There’s presently a fundraising campaign afoot. You will, I’m sure, be hearing more about the press in question in the weeks and months to come.

-2011-
Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (Scribner)
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (Little, Brown and Company)
Vanessa Veselka, Zazen (Red Lemonade)
Justin Taylor, The Gospel of Anarchy (Harper Perennial)
Colson Whitehead, Zone One (Doubleday)
Nathan Larson, The Dewey Decimal System (Akashic)
Ellen Willis: Out of the Vinyl Deeps (University of Minnesota Press)
Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (Greywolf)
John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (Farrar Strauss & Giroux)
Jeff Sharlet, Sweet Heaven When I Die (W.W. Norton)
Lisa Wells, Yeah. No. Totally. (Perfect Day Publishing)

-Non-2011-
John Williams, Stoner (NYRB Classics)
Alexander Chee, Edinburgh (Picador)
Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (The Dorothy Project)
Bruce Chatwin, On the Black Hill (Penguin)
Dennis Cooper, The Sluts (Da Capo)
Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn (Grove Press)
Michael Kimball, Us (Tyrant Books)
Michael Kimball, Dear Everybody (Alma Books)
Rick Moody, The Four Fingers of Death (Back Bay Books)
Paul Harding, Tinkers (Bellevue Literary Press)
Anne Carson, Nox (New Directions)

At Vol.1, I’ve listed some of my favorite writing about music for the year.

And at Big Other, I talk about some of my favorite live music of 2011.

My ten favorite albums, along with some thoughts on the year in music, are now listed at Dusted.

And I contributed to a list of literary gift ideas at The Contextual Life, along with a number of notably NY-area lit folks.

Titus Andronicus | FOR NO ONE from FOR NO ONE on Vimeo.

Ah, late November. Soon I’ll be off to pay a visit to the county from which I came. Last year, I did some exploration and revisiting of old haunts. This year, I’m less sure of what to expect — maybe another trip to the River Road Bookstore; maybe some trips on Jersey roads to the west. Nothing is set as of yet…

Except…it’s not really a proper horror story. It nurtures a particular image and setting that, by story’s end, eventually become horrific, but — this is more in the realm of things that unsettle me than things that will necessarily terrify audiences worldwide. It’s an image that I’ve had in my head for years now: seven or eight years ago, there was a particularly hot summer, and I’d walk to the subway after long nights at work and pass these clumps of trash bags that were just left there to fester, and I’d wonder; I’d start to see things emerging from them, and then I’d creep myself out and get onto the subway and try really hard to avoid thinking of the things now lurking around my subconscious.

(There’s an old story of mine somewhere with a similar payoff; a sinister buildup to an impossible image. Maybe I’ll post it somewhere; might make for interesting reading…)

I have a weird relationship with realism. A lot of the fiction I’ve done lately has been pretty straightforward. And yet: a lot of the writing that I first did when I was ushering myself into the process of writing fiction was much more surreal. Weird fiction or “slipstream” or something similar. Some of that’s just due to my reading habits: my bookshelves have a fair amount of realist fiction on them, but there’s a fair share of science fiction and horror and magic realism in there as well. But I also find it interesting that, after detouring around the weird for a while, I seem to find myself drawn back to it — the last story I finished opens in a fairly realistic vein and then takes a detour into the…if not the impossible, at least the unlikely.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m reminded that one can tweak things like realism on the page; that a story that opens in one mode doesn’t necessarily have to stay in that same mode for the duration. (Dennis Cooper’s The Marbled Swarm, which I just finished, is something of a master class in this — just when you think you know where it’s going, the narrator pulls things to a stop and resets the terms under which you hear his story.)

If nothing else, that renewed attraction to all things weird might help explain where parts of my head were when I wrote some of the dialogue in this story….

By the third morning, the air’s density had grown: sweat sprouted from Dalton’s chest and shoulders as soon as he rose to street level and began his westward walk. Ten steps down the block, he saw the bags again, grey plastic taut in places, slack and crumpled in others. Their shapes, he saw, had come to rest on one another; had come to compress and support themselves.

You can read the whole thing here. I’ll be back later in the week with some thoughts on this story and something else that’s in the works, and What It All Means. (Or something.)

I’ve had some stories appear in both their print and online spaces, and they also appear here; there’s also work from smart folks like Joe Meno, Patrick Somerville, Al Burian, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Jonathan Messinger, Susannah Felts, Jamie Iredell, Kate Duva, and more.

(As always, giant thanks are due to editors Todd Dills and C.T. Ballentine, who are fine people to boot.)

If you’re so inclined, you can purchase the book here.

I’m going to need to sketch out a shared history for the three primary main characters — including former bandmates, families, classmates — as well as a small town near the Pennsylvania border in northwestern New Jersey. I keep a Moleskin notebook around, but more recently I picked up a half-dozen Field Notes notebooks so that I could keep things project-specific.

You can read the whole thing right here. The whole site is well worth your time as well…