Fifty-Two Stories/The Magazine of Yoga/Poets & Writers

The official pub date of my book is today! In celebration of this awesome fact, you can now read the title story of my collection over at Cal Morgan's Fifty-Two Stories.

Also, there's a new interview with me up a The Magazine of Yoga. Topics covered: Compost, failure, and cage fighting.

Double also, Poets & Writers has posted a video of mine to their site. This is either a huge step toward legitimacy for me or a huge step away from legitimacy for Poets & Writers. Either way, I'm pretty excited.

Andrew's Book Club

Incredibly excited to announce that The Great Frustration has been selected as the May pick for Andrew's Book Club. I am a huge fan of ABC, so this is a huge honor. You can read an interview I did with Andrew here. Topics covered: Dinosaur comedians, food fights, and MST3k.

Animalcula: A Young Scientist's Guide to New Creatures

The new issue of The Kenyon Review is about to drop, as the kids say. The issue will feature a sizable excerpt from my epic, pseudoscientific work, Animalcula: A Young Scientist's Guide to New Creatures. So get ready for twelve (count 'em, twelve) short stories about some exciting microscopic organisms that I'm pretty sure I made up.

The issue will also feature a bunch of amazing work from some incredible people (including a bona fide hero of mine, Albert Goldbarth).

In the next few days The Kenyon Review will also be running a micro-interview with me on their blog. It's not an interview about microscopes, though that would have been completely awesome. It's just called micro because it's short. They've already posted two great interviews with contributors from the issue. Be sure to check them out: Ted Wheeler, Robert Yune. I'll link to my interview once it's up, as is my wont.

Also, while you're waiting to get your hands on a copy of The Kenyon Review, I encourage you to enjoy the work of some actual young scientists over at the Oklahoma Microscopy Society, from whom I borrowed the above picture of a wheel bug.

Q: Interview? A: Interview!

As many of you know, I rarely give interviews -- possibly because people rarely ask me to give them interviews. Whatever the case, I just did one with Shawn Vestal over at Bark. Topics covered include: Axe body spray, short story trailers, and the Civil War. Huge thanks to the awesome Shawn Vestal, and everyone at Bark for turning out one of the most consistently great lit blogs on the interweb.

Podcastapocalypse

The Missouri Review's most recent podcast is a short interview with me regarding my story, Loeka Discovered.

My having participated in a podcast sort of complicates the fact that I don't know what one is. But my best guess is that all you Seth-heads who have been dying to cast me onto your pods are in luck.

Some points of interest that may enhance your listening enjoyment:

1.)In my brief snippets of audio, try to count how many times I say like, sort of, kind of, and a bunch of other things that are extremely similar to like, sort of, and kind of.

2.)In one part of my interview, I sort of, like, suggest that there isn't any use of scene in my story. Later, Speer Morgan, in the most diplomatic way possible, points out that I don't really know what I'm talking about.

So don't worry, Seth-heads! There is some use of scene in my story. I just meant that there's not any super, detail-rich scene-ish scene. That having been said, I'm still relatively certain that I don't know what I'm talking about.

3.)It may be interesting to know that, while listening to this, I skipped over that normal stage of self-consciousness in which a person says, "My voice doesn't sound like that! Does it?" Instead, I immediately launched into a bout of self-hate at the atomic level, in which I perceived my most basic elements to be intrinsically evil and wrong. Plus, I know for a fact that my voice doesn't sound like that.

4.)Everyone at The Missouri Review rules (special thanks to Caitlin Garing for conducting the interview, and to Speer Mogan for his kind words), and I'm honored they took the time to put this together. Also, my beverage of choice during the interview was a can of 7-UP that I stole from a mini-fridge in the Mid-American Review office. That same office may have also incurred the cost of a long distance call to Columbia, Missouri.