This week I received a box full of galleys from Harper. My goodness, they are beautiful.

I’ve also updated The Infinite’s page, here on the site, with the cover description and three early blurbs. And, I must say, it’s an incredibly humbling, surreal thing to receive a blurb from a writer you really admire.

The Infinite has three so far, from writers I love.

Philipp Meyer is one of the most exciting writers working today. The Son and American Rust are both modern classics. Incredible.

Joseph Boyden is not only one of my favorite writers—he’s a hero of mine, too. Please read his work. It’s been life changing for me, beginning with Three Day Road.

Andrew Malan Milward…he is the author of I Was a Revolutionary, which is one of the best books I’ve read in the last couple years. A true master of his craft.

And there’s still more to come.

 

Each April, the literary magazine Hobart rolls out a month-long baseball issue. This is one of the greatest things that happens in the world of literary publishing, or in the world in general, and I look forward to it each and every year.

Aaron Burch and the Hobart crew have been kind enough to include things I’ve written in several past baseball editions. This year marks my sixth inclusion, I think, and I’m quite proud of that. Normally I send over a short story or short essay–and sometimes I participate as part of the “expert panel” for predicting the new Major League season.

This year, however, I wrote a poem. It is my first published poem. I hope you like it.

It is called “Baseball’s Cruel Lexicon.”

It turns out a very short story of mine, called “Snapper,” was one of ten semi-finalists in the Sycamore Review’s flash fiction contest. So that’s neat.

The eponymous fish of the story is a red snapper. But here’s a photo of a mangrove snapper. I took this from a friend’s fishing boat off Grand Isle, La.