My story “The Cape” is on the Selected Shorts podcast again, as read by actor Tony Yazbeck, so I figured this would be a good time to point out that anyone interested in that story can find it in my 2017 collection Tales of Falling and Flying, which also includes three other stories that have appeared on Selected Shorts: “The Dodo,” “The Monster,” and “The Man, the Restaurant, and the Eiffel Tower.” (My stories “The TV” and “The Book,” which have also been on the show, can be found in my 2011 collection Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, and “The Vatican” can be read online at Electric Literature.) Speaking of Selected Shorts, I’m just now putting the finishing touches on a new story that will appear in a special Selected Shorts Anthology that will be out next year from Algonquin Books! More on that as it develops…

In other news, I really enjoyed reading “Art of the Opening: Move Fast and Make Things Happen” by Albert Liau over at Craft Literary. It talks about some of my stories, as well as some by Barry Yourgrau, which is delightful to see, as his work was such a big influence on me before I even started writing. I remember picking up his book A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane back in 1999 and saying Wow, I’m so glad someone is finally doing this right! What a trip all these years later to find my stories discussed side by side with his.