fiction

Adjunctivitis
Longtime KtB contributor Gordon Haber has a new novella just published as an Amazon Kindle Single. It’s exciting… a romantic comedy about a young writer working as a teacher on the fringes of Hollywood who finally feels fortune within his grasp after a mysterious encounter… it’s got the best title ever: Adjunctivitis. …and it’s only…

Dear Nancy
People get cancer; mothers lose sons in war; babies die; but here she is, heartbroken because I sexted you, Nancy, a middle-aged hippie lady who writes bad slam poetry.

For Every Life Saved
The last Yiddish writer. A story from the newest book to come out of KtB, Sweet Heaven When I Die.

“The famous, as we know, are nuts.”
Read “moving” and can’t get enough of Eileen Myles? Wanna know how to honor a dead poet and how to get hate mail that persists for a quarter century? (HINT: You can do both at once!) Yup, that’s the rockstar book trailer for Inferno (a poet’s novel), which is available only from OR Books, the…

John the Baptizer’s Second Act
The other day I received an unusual publicity letter from Alane Mason, a senior editor at W.W. Norton, enclosed with a copy of John the Baptizer, a recent novel by Brooks Hansen. “It was a long hard summer for books,” Alane wrote, and in publishing we’re all used to moving on to the next in…

Essential Stories
I like to think of Blaise Pascal, though fiction didn’t much concern him, when trying to understand why fiction has more and more been reduced to details of quotidian life as against a vision of universal life, of essential life. Contemporary fiction seems to be locked in nothing but details, though at one time in…

J.G. Ballard’s Pre-Posthumous Memoir
KtB contributor (Believer, Beware division) Mark Dery reviews the great J.G. Ballard’s latest and possibly last book, a “pre-posthumous memoir” titled Miracles of Life, for L.A. Weekly. “In response to my inquiry about who would be bringing out Miracles of Life in the States, and when,” writes Mark in a chronicle of his correspondence with…