Scary “best books of the year” lists are here. Dare to look away.

It’s been an eventful time lately.

In early summer I signed on with the wonderful Sarah Yake from the Frances Collin Agency. Just like that, my novel, which looked like this in early 2016, is now “making the rounds,” as they say, going out to great editors far and wide. It feels crazily amazing. So, good luck, novels, mine and all the others out there.

In August, I got to read for the first time in New York City, at Brooklyn’s Unnameable Books, to be exact, where I bought a copy of a Janet Frame novel for $7. The occasion was the launch of Vestiges_02 from Black Sun Lit. We heard from a fantastic group of writers and poets, and there was even a surprise appearance by Russell Bennetts, who just happened to be in town and was kind enough to stop by and celebrate. (In case anyone’s curious, I read this short piece from Minor Literature[s].)

I found out that I’ll have two short-short stories in The Brooklyn Rail. They’ll be published sometime in the next few months or so. One’s about love, the other’s about escaping death.

For The Kenyon Review Online, I wrote a review of Caren Beilin’s experimental novel, “The University of Pennsylvania,” from Noemi Press, 2014.

That’s it for now. Now on we go into fall reading and submission season, complete with those “best books of 2016” lists, which are popping up all over. I sort of love to hate them. I’ve said I won’t read them because they’re cruel to writers, just reductive clickbait designed to maximize holiday book-buying, but I do end up looking at a few. It’s hard not to feed the monster a little.

Writer and translator Adrian Nathan West’s first novel, “The Aesthetics of Degradation,” was published by Repeater Books earlier this month. Nate’s one of the smartest people I know, so it was a pleasure to interview him about his book for Berfrois.

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It’s been months since I posted anything but hey, I finished a draft of a new novel! At this stage it has a lot of short chapters, as you can see by this photo. It’s fun walking across the room and moving scenes around. This is the best way I know of to see the whole book, a very useful technique I shamelessly borrowed from novelist David Connerly Nahm. 

Oh, and last month I wrote an experimental review of Diane Williams’s new story collection, “Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine” for Minor Literature[s]. 

Okay, back to revising this novel. It’s going out to my first readers very soon.

And if you use any tricks or techniques like the one above when you’re revising a book, I’d love to hear about them.

“I was assailed by the smell of earth, the smell of decay from the rains that had fallen on the leaves of countless autumns. The landscape changed; the gorse had been replaced by fern, and the terrain sloped. I heard the fluttering of bird wings. I sat down on a damp, moss-covered rock by a pond with rippling water. Perhaps one day–if I died near this spot where I had paused to sit–a hunter or a wanderer like myself would find, instead of a carcass of a wild animal, my own remains. With the tip of his boot he would unearth a bone, and beneath it would be an ant colony or a centipede’s nest or perhaps a worm that would coil in desperation at being discovered, at having its entire world dismantled.”

–from Mercè Rodoreda’s novel, “War, So Much War” (Open Letter Books, November 2015). Translated by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent.

This novel, in English for the first time, has become one of my favorites. And not just for 2015. I’ve written a piece about it, which will likely be published this fall. Most importantly though: Read Rodoreda! I posted about her earlier, but that’s all I can say: Read. Rodoreda.