Starting today, Keyhole Press is taking pre-orders for my limited edition minibook Wolf Parts.

A dark, fragmentary retelling of Little Red Riding Hood in forty short fictions, this version of Wolf Parts will only be available to people who pre-order the book before its print date of March 21, 2010. The book costs $8 (with free shipping), for which you'll receive the perfect-bound minibook, plus an audiobook version that you'll be able to download immediately upon completion of your order. As an added bonus, you'll also receive an e-coupon for $3 off my full-length collection How They Were Found when it becomes available for pre-order later this year, sometime before its October release.

To give you a taste of what's inside, here's the beginning of the book:

After Red cut her way out of the wolf’s belly—after she wiped the gore off her hood and cape, her dress, her tights—she again found herself standing on the path that wound through the forest toward her grandmother’s house. Along the way, she met with the wolf, with whom she had palavered the first time and every time since. Afterward, she went to her grandmother’s, where she again discovered the wolf devouring the old woman, and where he waited to devour her too, as he had before. Once again she was lost, and once again, she cut herself out of his belly and back onto the stony path. Over and over, she did these things until, desperate to break the cycle, she laid across the stones and, with the knife her mother had given her, gutted herself, quickly, left to right. She cried out in wonder at the bright worlds she found hidden within herself, and with shaky hands she scooped their hot wet flesh into the open air, where with a flick of her wrists she set them each free.

Basically, if you order Wolf Parts during the next three weeks--the only time it will be available for purchase online--you'll receive the audiobook immediately, the print minibook in early April, and, should you later choose to order How They Were Found directly from Keyhole, you'll get that book for just $11 (instead of the usual $14), plus some pre-order bonuses for that book that we're not ready to talk about yet.

That's it for the sales pitch. On a more personal level, I can honestly say that this is one of my own favorite works, and one that I'm incredibly happy to finally put out into the world after keeping it close for the past year or so. I hope you'll consider picking up a copy, and that if you do you'll enjoy reading it as much as I've enjoyed working on it in all its various incarnations. As always, thanks again in advance for your support and your readership, and for doing whatever you can to spread the word about Wolf Parts.

ORDER NOW AT WWW.HOWTHEYWEREFOUND.COM

THERE ARE VARIOUS KINDS OF WOLVES.



I sat down last night and watched 60 Writers / 60 Places, and got up this morning and watched part of it again. Directed by Luca Dipierro and Michael Kimball, it's a fantastic short film (about fifty minutes), both purely for the readings themselves and also for the glimpses of writerly personality and temperment that emerge even in these short glimpses.

 Lots of great writers appear in 60 Writers / 60 Places--Brian Evenson, Blake Butler, Joanna Howard, Kim Chinquee, Robert Lopez, Deb Olin Unferth, Sam Lipsyte, Rick Moody, and Adam Robinson, among many others--and of course it's great to see their work delivered here. In addition, there are lots of faces new to me, including several very young writers and several writers of a more academic bent. It's a diverse cast, and nearly everyone's work was interesting as language and also well-delivered as performance. Some of the standouts include Unferth's reading from Vacation in a laundromat, Fiona Maazel's at the gym, Willie Perdemo's reading at a playground, and Will Eno's reading that closes the movie, as well as those of many of the other writers mentioned above. Throughout the movie, I found myself riveted to the chair not just because I was curious about who was coming next, but also because I wanted to see where they would be.

Each reading begins with the writer staring into the camera, usually with a fairly blank look on their face--the film's website says the movie "begins with the idea of the tableaux vivant, a living picture where the camera never moves." After a few seconds, the reading begins, with the camera static and the scene around the writer often moving as if unaffected by the reading. Afterward, there's another second or two where the writer has obviously been asked to return their gaze to the camera, to stare the viewer down, returning the scene to its static beginning before the film cuts away. This post-reading pause is one of the movie's most interesting features, because while the blankness of the stare before the reading has a performative, "game face" kind of feel, the one after rarely does: Here, nearly every writer's face has changed slightly, even if they've only read a single sentence. The most common occurrence is a brief, almost imperceptible smile or grin, tugging at the corners of mouths pulled tight, one I've seen at countless readings, that I've felt on my own face at the end of my own performances. It's the look of an athlete after a game, a gymnast who feels sure she's stuck the landing, and in the context of this film's conceit it further becomes a sort of recognition of some bigger transformation that has just taken place, where a person is transformed via the mere act of reading their own words, their bodies stepping out of their everyday location--a subway car, a garden, a supermarket--into some space more electric. This is a movie full of such moments, and Kimball and Dipierro should be proud of how many great ones they've managed to capture on film.

You can buy 60 Writers / 60 Places on DVD from Little Burn Films, either individually or with Kimball and Dipierro's previous film, I Will Smash You.

As a teaser, here's the first paragraph of my story:

From between my wife's legs quickened only this puff of womb-air, this gasp of baby-breath trapped for months inside of her, followed by no body, no afterbirth, no cord to cut or miscarriage to scrape away. Afterward, my wife insisted she heard the sound of her baby girl crying, but what was I to say in the absence of that child? How was I to call her anything other than mad, when she insisted our baby was near, that she could hear her every move?

Thanks so much to Mike Meginnis, Evan Lavender-Smith, and the other staff members at Puerto del Sol for taking this story, and for their enthusiasm and professionalism throughout the publishing process and beyond. I can't wait to see the issue and read more of it, as the web samples available at their site are fantastic. If you haven't checked any of them out yet, I suggest starting with the Frédéric Boyer excerpt translated by Nick Bredie and Joanna Howard.

You can subscribe to Puerto del Sol for just $20 for one year, with longer subscriptions costing even less.

Jim Ruland is bringing his Vermin on the Mount reading series to AWP this year, partnering with Keyhole to put on a reading the evening of April 8th at The Mercury Cafe. Set aside the date, because it's going to be a great event: I'll be reading with Amelia Gray, Elena Passarello, Kevin Sampsell, Matthew Simmons and Rachel Yoder.

More details to come as the date approaches, but mark this on your AWP calendar as something to be at.

I could tell Horace was talking to his mother. He spoke to her daily. I had always been a little envious. My mother and I hardly conversed. Since Bernie had been born, we had not gone often to the house in New Jersey where I grew up and where Claudia now lived with her partner, Francine, but things had decayed before that. I traced it to the year my father got sick and we argued about his treatment. Though I was the first to admit I resented the man, preoccupied as he was with his pleasures, adrift in some dream of sleaze, he was still my father, and after the diagnosis I championed all the heroic measures, the experimental chemos, the scalpels and rally caps, any long shot on tap. Maybe I demanded those things precisely because I resented him. But my mother had his ear, convinced him to go gentle into that shitty night. They had caught the cancer late and it had spread quickly, but I wondered if he agreed to slip away out of weariness or a sense of penance.

--From Sam Lipsyte's forthcoming The Ask, excerpted this week at Five Chapters