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Back in 2010, I put out a little experimental novella called, An Dantomine Eerly. I was a young author and editor active in Seattle’s bustling literary community. I was used to doing events and reading series, but I had never toured on the strength of a published book before. With a blue-collar work ethic and a not-at-all-characteristic sense of enthusiasm, I set out on a string of dates outside of my areas of influence into the great unknown.
I read at any bookstore that have would me. In food courts, strip malls, and airports, I didn’t care. I packed up my car once and drove five hours to a tiny bookstore halfway up the road to Mt. Hood in Oregon, only to read to the bookseller and her cat. We had a lovely dinner next door before I drove the five hours back home. A few weeks later, I read to rows of empty chairs at a small community bookstore outside a major city in California. After I slogged through the minimum amount of pages required for it to be considered a reading, one of the booksellers took pity on me and bought me a beer. I wallowed in my pity beer and had a great conversation with the bookseller about my crazy little book, which it turns out he had read, and other weird, experimental, surrealist literature we both admired.
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This week’s contest is for the new anthology of crime stories set in Big Sky Country: Montana Noir, edited by James Grady and Kier Graff. Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct location within the geographic area of the book. Grady and Graff, both Montana natives, masterfully curate this collection of hard-edged Western tales by David Abrams, Caroline Patterson, Eric Heidle, Thomas McGuane, Janet Skeslien Charles, Sidner Larson, Yvonne Seng, Jamie Ford, Carrie La Seur, Walter Kirn, Gwen Florio, and Debra Earling.
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Did you know Brave Deeds is also available as an audiobook? And did you also know that it’s on sale right now for less than $8? If you like your books read to you, then check out Paul Costanzo’s narration of the novel about six soldiers struggling to survive one day of war. It’s unlike any other bedtime story you’ve ever heard...
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When two writers move in together, how in hell do they organize their respective libraries? Is there a trial period of shelf separation—yours, mine—before a ceremonial marrying of the titles? Two well-suited people will surely share some redundancy. What’s to be done with the doubles when shelf space, as it’s bound to, gets scarce? Whose copy is kept? And why? Oh, I see, yours is signed. But so’s mine.
Novelist Thisbe Nissen and I met at a writers conference and, a year later, we got engaged at said conference (during my introduction to her reading, I slipped in an on-stage, down-on-bended-knee proposal). When we bought our first house, outside Saugerties, New York, in the foothills of the Catskills, among the first things we did was have bookshelves built. A few years later, when we sold that house and decamped for the Midwest, before we set up our son’s bedroom or renovated the handicapped shower stall in the bathroom—the previous owner was paraplegic—we had bookshelves built.
Thisbe and I merged and purged at the very beginning....and at some point our son, too, got shelved in poetry.
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