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.

This is the most unusual “in the wild” sighting of The Ghost Variations anyone has shared with me: a stack of copies for sale as part of the Halloween display at the Old Idaho Penitentiary in Boise.

The WORDTheatre Short Story Podcast has posted an “In Memoriam” episode featuring four readings by Philip Baker Hall, who passed away on June 12, 2022. My story “Small Degrees” is one of the four he presents, along with stories by Peter Orner, Joyce Carol Oates, and Mark Halliday. You can listen to the episode here.

This essay about Donald Harington, the Shmoo, anonymity, and the importance of art that makes the world magical, bearable, or understandable was published in The Oxford American’s 100th issue—which is to say that it’s several years old, but I just unearthed it.

I’ll be teaching a weeklong fiction-writing workshop this summer from July 24-29 at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. You can read more about the conference and submit an application here.

The Ghost Variations made the longlist for the Story Prize, honoring the best collections published in 2021. You can read the announcement here.

I wrote about Kim Fu’s short story “Sandman,” from her collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, for Electric Literature. You can read both my introduction and the story itself here.

Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark, has an essay in Electric Literature in which he recommends my novel The Illumination as one of “seven books about navigating a post-pandemic world.” You can read it here.

Roughly fifteen years ago, the wonderful character actor Philip Baker Hall (whom you would almost certainly recognize from Magnolia, Zodiac, and many other films) read my story “Small Degrees” before a live audience for WORDTheatre. For the next two months, until March 2, WORD is making that performance available for free listening on its short story podcast. You can find the recording here or through your favorite podcasting service.

Philip Martin of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has some smart things to say about The Ghost Variations in his year-end reading column.

I’m posting this about nine months late, but Sam Sacks reviewed The Ghost Variations in the Wall Street Journal. You can read his thoughts here.

I provided an annotated list of my five favorite novels about ghosts for shepherd.com. You can read it here.

NPR’s Book of the Day podcast recently featured The Ghost Variations along with Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence. (That makes two books of the day, but I’ll allow it.) You can listen to the feature here.

Bookforum asked its contributors to name the best books they read in 2021. Justin Taylor praised The Ghost Variations. You can read his thoughts here.

Electric Literature’s curated Halloween reading list includes The Ghost Variations. You can read the list here.

I conversed with Connor Syrewicz of Barzakh Magazine about The Ghost Variations, inbetweenness, the vexations of sentence-making, seeking pleasure in reading and writing, and many other topics for a feature titled “Nothing Is Quite What We Imagine It to Be.” You can read it here.

Lia Lent, of Little Rock’s WordsWorth Books, recommended The Ghost Variations for Minnesota Public Radio’s “Ask a Bookseller” feature. You can listen to the short segment here.

The website Semiovox, dedicated to semiotic analysis of the kind that “reveals not just what things mean, but how,” recently republished a short essay I wrote about a significant object in my life: a Wendy’s saladmobile.

The Rolla, MO, band Begin at Zero have recorded a song inspired by my story “The Ceiling.” You can listen to or purchase the song through their Bandcamp page, here.