Small Odysseys

A new thing! I’ve loved Selected Shorts for so long—-actors reading short stories!—-and I was so thrilled when they picked Customer Service at the Karaoke Don Quixote for their show, and then years later when they commissioned Best Worst American, which ended up being the title story for my book.

For their 35th anniversary they asked 35 writers to come up with stories. I’m so excited to participate. Hannah Tinti edited, Neil Gaiman wrote the foreword, and Algonquin books will be publishing it on 3 March 2022. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve written. Check it out! Pre-order, please!

Two Pieces in TriQuarterly

Two pieces of mine are up in TriQuarterly! While self-contained, they are excerpts from the novel-in-progress, whose second draft is about a month or two away from completion. The pieces are on the magazine's front page, but their Summer/Fall 2013 issue is HUGE (and awesome), and so it's easier accessing them via these direct links:

• Domokun in Fremont
• Courier

Also: Selected Shorts rebroadcast "Customer Service at the Karaoke Don Quixote this month"! Parker Posey guest-hosted! (MP3 available here.)

Great Beginnings!

So the Selected Shorts episode with my story "Best Worst American" in it aired this weekend! It's here (the 10/21 episode titled "Great Beginnings").

And here's the full interview of Keret and Tinti talking about the stories in the episode, mine included.). 

You can get to the actual MP3 of the episode here, where Cristin Milioti does an awesome job reading the piece.

Getty Event Write-Ups

Two nice write-ups of the Getty event: http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/selected-shorts-celebrates-the-written-and-spoken-word/ and http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/03/selected-shorts-at-the-getty-starring-tim-curry.html


Nate Corddry did an awesome job reading the piece, which was written years ago as a lark in the dead hours when I managed a computer lab. Had I known, back then, that someone was going to have to perform the thing, I may have removed the bit about singing portions of Don Quixote in Spanish or maybe even the thing about talking in a fake foreign accent, which is pretty much the whole piece. Corddry totally sang, though! And he did so beautifully. And he was way funny. So maybe it's just as well I didn't know.