Someone’s Dead
I’m deep into a re-read of Robertson Davies’s extraordinary Fifth Business (1970), which in its own sly way is a bit of a detective story: someone’s dead, someone’s been killed, and the dead person in question is the delightfully (self-)named Boy Staunton, and coiled around the death there’s this slow, bubbling web of memory and oddball characters, at the edges, a meditation on myth and magic and Canadian life. I’m making this short, punchy novel sound way heavier than it is. It’s just really fun, and I’m glad to be deep in Davies—and surprised to see how sturdy the mystery genre is, how capacious—like, capacious enough for me to say that Davies wrote a mystery even if Davies himself may not agree.
But what can he say? Davies, like Boy Staunton, is no longer with us. So Fifth Business is a detective novel.
I’ve been deep into the comforts of detective fiction and noir and everything in-between for the last two or three years (alongside all kinds of other stuff, of course), and it struck me that my all-time favorite new books of 2025 were not just mystery and detective-adjacent—they were also independently published: Sara Gran’s Little Mysteries and Deborah Shapiro’s Watching the Detective.
I drew this! Love these covers.
And I don’t mean, like, published by an indie press, even if they weren’t exactly self-published. They were published by authors running their own presses. Sara Gran runs Dreamland Books. Deborah Shapiro runs B-Side Editions. They do beautiful stuff. You should check them out.
Shapiro’s Watching the Detective is this gorgeous memoir/cultural-exploration that coils around the detective show Columbo (1) and excavates all kinds of fascinating cultural history around it: the clothes, the cars, the particular paint-jobs on the cars, the cultural and material conditions around it, fathers and daughters. All of that plus startling, offhand insights into Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, set design, and the grimy particularities and peculiarities of the 1970s. I could go on. I won’t. Buy the book, OK?
The same goes for Gran’s Little Mysteries: nine beautifully written, off-kilter mysteries—one a paragraph long, two of them long, hilarious, dark riffs on Carolyn Keene(2)’s house-style for the Nancy Drew series. If you’re a fan of Gran’s Claire deWitt(3), she’s in there. She’s still the world’s greatest detective. She’s still deeply messed up.
What distinguishes these two extraordinary books, for me, is how gorgeously they braid readerly expectations (“I love Columbo! I want to know more about Columbo” & “I love mysteries! I want to see someone figure out who killed X!”) with some bonkers stylistic high-jinks (Gran’s Nancy Drew parodies and general celebration of bad behavior! Shapiro’s unlikely personal and cultural linkages!). But also? There’s a universe where both of these writers could have written and published way more boring versions of these books through a traditional press, and I’m so glad they didn’t. I don’t want to make a grand statement about the Publishing Industry Today, but at the very least I’ll say that it’s interesting, for me, that even in the indiest of indie situation we’re still navigating one of Dan Sinykin’s insights in Big Fiction—that literary forms continue to embrace and mess with genre elements in really cool ways, for all sorts of reasons that tangle market expectations with literary sensibilities. And it does strike me as odd that these are the books that lingered and haunted me from last year. It wasn’t the big press ones. It was these two delightful weirdos.
And there’s weight and substance to the weirdos. There always is.
Martin Scorcese had this great insight on Westerns in the 1950s, that as long as you had a couple of shootouts you could sneak whatever formal and cultural stuff you wanted into your movie, and so you had Budd Boetticher’s The Tall T as a commentary on McCarthyism. But also, Boetticher’s films were as offbeat and stylized as Gran and Shapiro’s novels.
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I’m also reading Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (1951), where a detective stuck in a hospital bed solves a major Richard III murder mystery, and Seichō Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express (1958), a mystery so spare and brilliant plotted and carefully calculated, and written so cleanly that I’m kind of blown away by how this particular genre is the best way to understand the strictures and expectations of narrative. But also how we’re willing to pretty much go anywhere as long as we have an author who understands what we’re coming in for, and why, and how to mess with our expectations in ways that feel productive and smart and fresh.
We just need to make sure someone’s dead and then the whole thing is alive.
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(1) The closest I’ve seen someone come to this is Ander Monson’s Predator, where Monson watches the movie Predator 146 times (more since then, too) and excavates all sorts of amazing stuff on masculinity, the 1980s, school shootings and gun control, video games and the portrayal of violence. Check it out: It’s so good!
(2) Yes! I know Carolyn Keene is not a real person--just the pseudonym for all the writers that collectively wrote the Nancy Drew mysteries. She’s still kind of real in my heart, as I imagine she must be for anyone who read the books when they were kids.
(3) I adore Claire deWitt! But my entry point into Sara Gran was her short horror novel Come Closer, which is not just genuinely freaking scary but also, in the most messed up way, deadpan funny and makes the case for why being possessed by a demon may actually be kind of fun and liberating.
On Benvenuto Cellini, Tech-Bro Patronage, and AI
I’ve been reading and loving the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, which is full of 16th-century life and a real window into what it was like to be a Renaissance artist. Benvenuto spends a LOT of his time chasing patrons for payments owed, and spends the rest of his time stabbing folk for offenses real and imagined, so basically nothing’s changed (except for maybe less stabbing).
I was most struck by how fraught the patron relationship was—how every wealthy patron, from popes on down, commissioned art, praised the artist, and then almost immediately resented the person they praised: like, there’s a real sense of begrudging the artist for having the talent and craft to make art, and this ridiculous conviction (on the part of 16th-century tech-bro oligarchs) that the “real” artist is the patron & the person making the art is just a tool—and instrument—to the patron.
Like, here’s the king of France chiding Benvenuto: “There is one most important matter, Benvenuto, which men of your sort, though full of talent, ought always to bear in mind; it is that you cannot bring your great gifts to light by your own strength alone; you show your greatness only through the opportunities we give you. Now you ought to be a little more submissive, not so arrogant and headstrong.”
This moneyed entitlement also feels super familiar, from how streaming has devalued Writers’ Rooms to how AI has hoovered up people’s art and turned it into slop to how tech companies try so hard, and in so many ways, to remove the quirks and weirdness of individuals and their aesthetic disposition and just turn every platform into these smooth, frictionless, algorithmically-driven consumable loops—nothing in the tech-bro view of the world is particularly original, it’s all a kind of a bad copy, a boring replica, because they don’t originate work. They commission it. And then they insist on commissioning bits that replicate stuff that was replicated to begin with. It’s one of the major reasons why AI-generated prose & art is so freaking boring. It was commissioned by boring people too boring to know their own limitations, and it was built on the labor and vision of artists who they actively resent.
OK, one last bit: I picked up the Cellini autobiography because of Muriel Spark’s MEMENTO MORI, a hilarious novel about a bunch of moneyed nincompoops all working on their autobiographies to preserve their brilliance for posterity. Their project is, in every regard, a failure. They’re not brilliant, they can’t write, and no amount of money saves them from their themselves.
A New Story in The Sunday Morning Transport!
Hi! I wrote a short story that is very much its own thing and a love letter to (1) John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio,” (2) NPR, and (3) Chicago. Here’s the first line, with the rest over at The Sunday Morning Transport:
The husband took a pocket radio to bed every night because he fell asleep much earlier than his wife and he woke up much earlier, often at five a.m. but earlier sometimes, and sometimes he didn’t sleep much at all. But—pre-radio—if he got out of bed he invariably woke her up, and if he stayed in bed he fidgeted and woke her up in a gradual, more unintentionally insidious and crazy-making way, so he found this solution, a yellow Sangean, defiantly analog, that he would turn on, earbud in one ear, so he could listen to whatever tragedies had befallen the world in his half-sleep.
This & Last Week’s Lunch Bag Doodles
I’ve been posting an awful lot of stuff on social media, and I’m at the point, once again, of not knowing entirely why we all decided that this mode of interaction was the best way to share what we do, what we think, how we feel, with others. I mean, I get why we do it. And I don’t think I’ll be giving it up any time soon. But I’m also going to try to come back here and share as well.
I’ve been drawing progressively more elaborate doodles on my son’s lunch bags. I do it as a bit of an exercise and a practice, and also as a reward for having done the writing I meant to do. I also do it for him (he’s in fifth grade, so I have a feeling that this will be the last year of doodles).
Here are a few from this week and last week:
Recent Bits
I’ve been in a writing cave for most of the year and will continue to inhabit the cave for a few more months, but I’m also doing some events (posted some already, will post a few more presently) and doodling (representative doodle of a representative commuter below)—I continue to post on social media super frequently, so you’re welcome to keep up over there if you want more content, and if you’re ok w/ the content being mostly doodles and the occasional cat.
My Jackleg Acquisitions
Late last year I wrote a column on how, exactly, I ended up as a fiction editor for Jackleg Press, and this year I’m enormously proud to celebrate the books coming out of that process. I love them all. These are extraordinary story collections. Please buy yourself a copy & ask your local & university library to buy copies for their collections. It’s been an honor to work with these writers and I’m so excited for what’s coming next.
A couple of quick words on what’s already out there & what’s coming soon:
Joachim Glage’s The Devil’s Library: Stories about books. Borgesian and delightful and labyrinthine. (Out now! Buy!)
Kathryn Kruse’s To Receive My Services You Must Be Dying and Alone: Stories about gig-work & death & estrangement. Beautiful and ingeniously constructed. (Out now! Buy!)
Gemini Wahhaj’s Katy Family: Stories about Bangladeshi immigrants and the Houston suburbs. This one is packed with life and humor and sharply observed family and class dynamics. (Available for pre-order! Please pre-order!)
Michael Chin’s This Year’s Ghost: Stories about the fantastical and the deep bonds we form just by being here, together, in this world. Truly, deeply, absorbingly strange and weird even if you don’t factor in the clown college. But there’s definitely a clown college. (Available for pre-order! Please pre-order!)
Watch soon for more titles! I’m super excited that we get to put out Chloe Clark’s latest collection & Mark Baumgartner’s debut collection. I’m a huge fan of both of these authors, and I am sure you’ll love their work.
February events!
Hi! The events page is updated, and the doodle below has also been updated with everything I’m doing this February (no pressure I’m expecting you at all of these events):
Two Pieces on the DNC for The Believer
I wrote two pieces on the DNC marches for The Believer:
New story in freaking Ploughshares!
A little more on this story later, but for now just now that I’m over the freaking moon to have a new story out in the Summer 2024 issue of Ploughshares, guest edited by the amazing Rebecca Makkai.
The story is called “My Refugee.” It’s a weird one, and it’s deeply personal, and I’ve got loads more I’d love to say about it but I’ll just let the story say what it wants to say, however it wants to say it.
There are amazing writers in the issue & also me, and you should expect a bunch of obnoxious posts from over here about being in this journal—it truly is a dream journal & also one that has informed my whole writing life—-possibly until you bring up the sketchy obnoxious writer character in Stephen King’s Under the Dome who brought up being in Ploughshares every other page.
Anyway I’m in Ploughshares. You can buy a physical or a digital copy of the issue over here. A little taste of the story + the gorgeous cover follow below.
A new story in The Sunday Morning Transport!
My story "Lesser Demons of the North Shore" is up over at The Sunday Morning Transport! I love this publication: you get one story every Sunday if you subscribe—-so four stories total—-or one free story a month if you go with the unpaid option. You have to pay for “Lesser Demons”!
Or you can use this link for a free 60-day subscription! You should 100% subscribe to The Sunday Morning Transport though—-it’s got a heck of an astounding archive already, a new story every Sunday (though only one* so far involving hamsters and demons and Chicago’s north shore).
*this one. My story.
First paragraph:
Here’s the story that should have served as a warning: Four years before we moved to the suburbs, my wife, Clemencia, worked at an after-school nonprofit in Bucktown, and one of the volunteers she supervised, Staci, drove from Winnetka to help out. Our commute was much easier than Staci’s, just a hop on the El from our Pilsen apartment. Clemencia said she didn’t really know Winnetka, didn’t really know about the North Shore. Staci said she hadn’t really known about it either. She’d married into the suburbs. Staci had been an actor. She worked at the Goodman and Steppenwolf and kept at it after she’d met her lawyer boyfriend and moved. Don’t move, Staci told her. You’ll think, Oh, it’s Chicago with a yard, but it is not Chicago with a yard. The North Shore isn’t Chicago. She said, in our neighborhood there’s this woman, she’s in her sixties, she has the blowout, the fur coat—the whole North Shore thing.
The rest is over here.
New story in The Chicago Quarterly Review!!!
I’ve been a fan of The Chicago Quarterly Review for ages, and it is a super special thrill to have a story in their magazine. Also? It’s a super Chicago story, about Chicago’s never-ending March gloom, and it’s the first ever thing I’ve ever both written and illustrated. You can buy the issue here. You can take a look at the first page & also find proof of Chicago’s March weirdness below. Big thanks to editors S. Afzal Haider & Elizabeth McKenzie.
Everything I'm Doing at AWP & All the Things I'm Not Doing But Looking Forward to Attending
Hi! Here is everything I’m doing at AWP in a single index card, but below that are additional details + also some shameless pleas to come see me + (below that) two additional readings that I’ll definitely be going to, that I’d love to see you at too:
On Thursday Feb. 8 from 10am-11am I’ll be at the University of Arizona Press booth (821) signing copies of Extended Stay. That’s booth 821! If this is at all an incentive, just know that (1) I’ll be so happy and surprised that you made it over there for a novel that has been out already for a little over a year but also (2) I’ll be 100% happy to sign the book and doodle anything you like on the book proper (if you like) and also do a custom Post-it drawing right on the spot for you. You can also literally just stop by and say hi and not buy a book!
On Friday Feb. 9 from 5pm-6:30pm, I’ll be part of this offsite reading featuring University of Illinois and Northwestern alumni and faculty! It’ll happen at the Strange Days Brewing Co. (318 Oak St). I’m reading a very short excerpt from a new thing, and I get to read alongside Mary Biddinger, Simone Muench, Jackie K. White, Christine Sneed, Beth McDermott, Jeremy T. Wilson, Faisal Mohyuddin, and Rebecca Morgan Frank.
Finally, on Saturday Feb. 10 from 10:35am-11:50am, I’ll be doing a panel on everything we had to unlearn when working on second books, alongside Julie Iromuanya, Jimin Han, and Ted Wheeler! Here’s the link to the official page! And here’s the description: We want to believe that writing is cumulative—that we benefit from habit and repetition—and it’s true, the more we write, the more we know about writing. But what works on one project might not translate to the next. Much of the work we need to do is unlearning, a willingness to go back to not knowing, so we can explore the possibilities of not being fully sure of ourselves. In this panel, four novelists discuss their unlearning and what they left behind as they embarked on new projects.
Room 2502A, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2
Saturday, February 10, 2024
10:35 am to 11:50 am
THE TWO OFF-SITE EVENTS I’M SUPER EXCITED ABOUT!
I feel tremendously lucky to be an editor for Jackleg Press, and they’ll have a reading with Another Chicago Magazine on Thursday Feb. 8 from 12pm-2pm. The info is here! And here it is as a screencap:
And I’ve been lucky to teach for the SPS Northwestern creative writing program, and some of my favorite students and faculty are going to be reading! And I’m so excited to see them. I’ve pasted the info below:
NU Graduate and Faculty Reading at AWP: Kansas City Edition
presented by the MFA in Prose and Poetry and MA in Writing Programs at SPS
Date: Thursday, February 8
Doors: 5:30pm
Program: 6pm
Location: HiTides Coffee (519 E. 18th – Kansas City, MO)
Northwestern University's MA in Writing & MFA in Prose and Poetry Programs will host a special Graduate and Faculty Reading in connection with this year’s Association for Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Kansas City, MO. The reading will feature current faculty Paula Carter and Faisal Mohyuddin, and alumni Audrey Fierberg, Holly Stovall, and Ankur Thakkar. Faculty Director Christine Sneed will host and emcee. Snacks and mingling begin at 5:30pm. Program begins at 6pm. Admission is free and open to the public, and no registration is required.
SO MANY EVENTS!
Hi! I have so many events coming up! I’ll talk about them a lil later but for now a lot of them are posted over on the events page!
Are You Writing a Novel?
I'm teaching Speculative-Novel-in-a-Year for StoryStudio in 2024. I’ve been thinking long & hard about the specific challenges in writing speculative novels. If you're writing anything that's science-fiction, horror, or fantasy---or just adjacent to it in some way---I'd love to have you in this class. Feel free to post widely and share with anyone who might be interested! Registration closes November 27.
Esther In Nowa Fantastyka!
My story “Esther (1855),” originally published in NIGHTMARE, is now in a Polish translation for this month’s Nowa Fantastyka. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love the cover. Just imagine me making the exact same face as the little girl or at least one of the more cheerful werebeasts.
CLOTHESHORSE: Percival Everett's Dr. No
Clotheshorse is a super occasional* series highlighting menswear in fiction. Here’s a passage from Percival Everett’s smart, goofy, goofy-smart Dr. No:
He was well-dressed. In my memory of him in the coffe shop he was not quite disheveled, but he was not a natty dresser. Now here he was, tailored iron-gray suit, thin maroon tie, a maroon handkerchief peeking out from his breast pocket. His oxblood wing tips gleamed. He looked like a supervillain or, worse, an upper-crust English spy, an openly promiscuous and functionally alcoholic heterosexual with an on-and-off-again messiah complex. It was the shoes, the way they were tied. (p. 37)
* Last time I posted on it was like, 2015. It’s been a while. You can check out the other entries here.
Here’s Everett’s author photo on the back of the Dr. No paperback, it’s easily my favorite author photo in recent years:
More Extended Stay Bits
Extended Stay keeps chugging along! Here are some cool bits below this really cool spread of red-and-black covers.
Audio rights for the novel were acquired a few months ago, and the audiobook will be released in November. I’m a new but ardent convert to audiobooks, and cannot recommend Libby enough if you have a library card and want to experience an awesome novel while washing dishes or folding laundry. (I’m currently blown away by Zadie Smith’s commitment to doing all the voices and singing in The Fraud.)
I’m doing a few more events! Check out the Events page for more detailed info but I’m excited for this Friday 13th Horror Authors Night with some of my favorite Chicago folk who write dark stuff.
I’m super grateful to bookstagrammers like Ashley (aka spookishmommy) and Nina (aka the_wandering_reader/) for their continued support of the novel. I’ve embedded my two faves below but you should just follow them for all their awesome recommendations. Like, if you have not read Monstrilio? Do! So good! So sad! And I’ve got Ashley to thank for that one. OK: two awesome reels from Ashley and Nina, then more stuff:
It’s Latinx heritage month and it’s basically October! Extended Stay has popped up in some cool places, like this Goodreads list (54 New Books to Discover This Hispanic Heritage Month) and this Chicago Public Library list, plus some others.
I’m teaching a year-long class in 2024 for StoryStudio: Speculative Novel in a Year. Applications open October 17. Apply!
I am on Instagram, still! Mostly doodling on lunch bags. I am also on Threads. I am no longer on the other social media places. If you’re on either, follow! Or not!
Stewie & Brian Show Up in Anthony Trollope
Sort of! What I mean is that Anthony Trollope does the Family Guy How’s-that-novel-coming? bit in 1867’s The Last Chronicle of Barset (the relevant Stewie & Brian clip follows the excerpt below, but here’s the link just in case that’s easier.):
"You are just like some of those men who for years past have been going to write a book on some new subject. The intention has been sincere at first, and it never altogether dies away. But the would-be author, though he still talks of his work, knows that it will never be executed, and is very patient under the disappointment. All enthusiasm about the thing is gone, but he is still known as the man who is going to do it some day. You are the man who means to marry Miss Dale in five, ten, or twenty years' time."
Some Updates!
Hi! A bunch of stuff happened. Like,
I’m doing a reading on July 6 at the Jose Saramago Foundation, in Lisbon. (I’m part of this year’s Disquiet program.) If you’re in Lisbon, say hi!
Extended Stay showed up in this new CrimeReads list of Latinx Horror and Crime to check out in 2023.
I guest-edited this beautiful West Branch feature and got to introduce three amazing stories by three of my favorite emerging writers: Matthew Lloyd Richardson, Michelle go-un Lee, and Mike Prask.
Gavin Grant asked me 3 questions for the Small Beer Press blog.
Lina Chern included Extended Stay in a CrimeReads article about the joy of the bad decision! (In narratives!)
The New York Public Library included Extended Stay in a list of novels scarier than Scream VI!
I drew the katydid that posed for the cover of Steely Dan’s Katy Lied album (the katydid was actually a huge fan of the album)
