• PORTLAND: April 8, 7:30pm at Powell’s Books (with Cara Hoffman). More info.
• SEATTLE: April 9, 7pm at University Bookstore (with Stacy Levine). More info.
• MINNEAPOLIS: April 10, 7pm at Nomad World Pub (with Dessa, Lindsay Hunter, Dylan Hicks and John Jodzio). More info.
• BOSTON: April 11, 7pm at Brookline Booksmith. More info.
• AMHERST: April 13, 7:30pm at Juniper Literary Festival (with Robert Fernandez, Anna Moschovakis and Vincent Standley). More info.
• AMHERST: April 14, 1:15pm at Juniper Literary Festival (panel: “Digital Hybrids: How New Media Shape New Writing”). More info.
• CHAMPAIGN-URBANA: April 18, 4:30 pm at the Illini Union Bookstore Authors Corner. More info.
• BOWLING GREEN: April 19, 7:30 pm at the Prout Chapel for the BGSU Creative Writing Program reading series. More info.
• AKRON: April 20, 6pm at the Big Big Mess Reading Series (with Matt Bell, Imad Rahman and Marc McKee). More info.
• LOS ANGELES: April 22, 12pm at the LA Times Festival of Books (with Etgar Keret, Sara Levine, Ben Loory and Carolyn Kellogg). More info.
• SAN FRANCISCO: April 24, 7:30pm at Booksmith. More info.
• AUSTIN: April 26, 7pm at DOMY Books for the Book Lovers Reading Club. More info.
• AUSTIN: April 27, 7:30pm at the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center. More info.
• LOS ANGELES: April 29, 8pm at the Mountain Bar for Vermin on the Mount. More info.

1. I’m reading at Skylight Books in LA tomorrow (Monday) at 7:30 with my good buddy J Ryan. It’s going to be a great night. More info here.
2. Check out this interview with Catherine Lacy at BOMBLOG.
3. And a new new story, Date Night.
4. Here’s a piece I wrote for GOOD about water in L.A., Austin and Tucson. Keep an eye on GOOD for more water essays across the U.S. of America.
5. If you’re in Austin, go pick up a copy of THREATS on sale at Domy Books and then come to the Book Lovers Club on April 26. I’ll be there.
6. The LA Times Festival of Books schedule is up. Excited to do a back-to-back with Betsy Crane and Aimee Bender. The panel I’m on features Etgar Keret, Sara Levine, Ben Loory and moderation by Carolyn Kellogg, and we’re all gonna get to know the Salvatori Computer Science Center.

1. The doctor poked his head into the room and said “Do you work or do you stay home, with the kids?” and I said “I work” and he said “Okay” and I said “I work from home” and then he left but then poked his head back in and said “I didn’t mean to say that thing about kids” and I said “It’s okay.”
2. The x-ray tech told me he knows another Amelia, named Amelia Rose, but she doesn’t like her name and so makes everyone call her Mia. He said it, “Mia,” with a little nasal sound in his voice that made me feel he was in love with this other Amelia, and so I said both names were pretty, and then he said her name again and then made me take a breath in and hold still.
3. After the codeine I kind of passed out and woke to four cleaning ladies silently putting bags into a rolling can. One of them looked at me suspiciously.
4. The nurse asked me what year it was and if I had any suicidal thoughts, which struck me as over-general and then over-personal questions, respectively.
5. The man who gave me the breathing treatment put an oxygen mask on my face and then a vapor went into me, and we sat for a while and then he said “Do you know what this is?” and I said “No idea” and he said “Oh jeez, well let me explain it” and I said “I’m into it” in a way that I hoped to convey that he wouldn’t explain and we could just sit in silence while the machine hissed.

Just bronchitis, fortunately. So now I’ve quit paying lip to the idea of slowing down in favor of actually slowing down, getting flat on my back for the week, playing some video games, drinking gatorade.

I just finished Stone Arabia and enjoyed it very much. I’ll have to get a hold of Eat The Document next, though I think my next read may be Carson Mell’s new book, The Blue Bourbon Orchestra. I was pumped when my copy of Nikanor Teratologen’s book Assisted Living arrived in the mail, but it was immediately stolen by my buddy J Ryan. Is my buddy J Ryan the Hamburglar? He claims to be weakened by a cough. A likely guise!

I interviewed Bernie Wagenblast, voice of NYC transportation, for my employer.

HOW YOU LIKE ME NOW

I want to interview Amelia Grey but I’m not sure who would like to print that interview. I’d ask Amelia Grey about what it’s like to write a ton of books within a genre that doesn’t necessarily dig innovation. I need to get familiar with Amelia Grey’s canon, first. We exchanged emails a while back and she said she was too busy for an interview because she was working on a book called Fall in Love Like a Romance Writer. I understand that. I understand being busy.

Also: my fear that airport bookstores wouldn’t touch a book called THREATS is apparently unfounded, according to editor-turned-bookspy Emily Bell in O’Hare. Will I see someone reading the book on my next flight? I’m buying an extra box of diapers just in case.

IOWA CITY:

• March 6th, 7:00pm at Prairie Lights

NYC:

• March 7th, 7:00pm, Happy Endings at Joe’s Pub (with Jessica Anthony, Heidi Julavits and musical guest Kaiser Cartel)
• March 8th, 7:00pm at KGB Bar (with Alex Gilvarry, Suzzy Roche, and Joseph Salvatore

Hope to see you there!

(Here’s some love from Austin, Books Matter, Entertainment Weekly and BookPeople.)

Orders of business: I’m putting together a tour calendar. You will find it under the “Calendar” tab on this page. Also, please see the gorgeous new site header, designed by Zach Dodson.

THREATS is officially on sale Feb 28. The proper way to write THREATS is to put it in all caps, thusly: THREATS. It’s not an acronym. It’s just a word in capital letters. I decided that because Threats doesn’t look good and all the actual threats are in capital letters. (They are not acronyms, either. There are plenty of other secrets in that book to find; don’t worry about acronyms anymore.) The book has gotten very nice pre-publication reviews from San Diego CityBeat, Untoward, Kirkus, etc. Booklist said, “her first novel proves she has stamina for the long form.” Publishers Weekly said, “This is an innovative debut novel featuring a most unreliable (and compelling) narrator.” So ends my pre-publication paragraph. Well, one more thing: I’ve been living with and working on this book for years and I hope you like it.

Los Angeles is teeming with creative energy. Everyone is working on something, thinking about working on something, showing me what they’re working on. I feel annoyed that I have to do things like eat and buy band-aids and get quarters for laundry when I could be working, working, working. I’m overdue calling my parents. I grind my teeth in my sleep. I’m eating a lot of things I find in trees. The cats and I posse up and roam the streets at night. My fingernails have sharpened to killer points. My eyes are turning orange.

There might be some wonderful piece of writing latent in that newspaper item I saw the other day about the Korean fellow who fell off the ship and then grabbed onto a giant sea turtle and rode him for several days before he was picked up. That is wonderful to me. What must that man have felt? What must the turtle have felt? What must they have felt together?