I sat for a roughly thirty-minute conversation about literature, ghosts, metaphysics, and ‘pataphysics with Robin Becker and Maxim Tamarov of Minnesota State University, Mankato, for the Good Thunder Podcast. You can listen to the episode here.

This isn’t related to writing, teaching, or publishing but seemed worth posting about nevertheless. For more than twenty years, I’ve been participating in a (very nearly) weekly movie club, and recently, on the occasion of our thousandth movie, Sean Clancy wrote a feature about us for the state newspaper. You can find the article here (behind a paywall).

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You’ll also find several pertinent lists, here, here, and here.

Steve Straessle has written a column about me, my books, and the Six Bridges Book Festival for today’s issue of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. (There’s a little bit of mis-recollection at the beginning of the piece, since I’m definitely not a sloppy joe eater, but I’m grateful for his kind thoughts.) You can read the column here.

I’ll be judging this year’s Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize for the North American Review. The contest is open now and closes on November 1. The winner will receive $1000.

The prize is “intended to recognize the finest speculative fiction, which can include, but is not limited to, work influenced by the postmodern science-fiction of Kurt Vonnegut. We welcome all forms of previously unpublished fiction—one story per submission. We are enthusiastic about all work painted with speculative fiction’s broad brush: fairy tale, magical realism, fabulism, the fantastic, horror, Afro-futurism, science fiction hard and soft, and everything in between. The winner, runners-up, and any honorable mentions may be offered publication in the North American Review’s summer issue.”

You can read more about the contest and submit a story here.

I stumbled across an analysis of the first sentence and last sentence of my novel The Illumination at a website called Book Atlas, which dedicates itself to just such first-sentence/last-sentence investigations. You can read the entry here.

My craft lecture on the value of nonhuman creatures in fiction, “An Animal Within to Give Its Blessing,” has been published in the new issue of Washington Square Review. The lecture is available in full online at the Review’s website, where print copies of the issue are also available for purchase.

Bonjour Paris published an article about the Paris Writers Workshop, where I’ll be teaching this summer from June 2-7.

I’ll be conducting a speculative fiction workshop from June 2 - 7 at the Paris Writers Workshop. The week will offer—

• Daily small group master classes in your selected genre

• Individual meetings with your faculty instructor

• Inspirational and practical guidance for your work in progress

• Panel discussions focused on tools of writing and paths to publishing

• Readings by your fellow writers and faculty

• And social gatherings with an amazing community of writers from all over the world

The Paris Writers Workshop is the longest running literary program of its kind and will be held at Columbia University’s beautiful Reid Hall campus in the heart of literary Paris. More details, the full program, and the registration link can be found here.

For the winter 2024 issue of BOMB Magazine, I spoke with Kelly Link, one of the finest fiction writers in the U.S., about the distinctions she draws between nighttime logic, daytime logic, and dream logic. The new issue is available at newsstands or can be purchased here.

The full conversation is now accessible online.

You can find a new story of mine, “Time as a Perpetual Motion Machine,” in the latest issue of MONKEY: New Writing from Japan. It’s available for order as a paperback, a PDF, or an ePub here.

On the latest episode of their podcast “The Clinic & The Person,” dedicated to the intersection between biomedicine and the humanities, J. Russell Teagarden and Daniel Albrant discuss my novel The Illumination with Dr. Ron Boeding. You can listen to the conversation here.

A portion of The Ghost Variations—the “Ghosts and Speculation” section—will be repackaged for digital publication this fall as part of the Vintage Shorts series. It’s one of a quartet of ghostly or horrifying stories being released as $.99 eBooks prior to Halloween, along with work by Stephen King, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Theodore Van Alst. The on-sale date is September 26, 2023. You can read more about the series here.

Rebecca Makkai gives a brief mention to my 2008 collection The View from the Seventh Layer in her Substack entry regarding her idea for “a new and unconventional prize: one that celebrates the best book from 15 years ago that never won a major award.” She proposes calling it “the Cassandra Prize (as in, a visionary book that no one fully appreciated in its time).” You can read the entry here. She praises The Ghost Variations—and the lists on this website—in a slightly later entry.

Composer Christopher Cerrone, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and multiple Grammy nominee, has adapted my short story “The Year of Silence” for the Louisville Symphony and baritone Dashon Burton. The work will be premiering at the Kentucky Center as part of the Symphony’s Classics Series on Saturday, May 13, 2023. You can read more about it or buy tickets here. And here’s a short column about in in the Arkansas-Democrat Gazette.

The Guardian’s monthly “What We’re Reading” feature includes some praise by Lan Samantha Chang for Walter Tevis’s newly published volume of collected stories, The King Is Dead, as well as for the introduction I wrote. You can read the feature here.

Today marks the publication of The King Is Dead, the first complete edition of the stories of Walter Tevis (pictured above, right, with another fellow). I was honored to write the introduction. You can purchase the collection through Bookshop.org, Amazon, or your independent bookseller.

I wrote a short appreciation of a sentence from George R. R. Martin’s (best?) story “Sandkings” for The Sewanee Review. You can read it here.

A short interview with me prior to my appearance Saturday, Oct. 29, at the Six Bridges Book Festival (formerly the Arkansas Literary Festival).

The King Is Dead, a first-ever collection of the complete stories of Walter Tevis, is scheduled to be published by Vintage as a paperback original on February 14, 2023. Tevis is an absolutely essential writer for me (see here, here, and here), so I was excited to hear this news and overjoyed when I was asked to write the introduction. You can pre-order a copy of the collection through Bookshop.org, your local independent, or elsewhere.

My craft lecture “Pieces of Elsewhere: the Horizontal and the Vertical in Character and Fiction” is available in the Fall 2022 issue of The Sewanee Review. You can read roughly the opening third of the lecture here and the rest either by purchasing a copy of the issue or subscribing to the magazine. I hope you will, because I’m proud of the lecture.