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Composer Chris Cerrone adapted Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities as an opera, and the result, to my mind, is a masterpiece--a fully-realized work which takes Calvino's landscapes and ideas as its cornerstones and builds its own rather dazzling musical skyline on them. The piece, a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Music, was performed in L.A.'s Union Station, and is now available for CD and download. I interviewed Cerrone about his take on Calvino, along with the relationship between music and literature, and you can read our conversation and hear some clips from the piece at the Tin House blog:

I figured some of the Vollmann fans here might appreciate this tribute to my favorite book of his, published recently in The Believer Logger. There are also homages from Kim Addonizio, Victor LaValle, and Kent Wascom. Happy V-day!

You can snag UNDERSTORIES today for a mere $1.99 for your Kindle, should you be so inclined. Here's a link:

I was thrilled to hear Nancy Pearl select UNDERSTORIES as one of her "under-the-radar" picks for Summer Reading on NPR's Morning Edition last week. Dubbing it "elastic realism," she named it "probably [her] favorite short story collection in recent memory," and delved in greater detail into a couple of stories, "The Discipline of Shadows" and "The Gendarmes." She went on to discuss a couple of other books that sound compelling; I can distinctly recall wanting to read one, Reif Larsen's THE SELECTED WORKS OF TS SPIVET, when it was published in 2009, since I am, myself, a devotee of unconventional maps. Anyway, I’m so grateful that she placed my book in this company. Here’s a link to the story:

At her blog, A Just Recompense, Karen Carlson has written a tremendously thorough, probing, and spirited review of UNDERSTORIES. She touches on everything from umbrellas to umbrology, flash to "foolish consistency," "Mothlight" to maternal instinct. I'm very grateful to her and urge you to browse around her blog in general, which has no shortage of riches.

Hi, everyone. Okay, if this blog was a plant other than an extremely hardy cactus, it would've withered long ago. In any case, during this drought, I have been busy with a bunch of things. Here are a few of them:

-I interviewed one of my favorite authors, Norman Rush, for the Tin House blog, which you can read here: .

-On the other side of the interview table, Eddy Rathke interviewed me for Monkeybicycle's "52 Weeks/52 Authors" series, and that can be found here: .

-My story "The Conversations" received Special Mention in the 2014 Pushcart Anthology. It can be read in The Collagist here: .

Finally, UNDERSTORIES is currently a finalist in Fiction for the 2012-13 New Hampshire Literary Awards.

Please keep your fingers crossed for me and your plants at least slightly hydrated.

For a limited time, UNDERSTORIES is available for $1.99 as a Kindle ebook. For those of you who've been curious or sitting on the fence about it (an uncomfortable place to sit, I realize), this is a great occasion to check it out. And if you've already snared a copy, I greatly appreciate your spreading the word. Thanks! Here's a link:

I'm thrilled to be joining a rousing crew of writers as part of the Franklin Park Reading Series on Monday, Feb. 11th. I'll probably read some new, unpublished work, and I'll be joined by Karolina Waclawiak, author of How to Get into the Twin Palms, Lars Iyer, author of the forthcoming Exodus, Dylan Nice, author of Other Kinds, and Margarita Korol, author of Spoils of War: Ode to a Refusenik Mother. Each of these writers has a compelling body of work, and I'm thus looking forward to a lively evening. Please consider joining us if you'll be hovering around the city.


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Here's a map and a history of the venue and how it came Lazarus-style out of the "rubble of a dilapidated mechanic's garage":

There's a profile of me that appears in The Hippo, a free paper widely distributed around southern New Hampshire. You can catch a look at it here, and you can see that it's right across the fold from a review of the new Camper van Beethoven album, which pleases me immensely.

Understories showed up on a handful of Best of 2012 lists, and I figured before we get too deep into the new year, I'd round 'em up and corral them in one spot. Here they are, with copious dollops of gratitude to everyone who read, reviewed, or rated the book, to anyone whose to-read or maybe pile it wormed itself into, to those who have spread the word, attended a reading, or might do so down the road. And to you for reading this far.

- Michele Filgate listed it on her Top Ten of the year at Salon.com , and also wrote a bit about it at Vol. 1 Brooklyn: .

- David Gutowski listed it as one of his Favorite Short Story Collections of the year at Largehearted Boy: .

- Matt Bell collared it, along with Diane Williams's Vicky Swanky is a Beauty, as one of his two favorite collections of the year at .

- Jason Jordan cited it as his Best Short Story Collection of the year at .

- Okla Elliot put it at on his year-end list of short story collections he enjoyed at .

- Amber Sparks listed it as a top collection at .

- Terry Weyna, at her Reading the Leaves blog, put it on her Best of the Year list: .

- Jennifer Spiegel gave it a special accolade at her end of the year blog in the category of
"Book Most Outside My Usual Fare That I Think You Should Read Because It’s Wildly Imaginative, Acutely Intelligent, The Prose Is Striking, and It’s Intellectually Stimulating."

- Joshua Nomen-Mutatio was kind enough to give it a write-in vote in the comments on The Millions at .

Happy New Year, everyone...onward to 2013!