursday, July 15 @8PM EST, Writers & Books will be hosting a free virtual reading and conversation (I’ll be moderating) with the writer Te-Ping Chen. Her first book of stories, Land of Big Numbers (Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021) has been acclaimed by the Oprah Magazine, NPR, and Publishers Weekly; it is truly amazing. […]
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12/22/20: The Arts Fuse Recommended, 2020
Thanks (once again!) to Vincent Czyz and The Arts Fuse, not only for the wonderful review a few months ago but for an extra shout out (right next to Lance Olsen’s My Red Heaven) in their Recommended Books, 2020 feature. It’s super to see Two Californias in such smart company…
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booknotes: May-Lan Tan, Things To Make and Break
May-Lan Tan, Things to Make and Break: Stories. Emily Books, 2014 I’m not sure what to do with this collection, which is a 100% good thing. Most of these stories depict disaffected teens and 20-somethings as they try to navigate their own limits in intersection with adulting: sex and drugs are foregrounded, but not fetishized, […]
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booknotes: Michael William Palmer, Baptizing the Dead and Other Jobs
Michael William Palmer, Baptizing the Dead and Other Jobs: Non-Fiction. Bauhan Publishing, 2020 I don’t read a lot of non-fiction (I know, my loss), but have been wanting to pick up Michael Palmer’s debut book in part because I like Michael a lot (disclosure), and in part because, in quarantine here in Western New York, […]
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booknotes: Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus
Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus, Riverhead Books, 2016. This is the kind of book I want to teach, because it is at once so intensely good and so interestingly flawed. A book that stays with me, with a slightly bitter taste. What did I love about it? It is so wildly inventive. It retools […]
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booknotes: Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police
Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police, Pantheon Books, 2019. Trans. Stephen Snyder. This is a really great book. Really great. I was really taken by the slow burn of it, the fairly sparse prose, the way it honestly didn’t go the way I thought it would go. By the end, it takes a tonal turn that […]
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booknotes: Jacob Paul, Last Tower to Heaven
Jacob Paul, Last Tower to Heaven, C&R Books, 2019 This is a smart, funny, conceptually sharp, and sometimes sad book that tries, in our current days, to figure out how one can survive collective trauma, notably the Holocaust, without having it turn into parody or soundbite. The protagonist, himself named Jacob Paul, helps make this […]
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booknotes: Natanya Ann Pulley, With Teeth
This book is weird and cool and deep in all the right ways. It takes what’s difficult, both in language and content, and lets it simmer with all the other emotions. At the same time, the emotions aren’t where I expect them to be, as if the writer has placed them all in clear view, […]