Did you know you can preorder my book?
You should go preorder my book.
"An intimate year-in-poems capturing the joy and dread of getting older, growing a family, the world’s news … and the miracles—no bigger than a child’s hand—that keep us going."
www.publishinggenius.com/catalog/apri...
In my experience the process of putting work into the world is full of frustrations, but imagine waking up to this: such a great pleasure to be read so generously by a writer I've read so admiringly for so long. so. Wildly grateful!
iambic tetrameter ass stick
Full book cover spread in a soft mauve background with faint pencil drawings across the surface. On the front cover, a drawing shows two classical faces in profile and close together. Text at the bottom right reads: An Absence of Sea Christina Tudor-Sideri A block of text on the back cover reads: at times oneiric confession at times philosophical contemplation in epistolary form An Absence of Sea unfolds as a breathless letter to the other a lover a double the sea time itself tracing the shadowed terrain where self meets its echo where longing takes on form where thought becomes touch moving through the quiet of solitude it follows the fragile carnal continuity of existence a gesture of return where the impossible is the only home that holds us a poetics of knowing and being known through the gaze through touch through the echo of another Below that the ISBN and: Cover detail from Orpheus and Eurydice in Hades, Pietro Fancelli
Forthcoming on April 16—An Absence of Sea—a letter across time woven from dreams, intimacies, lived fragments, and remembered voices, where the self meets its double and those who echo within it. www.erratumpress.com/an-absence-o...
My gratitude to @ansgarallen.bsky.social @erratumpress.bsky.social
Thanks, Matt!!
It's pub day for my new novel, The Tavern at the End of History. When writing I imagined it like The Magic Mountain, but shorter & with Jews. (& also angels, a dybbuk, & stolen art). Looking forward to sharing it with you all!
One of my favorite writers comparing me to one of my favorite writers (- wallpaper descriptions). I'm delighted!
"She said, hwaet?"
I've been out of work since October so this could not have come at a worse financial time for my ability to help my family. So, I really really appreciate everyone who has donated or shared this!
I wasn't a fan of some of his later work, but respected how he seemed to keep doing what he wanted to do. I'll miss knowing he's in the world, making his own way.
Sallis provided a model for an artist’s life lived on its own uncompromising terms— the crime novels found homes at bigger houses but he also pub'd stories, novels, essays w/ tiny presses, poetry at U-Presses., a translation of a Queneau novel with Dalkey, a packet of French& Russian poems...8/
when I Sallis he was guest editing a journal issue, I sent him a story (I wrote at 19 in Joanna Scott’s class @ UR) and got my first fiction acceptance. My 2nd was at another journal he published in often & my story’s title (“After the Insects Came”) & tone was Sallis fanfiction. 7/
When I started submitting work as a senior in college I sent my early poems and stories to the often small and genre-adjacent journals where Sallis published. The 1st poem I published was at a journal that published him ( back when the envelope carrying the acceptance also came with a check); 6/
Echoing Beckett Sallis' first crime novel, The Long-Legged Fly ends 'I have only to end it now by writing: I went back into the house and wrote. It is midnight. The rain beats at the window.
It is not midnight. It is not raining.' 5/
All six books make up one strange recursive arc: # 3 & 5 are mirror images of one another, # 4, The Eye of the Cricket, is a heartbreaking, Joycean masterpiece. All 6 move back and forth covering/recovering/reminting the same territory. 4/
Sallis was not good w/ dialogue, was terrible w/ violence, & uninterested in plot—but they are a stunning engagement w/ memory, voice, literary criticism, longing, regret, pastiche, & formal innovation. 3/
& I discovered Sallis, while in college, through his remarkable series of crime novels featuring the detective/novelist/French professor, Lew Griffin. One of the amazing things about these books is that they are not great crime stories—2/
Sorry to see that James Sallis has died. Sallis was a formative writer for me & modeled an outlaw career, as he phrased it, that was inspiring in its freedom. He’s best known for his tight little crime novel, Drive, that later became an even better movie—1/
My novel, The Tavern at the End of History, comes out next week. In the meantime there's another excerpt (about bad curators, worse museums and who actually lives in Maine) up as one of Literary Hub's daily fiction offerings. lithub.com/title/
How terrible & beautiful not to know ourselves:
Birthday dram
On the eve of MLA, a model of collegiality worth considering. (From
@keironpim.bsky.social 's stunning bio of Joseph Roth) "Anyone who insulted them would be challenged to a duel...unscarred cheeks and a nose without a nick in it were unworthy of an academic in the genuine German tradition."
Chag Sameach
As classic a yule tradition as dim sum..
Ah, WD, my confused affection for Canadians plays a larger part of my (yet unpublished) novel Sleepwalkers of the North Atlantic where my depiction of the people of the north is characterized, surely, by restraint, accuracy:
Important not to even stock other books.
I'm a huge fan of Angela Woodward. More people need to read her strange, hilarious sui generis work. AFTERLIFE is my most anticipated book of the spring...
Can't wait to hear the trolling re relative stress and caesurae in dactylic hexameter...
I reviewed Gabriele Tergit's THE EFFINGERS, a mighty and brilliant and extremely readable book out now in English thanks to a cracking translation by Sophie Duvernoy >>> www.theguardian.com/books/2025/d...
