February 22, 2025
Posted Bohumil Hrabal page. 25% through I Was Long Dead — on track to finish in early May. (It eased up once Syvert visited Oslo.)
February 1, 2025
Finished Knausgaard’s Arendal and posted initial immediate impressions. Will add to it, including some pertinent quotations etc, some point soon. Started reading Jeg var lenge død (the sixth book in The Morning Star series) with the initial goal of posting about it in a hundred days (~May 12, if I stick to one ebook percentage/day), but now (Feb 8), a few pages into it, Joar seems like a rangier, more detailed, and therefore more difficult narrator for a novice Norwegian reader, so mid-May may be umulig.
December 26, 2025
Since the last entry on Sept 17, I posted something about books related to “rock” music and an old essay on walking and reading, with a new introduction. Also grateful for the chance to appear on the Beyond the Zero End-of-Year Special Part 1, talking with Ben about some of the books included on the annual reading rundown posted herein today. Also completed the first draft of a new novel a few days ago (but that’s enough about that). Also there’s this sweet new review of Like It Matters by the one/only Cody on Goodreads.
September 17, 2025
Thanks to Eric Bies and his newish, estimable Orange County Review of Books for posting my brief, restrained review of Sebastian Castillo’s Fresh, Green Life.
Please also note: the post on Knausgaard’s The School of Night (Nattskolen) is more or less done. I wrote it “live” on the site, so if you saw it toward the end of August it’s been reorganized and improved. Will add to it after I read the English translation in January or so.
August 14, 2025
Finished Knausgaard’s Nattskolen (The School of Night) and will most likely post a little something about it once I have chance. The English translation comes out in January 2026 — couldn’t wait for an advanced reading copy so I spent a few years learning Norwegian so I could ultimately read the originals via Norsk ebok.
July 29, 2025
Neutral Evil ))) is on sale at Amazon for $9.41. The Kindle edition is $6.99, less than a large watermelon.
July 16, 2025
Two copies of The Shimmering Go-Between are currently available on Amazon for $496.01 and $683.20. I was selling them there for $7 (including shipping) before the Beeze suspended my “store” for inactivity. But fear not! You can get a crisp print edition from me for $7 simply by visiting the Shimmering Go-Between page.
July 9, 2025
Added impressions of three audiobooks to Summer “Days Between” Reading About The Dead and Related Wonders of Nature, originally posted August 3, 2023, a few weeks after Chaotic Good came out. The page has evolved as a natural place for reviews of books (audiobooks lately) about the Dead and related topics. This ongoing sub-study of the peri-GD genre is my equivalent of beach reads or chick lit, a semi-intentional sort of escapism that brings me back to a primary teenage interest that re-resonates now that I’m essentially equivalently homebound, eliciting in me something like a feeling of being unleashed and unbounded. Continues to seem worth exploring/posting about, so I’ll continue exploring/posting about it for now.
June 18, 2025
Doing my best to “eff off for a while” to reset and restart the engines. Like It Matters first anniversary was June 16. Neutral Evil )))‘s fifth anniversary is coming up on July 17. Have some ideas for new posts that should appear soonish. Been slowly reading in multiple languages (Norwegian, Italian, French, Spanish, English) recently, including Knausgaard’s Nattskolen (to be published in English translation in January 2026 as “The School of Night,” which at first I thought was off, thought it should be “The Night School,” but then learned in the novel itself that “The School of Night” refers to a group of late 16th-century atheists including Christopher Marlowe), which I’m about 275 pages into with another 300 to go. I’ve been reading two or three pages a night on Kindle since January but have decided to dedicate the early summer to it, setting a 20 10-ebook page/day goal. This is semi-ambitious since I read slowly in Norwegian of course but I also check my comprehension against the usually pretty accurate and certainly adequate translation function on Kindle, highlighting a third of the page at time, so in a way I read it twice, first in my own (mis)understanding of the original and then in the possibly incorrect or weak automatic electronic translation. Loving it so far, probably the most enjoyable of the Morning Star series, although at this point not spooky or supernatural, other than a shadowy figure on a daguerrotype and a creepy photograph of a cat skeleton. Will write at length about it when I finish, ideally before Labor Day? And then I’ll start the next book in the series, Arendal, or Tomas Espedal‘s semi-recent Lyst (if I can find it in Norsk ebok — looks like it’s only available electronically in Danish, which I can probably handle). Otherwise recently finished Eduard Leve’s Suicide (the first book I finished in French — I tried reading Madame Bovary but put it down after 150 pages, needing something more contemporary) and thought it was incredibly well-written, as well as a really well-done 40-page essay on gentrification in Milan by Vicenzo Latronico, who I intend to read more of in Italian this summer. Next French book will probably be The Years by Annie Ernaux. But for now, for most of the summer, I’ll be focused on The School of Night, occasionally reading a translation of Goethe’s Faust in an old leatherbound Harvard Classic edition with gilt edges and a snazzy yellow ribbon. (Plan to start on German next year, and then a few years later Portuguese, Swedish, and Danish, which should be sufficient language-wise to sustain me for the next 50 years or so.)
December 19, 2024
This recorded conversation with Ben about Knausgaard’s The Third Realm, as well as other favorites of 2024, kicks off Beyond the Zero’s mega-marathon seven-volume end-o’-year extravaganza.
September 24, 2024
Posted an over-long review of The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard.
September 12, 2024
On the Beyond the Zero podcast, I talk at Ben about a seminal instance of manual manipulation’s influence on Ulysses and other nasty stuff Like It Matters-related.
June 16, 2024
Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel published! Available from Asterism, Amazon, B&N, Your Local Indie Bookstore, or Kindle.
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 excavation 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, 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 $9 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 (plus shipping) 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 $19.99 (includes shipping). Or Venmo (@leeklein). Note your address when you order. Scarcity accounts for the 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 $9 via PayPal and I’ll send one to you if you live in the US. Or for the same price plus shipping 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.