“Death and the Lady” on the Selected Shorts Podcast

My story “Death and the Lady” (from Tales of Falling and Flying) is on the Selected Shorts Podcast right now, as read by actor Denis O’Hare (that terrifying guy on the first season of American Horror Story). This is I think my 11th story to appear on Selected Shorts (and the 6th from Tales of Falling and Flying), and I have to say, it’s my favorite performance! O’Hare does a wonderful job, frightening and funny at the same time. I admit to getting a bit weepy as the ending approached. Anyway, it’s Episode #22, “Reality Checks,” and also includes “The Leap” by Louise Erdrich and “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwartz. Check it out here or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

“The True Story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree”

I have a new story called “The True Story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree” up over at R&R (the new literary journal of Relegation Books) today! This one grew out of my lifelong confusion over why in that famous story George was ever chopping down his father’s cherry tree to begin with. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it! Many thanks to editor Joey Grantham for all his help on this one—and for finding the perfect Brad Holland painting to go with it!

What I Read and Wrote and Did in 2023

I published four new stories in 2023: “The Man with the Hand of Gold” in Uncharted Magazine (who nominated it for a Pushcart Prize), “Man Woman Egg Bird” and “The Book of Jokes & Stories” at Short Story Long (where you can also read an interview with me if you’re a subscriber), and “The White Bird of the Forest” in TriQuarterly.

My story “The Man and the Moose” (from Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day) was performed by actor Michael Cerveris at the Dallas Museum of Art as part of the Selected Shorts “Friendship!” event in February, and later appeared on their podcast in Episode #51: Perfectly Unmatched. My story “The Book” (from Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day) also appeared on the Selected Shorts Podcast, Episode #42: Reading Between the Lines, as read by actress Jane Kaczmarek. And my story “The Astronaut” (from Tales of Falling and Flying) appeared on the November 19, 2023 episode of the WordTheatre Podcast, as read by actor Jason George.

What else? My book Tales of Falling and Flying was named One of the 25 Best Fantasy Books of All Time by Good Housekeeping; that was nice. My story “Bear,” published in Craft Literary in 2022, made the Longlist for the annual Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions. My two collections turned up rounding out this list of Paul Buckley’s 10 projects he’s most proud of from his 34 years as design director at Penguin, which was a tremendous honor. I read a page of Ulysses as part of the Bloomsyear Centennial Reading, spoke to the students in Ashleigh Bryant Phillips‘ class at Appalachian State University via Zoom, and traveled to the Community College of Baltimore County – Essex, in Maryland, where I read stories and spoke to students in the English & Honors Programs. I was interviewed by Jason DeHart for his podcast Words, Images, and Worlds, and agreed to be next year’s judge of the 18th National Indie Excellence Jurors Choice Book Award. I wrote a new story called “The True Story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree,” read it at the Virtual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in November (via Zoom), and then sold it to Joey Grantham, editor of the new Relegation Books literary journal R&R, where it will appear this coming February. Most importantly, a project I’d been working on for years with composer Nathan Hudson—an album of contemporary classical chamber music based on / inspired by my stories—went up on Kickstarter, was named “A Project We Love” by the powers that be, and was then successfully funded!

On the teaching front, I continued to run my usual short story workshops, both privately and at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. I had students go off to MFA programs at NYU and Notre Dame, another (from a few years back) who accepted a PhD Scholarship to the University of Manchester, another who was accepted into the Stony Brook BookEnds Fellowship Program, another who sold a novel to FSG, and others (past and present) who published stories in Georgia Review, Pembroke Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, Black Sheep, Bending Genres, Beloit Fiction Journal, Gulf Coast, Narrative Magazine, Lovecraftiana, The ASP Bulletin, American Short Fiction, and Coolest American Stories 2023, among others. Two of the students I had in my Fall 2022 Chapman University Advanced SF&F Writing Workshop won 1st and 2nd Place in the national Dell Award Contest for Excellence in Undergraduate Science Fiction & Fantasy Writing, and a third received Honorable Mention. Not bad!

Reading-wise, it was a pretty good year. My favorites were: Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy Hughes (which is even better than the film noir classic Robert Montgomery made of it in 1947), A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews (I’ve read three books by Harry Crews now and they’ve all been perfect and completely different), An Autobiography by Angela Davis (which I recommend listening to on audio, as Davis reads it herself and has a wonderfully idiosyncratic voice), Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (not that Elizabeth Taylor), The Confessions of St. Augustine (So many great metaphors and lines! I especially loved “the brambles of lust grew high above my head”), The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) by Henri Alain-Fournier (a great & wonderfully mysterious book, which feels like it must’ve been a huge influence on Truffaut’s The 400 Blows), Uzumaki by Junji Ito (I’d read sections of it before, but never the whole thing at once; it definitely has a cumulative weight), The Pine Barrens by John McPhee (which explained a lot to me about my home state of New Jersey), Kokoro by Natsume Soseki (which felt like a giant missing piece to my understanding of Haruki Murakami), the sharp, wild, and brilliant My Death by Lisa Tuttle, and You Can’t Catch Death: A Daughter’s Memoir by Ianthe Brautigan (about her father—my favorite writer—Richard Brautigan, and her years spent dealing with his suicide and legacy). I also reread the four novels that comprise The Hoke Moseley Omnibus by Charles Willeford: Miami Blues, New Hope for the Dead, Sideswipe, and The Way We Die Now. I love those books (and those characters) beyond measure (especially Sideswipe!). Some of my favorite things on this Earth. (Also, that Omnibus cover is beautiful.)

Some other books I enjoyed this year: Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty, Battles in the Desert by José Emilio Pacheco, Bitters by Kaaron Warren (a fantastic central image/world I will remember forever), The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud, the first three books of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time series, Roberto Bolaño’s The Insufferable Gaucho, the first book of the new 2-volume Library of America Crime Novels of the 1960s set (which includes The Murderers by Fredric Brown, The Name of the Game is Death by Dan Marlowe, Dead Calm by Charles Williams (much better than the greatly simplified movie they made of it with Nicole Kidman), The Expendable Man by Dorothy Hughes (shades of Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up, but a better book overall), and The Score by Richard Stark), the very creepy The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill, Night’s Black Agents by Fritz Leiber (which includes the classic story “Smoke Ghost,” as well as a strangely delightful little tale called “The Automatic Pistol”), Yoga by Emmanuel Carrere, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq (my favorite ill-tempered lunatic!), Irish Journal by Heinrich Boll, The Red-Headed Pilgrim by Kevin Maloney, and (the first section, at least, of) The Plains by Gerald Murnane (kinda lost me in the second half). Plus The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain, and The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, both of which were rereads, and even better than I remembered. I also loved the new audiobook version of Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, as read in near-delirium by Jon Padgett, which gave me new appreciation for many of the stories, including (especially) “The Night School.”

What else? I blurbed 4 small press books that came out this year: Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane by Parker Young, Farsickness by Josh Mohr, Little Pictures: New and Selected Poems by Eli Godfrey, and Patterns of Orbit by Chloe Clark, plus a few that will be out in 2024, including Daybook by Nathan Knapp, Horsemouth and Aquariumhead by Elizabeth Horner Turner (winner of the Black Lawrence Press Spring 2023 Black River Chapbook Competition), Message in the Sky by John Minichillo, and A Psychography of Modest Intimacies by Soramimi Hanarejima (coming soon from Ravenna Press).

And in real life, what did I do? I went to Austria (where I attended the opening of a show of art by Hans Felix Kraus at The University of Applied Arts in Vienna, saw the Danube (it wasn’t blue), and stood beneath the Ferris wheel from The Third Man), and Maine (where I took a lot of pictures of clouds, saw the spot where Stephen King survived getting hit by a van, went to the Green Hand Bookshop, and climbed to the top of the Portland Observatory). I went to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures with my friend, film critic Martyn Conterio, who was visiting from England, and saw the typewriter which Joe Stefano used to write the screenplay for Psycho. I spent a few months reorganizing and cleaning out my house and taking everything I could to Goodwill and the used bookstore (I have a lot of credit at Stories Books in Echo Park now, if anyone has any recommendations). I repotted all the plants I bought at the beginning of the pandemic, which had grown very large and kept tipping over. I watched all of Mad Men and Columbo and The Wire and a bunch of other TV shows I have now forgotten. I decided to go back to not watching TV shows. I worked on my CV and discovered that I’ve done almost 200 public readings over the past 15 years. Hardly seems possible. No wonder I’m so tired!

And finally, here’s my favorite photo I took in 2023—it’s the Mt. Rushmore backdrop from North by Northwest, which you can visit at the Academy Museum. The best part was watching everyone try to take selfies to make their heads look like part of the monument (my own attempts were a huge failure).

Happy New Year, everybody! 2024’s gonna be a nightmare, but here’s hoping we all make it through!

Kickstarter Success!

Great news—Our Kickstarter reached its goal and got funded! Thanks so much to everyone who donated. Looking forward to recording an album of contemporary classical chamber music based on my stories! (Also looking forward to not begging people for money all the time.) You can read all about the project here.

Pushcart Nomination!

Delighted to find that my story “The Man with the Hand of Gold,” published earlier this year in Uncharted Magazine, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize! Many thanks to editor Tommy Dean and everyone else at Uncharted for the nom (and for publishing the story in the first place)!

In other news, the Kickstarter composer Nathan Hudson has been running to record and release an album of original contemporary classical music based on/inspired by my stories, has been named a “Project We Love” by the kind folks at Kickstarter! It’s great to see the project getting some attention. We still have a ways to go, though, so if you’ve got some loose change lying around, here’s where you can send it!

Recent Events + Kickstarter

Busy couple weeks over here! I went out to Baltimore and met with the English and Honors students at CCBC-Essex, read them stories, answered a lot of questions (and said “I don’t know” to a lot more), walked around the inner harbor, ate a lot of great food, and visited the American Visionary Art Museum (which is one of the coolest museums I’ve ever been to (even if it did make me sob in public a couple times)). Came home and did an interview with Jason DeHart for his podcast Words, Images, and Worlds, which you can find on Spotify, or watch here on YouTube, agreed to be the judge of the 18th National Indie Excellence Jurors Choice Book Award, which you can read about here, did a reading of a new story called “The True Story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree” at VIFCA (the Virtual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts), and then sold that story to Joey Grantham, editor of the new journal R&R, which will be published via the Relegation Books website starting in January of 2024.

Most importantly, a project I’ve been working on for years with composer Nathan Hudson went live on Kickstarter! We’re raising money to record an album of original contemporary classical chamber music that Nathan has written based on and/or inspired by my stories! We have a lot of cool rewards at various tiers to give away, and a lot of money to raise—so please, check it out and give if you can!

A Note about Paul Buckley

I saw the news today that Paul Buckley has left Penguin Books, where he was design director for 34 years. Paul did the covers for my collections Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day and Tales of Falling and Flying and was always such a pleasure to work with. On top of that, I loved both covers and felt like he really understood my work and “got” was I was all about as a writer and a human. I remember when they were in the process of putting together Stories for Nighttime, my editor wrote and asked me if I had any ideas for the cover. “Yes,” I said, “I’ve always known what it should look like—it should be bright yellow and have absolutely nothing on it!” I got a nice email in response, and then a few weeks later they sent me the cover Paul had designed. “Oh!” I said, “That’s even better!” (In a flash I suddenly understood why I was not a book designer.) And when, a few years later, they sent me the cover he’d designed for Tales of Falling and Flying, I remember thinking, “Wow, this guy is really going for it—he’s even more out there than I am!” It was such a great feeling to have such a genius on my side. To this day, both covers make me giddy with glee; I can hardly believe they actually happened.

Anyway, the point here is that today I read this piece about Paul Buckley over in PRINT Magazine; Paul talks about the ten projects he’s most proud of from over his 34-year career at Penguin, and I was delighted to find Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day and Tales of Falling and Flying rounding out the list! It makes me so happy to know that he’s as proud of making those covers as I have always been to have them on my books. Best wishes to Paul—I know that whatever he does next, it will be amazing!