April 12, 2024
Boy howdy! There’s a cover and a pre-order link for Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel, scheduled to publish June 16.
July 17, 2023
Chaotic Good published! Long podcast interview on Beyond the Zero. Good review. Publishers Weekly review.
February 3, 2023
There’s a cover for Chaotic Good, scheduled for publication by Sagging Meniscus on July 17.
December 31, 2021
Haven’t bothered to update this in a bit, huh? So what’s been going on? How’s the pandemic been? This fall I finished a final draft of Chaotic Good, the sequel/complementary novel to Neutral Evil ))) — I started writing it two years ago tomorrow (January 1, 2020) and am grateful that Sagging Meniscus has agreed to publish it (early 2023, most likely). There’s also a short translation that’s been accepted by a great small press but I won’t say anything more about it because we’re having trouble securing the rights. Otherwise, I’ve been working on a fresh edit of what was originally a 400+-page single-paragraph novel about a handful of male writer friends sitting in a big booth at a bar on Bloomsday. It’s one of two larger novel manuscripts I worked on in the first half of the twenty teens that are still in editorial development. The 2022 resolution is to complete solid reworked drafts of both manuscripts and then commence excacation of a mountainous Visionary Meganovel (the working title but probably not the final title) over the next decade or so. We’ll see how it goes. All praise be to all ye with a sliver of a glimmer of interest in my humble activities herein. Truly appreciated.
April 9, 2020
“Zeus Kinker” appeared in the first online issue of Sortes. Thanks to Jeremy Tennebaum for the invitation to contribute to the inaugural issue.
December 2, 2019
Thankful to announce my first published story (The Black Opal Ring) in something like six years in Issue 13 of Miracle Monocle, lit magazine from the University of Louisville.
October 5, 2019
In March 2020, Sagging Meniscus will publish Neutral Evil ))), a short novel about a Sunn O))) concert in Philadelphia two months after Trump’s inauguration (also about anxiety, edibles, solitude, talent, self-realization, responsibility, dry ice, fog, Seasons 52, Guitar Center, effect pedals, improvising, paying attention, rearing children, raising fists, anticipating mass shootings, deleting Twitter, assassinating the president, public flatulence, private resistance, moral alignment, and the search for pure tone). More to come as publication approaches.
August 11, 2019
New JRZDVLZ paperbacks are now available on Amazon for $5.
February 7, 2019
Please help me move copies of my novel The Shimmering Go-Between, which Atticus Books published in 2014, from my basement to your bookshelf. Send $4 via PayPal or Venmo (@leeklein) to cover postage + fees and I’ll send one to you if you live in the US. Or for the same price (one red cent + typical $3.99 in fees etc) you can now acquire a copy via Amazon.
September 26, 2018
I have some perfect/new-ish copies of Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World from my private stock available for $9.99 (includes $2.67 shipping and PayPal fees). Or Venmo (@leeklein). Scarcity accounts for the somewhat elevated price.
September 18, 2018
Today I decided to start posting impressions of books I like. More later.
February 11, 2018
The Eagles won the Super Bowl last week. I should be able to resume literary activities after several sleep-disturbed days consuming too many football-related articles and videos. A dedicated fan since I was five or six (oh how I cried when they lost in 1980), I’m very thankful I finally got to experience a Super Bowl victory and sprint the four blocks to Broad Street straight up Dickinson Street in South Philly, a champagne bottle held high.
What else? I deleted my Twitter in December in an effort to reduce exposure to external idiocies and inconsequentialities. Maybe I’ll start “blogging” a little here, mainly about reading and writing, to distract myself from new writing? Maybe I’ll start posting some reviews originally posted to Goodreads? This is a space I can use if I want. No one will read it. But as Jason Kelce sang: “We’re from Philly, fuckin’ Philly, no one likes us, we don’t care.”
Here’s a recent pic of me and my daughter:
October 1, 2017
Buy via Small Press Distribution, IndieBound, and Amazon.
Published by Sagging Meniscus Press, October 1, 2017.
JRZDVLZ is the autobiography of a sympathetic beast on a centuries-spanning quest for redemption. Based on long-suffering legend and historical fact, it’s about the sacrifice, civility, endurance, and humility required to transform a monster into a man.
I’m thrilled, psyched, and also delighted to announce the availability of a novel I’ve worked on inconsistently since 2006 (that’s 11 years, FYI).
Please allow me to introduce the Jersey Devil, a cryptozoological beast as well-known in New Jersey as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. The legend dates back to a few decades before the American Revolution. The thirteenth son of the Leeds family transformed at birth into a hideous monster — a composite of various animals, with the snout of a dog, horns of a ram, the wings of a bat, the torso of a kangaroo, the tail of a rat, the legs of a heron, and the hooves of a donkey — devoured his mother and siblings, and commenced three centuries of haunting the Pine Barrens (an enormous and naturally kind of spooky evergreen forest that covers most of southern New Jersey).
We waited until October to publish because, re-reading it last year as the days became darker and colder, it seemed like the perfect time to unleash it. We hope you love this weird beast of a book and help us elevate the Jersey Devil’s profile among his more famous Northwestern and Scottish cryptozoological relatives. We’re grateful for anything you can do to spread the word among your beastly and beautiful composite of friends networked in a social manner online.
Buy now from Small Press Distribution, IndieBound, and Amazon.
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July 23, 2017
I now possess a couple boxes filled with my novel The Shimmering Go-Between, which the dearly departed Atticus Books published in 2014. Send $4 via PayPal and I’ll send one to you if you live in the US. Or for the same price you can acquire a copy via Amazon.
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January 6, 2017
Reading in bed on the last morning of 2016, recovering from pneumonia (love you, antibiotics), it was a sweet surprise to take a break from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves to check my phone and see that The New Yorker’s James Wood cited Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (which I translated from the Spanish) as one of his four faves of 2016. A fine way to end the year.
The image above is from Granada, Nicaragua when I was traveling in Central America in the fall of 1995. I’m wearing a five-cent “Ropa Americana” T-shirt that said “Immaculate Conception Crusaders” on the left breast and #37 on the back. The very light, dyed cotton pants did not protect from the kitty’s claws.