Welcome to a page organizing the literary activity of the “Lee Klein” from the Philadelphia area, the one not particularly known for everything mentioned below. (Note: I am not the “poet, essayist, and writer on the arts” with the “Lee Klein” Wikipedia entry.)
On June 16, 2024, Sagging Meniscus will publish Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel. It’s about writer reader drinker friends who gather at a bar on Bloomsday each year to talk about life and literature. It’s also about walking and reading, the gestation of literary and literal offspring, and the joys and sorrows of writing with intent to publish. Preorder here. Here’s the cover:
On July 17, 2023, Sagging Meniscus published Chaotic Good — a short novel in part about seeing a band at Madison Square Garden in late Dec 2019. Also about spending way too much time outside the South Philly Walmart. Also about untangling headphone cords. Here’s the cover:
On May 1, 2020, Sagging Meniscus published Neutral Evil ))), a short novel about a Sunn O))) concert in Philadelphia two months after Trump’s inauguration.
In October 2017, Sagging Meniscus published JRZDVLZ, a novel narrated by the Jersey Devil, the notorious cryptozoological citizen of my original home state.
In July 2016, New Directions published my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, for which I received a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award. The New Yorker’s James Wood also cited Revulsion as one of his four favorites of 2016.
In 2014, Atticus Books published The Shimmering Go-Between, the novel that finally answers the question: what do you get when you cross an autofellator with a woman with immaculate conception disorder?
In early 2014, Barrelhouse Books published Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox, a collection of unconventional rejection letters I sent between 1999 and 2014 as lone editor of Eyeshot.net, one of the first weird little lit sites.
In 2004, Better Non Sequitur published Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World, a novel of travelogues, dialogues, and narrative essays.
Otherwise, my stories, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in 3AM, Agni, Barrelhouse, Brick, The Black Warrior Review, Harper’s, Hobart, The Normal School, PEN America, Vice, and many other sites, journals, and anthologies, including The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007. I post news of new publications and whatever else here. And here’s a picture of some contributor copies received in physical print form, randomly arranged upon a table:
As of June 2019, I live with an ever-varying number of chickens, one aging tabby cat, one young daughter, and one age-appropriate wife along the northern border of Rose Valley, PA, a hilly shady enclave just outside a Midwestern New England-ish town called Media, ~15 miles west of South Philadelphia, where I lived for thirteen years near the Italian Market and the dueling cheesesteakeries. Before South Philly, I lived in Iowa City (2004 to 2006), and before that in Brooklyn (Greenpoint) (2000 to 2004) — before that Princeton for a year or so (1998 to 2000), before that hometown Lawrenceville, NJ, for a bit, before that Boston for a really long year and a half (1996 to 1997), before that Austin (1994 to 1995), before that Oberlin College (1990 to 1994), before that hometown NJ (1972 to 1990), before that NYC for a day or so after being born at Mt. Sinai Hospital.
I received accreditation for cognitive/behavioral conditioning undergone at The Lawrenceville School, Oberlin College, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Here’s what I used to look like a long time ago. Here’s what I looked like a little before the Y2K apocalypse. Here’s a picture of me and my daughter on our birthday weekend in February 2014. Here’s what I look like now.
To contact electronically: leeklein at gmail. Or try this contact form.
To send gifts: mailing address available upon request.
I’ve regularly used Goodreads since 2007 and don’t plan to delete my profile there anytime soon — I’ve found it valuable to post loose impressions immediately after finishing books and have learned from friends from all over the world who post there regularly too. I use Instagram in spurts — and I’m an inconsistent, not particularly enthusiastic user of Facebook. I have a Twitter account too (deleted first iteration in early 2018, took a couple years off, and now very much limit my exposure to it — mostly just use it to “promote” my publications and those by friends). There’s also this Linktree thing, with a few links to things not linked herein.