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Dancing With Myself

I did a Dancing With Myself interview for Nigel Bird’s Sea Minor blog. Thanks, Nigel!

Really excited to find this great review of Gravesend at The Big Click by Nick Mamatas. Somehow missed it when it posted back in May. My favorite line: “The gunplay is an afterthought; what a more lurid novel would make a climax, Boyle passes over in a sentence, because the main character in this novel isn’t Ray Boy or Conway, but working-class immigrant Brooklyn itself.” Thanks, Nick!

I also love this review of Lazy Fascist Review #1 (which features a story of mine called “In the Neighborhood”) by Brian A. Ellis. “Bathroom reading for smart weirdos,” that’s fucking great.

 

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RIP Tony Gwynn

As a baseball-obsessed kid growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, Tony Gwynn represented steadiness. You knew you were watching the best, a genius hitter. I grew up in Brooklyn, so my life was all Yanks and Mets, but I watched Gwynn every chance I got and searched for his name daily in the box scores. I loved him and I always prayed for his card when I bought a pack of Topps or Donruss. You could see that it wasn’t just that he was great at the game — he was always studying, always working, always getting better. He hit .444 with the bases loaded in his career. He had a lifetime .415 average against Greg Maddux, and Maddux never struck him out. Goddamn. It was more than that though. You could just tell that he was a beautiful guy, a nice guy, a fan first. The Olbermann piece below confirms that — it had me in tears. RIP Tony Gwynn.

“What you hoped Tony Gwynn was like, he was like.” Keith Olbermann remembers Tony Gwynn:

Another good piece:

“He played joyful baseball that transcended time and space. It seemed uncomplicated: he always hit, he always smiled, he never had a bad season. When baseball disappointed him by blocking his run at .400 in 1994—he was hitting .394 when the player’s strike began in August—Gwynn simply came back the next year and hit .368. He would have hit in the 1950s and he would have hit in the 1930s; he would have hit under water or on the moon. There was something automatic about a Tony Gwynn line drive. He was so consistently good that you almost forgot to appreciate it.”  –Eric Nusbaum in Vice Sports

 

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The Fever/Flying Shoes

Megan Abbott’s The Fever and Lisa Howorth’s Flying Shoes are out today! Go get these incredible books now.

Here’s a profile of Lisa by the NY Times.

And there’s a Flying Shoes release party at the Powerhouse in Oxford tonight at 6.

Info on The Fever.

Next Tuesday: Megan in conversation with Jack at Off Square Books.

Also, while we’re talking about great stuff: stream Heal by Strand of Oaks over at NPR. A beautiful record. “JM” (about Jason Molina) is my favorite song of the year.

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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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