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Nightstand

1. Hero & pal Ace Atkins gave a shout-out to Gravesend in the Tampa Bay Times. Thanks so much, Ace!

2. If you’re interested, you can pick up a couple of new stories of mine: “Poughkeepsie” in Needle: A Magazine of Noir and “In the Neighborhood” in Lazy Fascist Review #1.

3. A few recent reviews of Gravesend that have really meant a lot: Nigel Bird on his blog; Matt Andrew in Pantheon Magazine; this Amazon review from Sean Lewis. I can’t remember what other reviews I have or haven’t mentioned here – I’m really grateful to everyone who has taken the time to read the book and review it.

4. Forgot to post this a while ago: My son, Eamon, was the Lafayette County & Oxford Public Library Patron of the Week:

5. Forgot to post about this too: About a month ago, Gravesend got mentioned alongside books by Megan Abbott and Laura Lippman in City Magazine Belgrade.

6. Richard Lange’s great novel Angel Baby is out in paperback now. Check out this full page ad in the L.A. Times featuring a blurb from my review of the book.LANGE

 

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Parts Unknown

Anthony Bourdain’s Mississippi episode is on tonight at 9 Eastern/8 Central. You’ll see all sorts of great people on it – John T. Edge, Leo ‘Bud’ Welch, Jack Pendarvis, Tom Franklin, Wright Thompson, Chris Offutt, Megan Abbott, Ace Atkins, Derrick Harriell, Lisa Howorth, Beth Ann Fennelly, Blair Hobbs, Melissa Ginsburg, John Currence, Taariq David, Theresa Starkey Pendarvis, many more – and you might see my big dumb head in the background in one or two scenes.

Here’s Bourdain’s blog entry about the episode.

And here’s a picture from our lunch at Lamar Lounge. Not sure what I’m doing – probably holding my head up since I’d already had two espressos, a double shot of rum, and a few pints of Guinness.

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In the Neighborhood

I have a story, “In the Neighborhood,” in the debut issue of Lazy Fascist Review alongside work from writers I really love like Elizabeth Ellen and Juliet Escoria and interviews with greats like Tom Piccirilli and Dennis Cooper. I wrote the story over a couple of weeks when my wife, son, and I were between apartments, and Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly were nice enough to let us stay at their place while they were in Europe. It was summer, almost 100 degrees for two weeks straight. Wimbledon was on TV. Eamon was sick. I woke up at six every morning and went out to Tom’s studio and hoped for a little of his good magic. I wound up writing one of the saddest and most fucked up things I’ve ever written – set in my Brooklyn neighborhood in winter and following a drifter from his grandmother’s sad house to a dive bar to a small apartment occupied by a sloppy barfly and her quadriplegic sister. There’s a beer pairing for every story, and mine’s paired with Ruination. The magazine’s eight bucks  – That’s less than New York cigarettes.

Also out from Lazy Fascist today: Killer new books from Brian Allen Carr, Michael Seidlinger, and Noah Cicero. All writers you should check out immediately.

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