News

A review by Laura Pryor appeared this month on NewPages.com and can be found here.  This site offers: “News, information and guides to independent bookstores, independent publishers, literary magazines, alternative periodicals, independent record labels, alternative newsweeklies and more.”

My partial reading of “Talking Fowl with My Father” ran on KQED’s Writers’ Block and can be accessed here, along with the program’s really great archives.  Have a listen if you wonder how I hear this story in my head.

I was very excited to see that BIGNESS was included on the long list for The Story Prize, among some very good company.  For those of you not familiar with The Story Prize, their website offers this description: “The Story Prize is an annual book award for short story collections written in English and published in the U.S. during a calendar year. The winner receives $20,000, and each finalist receives $5,000.”  This year’s finalists are Daniyal Mueenuddin, Victoria Patterson, and Wells Tower.

Roxane Gay, the editor of PANK, just wrote and posted a very nice review of The Bigness of the World and Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us.   Roxane also does a blog about rejection among other things, and is a fiction writer in addition to editing PANK.

A nice review by Matt McGregor at The Rumpus.It’s always an odd experience to read reviews, to have a careful reader see patterns and themes that hadn’t quite occurred to you.  The link is here.

On Saturday, November 28th, I will be interviewed on WEST COAST LIVE, a two-hour radio program taped live in Berkeley and described as “Two hours of slow-food organic radio with only the freshest conversation, music and play.”  The show is broadcast from 10:00 am – 12:00 noon on KALW, 91.7 FM, as well as on many public radio stations nationwide.  For information, visit the West Coast Live website at www.WCL.org.  To join the live audience, you can purchase tickets by calling 415-664-950 or go to TicketWeb.

I just did my launching/reading at the Opera Plaza Books Inc here in San Francisco.  The bookstore was very welcoming, and it was great to see familiar faces and a few unfamiliar as well as to meet the copy editor for THE BIGNESS OF THE WORLD, Dorine Jennette.  Dorine came from Davis for the event, which she then wrote about for the Georgia Review blog–see post.  Dorine is a poet whose first book, URCHIN TO FOLLOW, will be published by National Poetry Review Press in May of 2010.

This morning, I had the strange and very pleasant experience of watching a video review of THE BIGNESS OF THE WORLD, by Anna Clark.  The review was done for The Collagist, an online journal that is part of Dzanc Books.  Anna Clark writes one of the few blogs that I read, Isak.  There is something strangely intimate about watching and listening to a person one has never met speaking about one’s book and explaining its themes better than the author.

The newest issue of New England Review is out, and it has a great special feature on editor Ted Solotaroff as well as TWO of my stories, “All Boy” and “Talking Fowl with My Father,” under the heading “Domestic Interiors of the Midwest: Two Stories.” For an overview of the issue, go here.

I just returned from Albuquerque, which was my home for over fourteen years.  I did a reading at Bookworks and a reading at the University of New Mexico, both of which were well attended.  Highlights: I got to see a lot of old friends and former customers from Two Serious Ladies, the Asian furniture store that my partner and I owned; I got to meet with five very interesting graduate students and talk about their writing (and mine); I got asked questions about my story by a six-year-old audience member who was listening very carefully, though didn’t understand about fiction yet–she asked whether my mother was still in jail.  I also did an interview with the local paper, The Alibi.