New books, new and old music, and EPOCH
Preorder an anthology, a novel, and a cassette tape, and subscribe to Cornell's 76-year-old literary magazine
Dear friends—
Some of you might recall my 2020 discovery, at Ithaca’s legendary Friends of the Library sale, of some unusual “psychonarrative” recordings created in Trumansburg, New York in the 1970s by a disgraced psychologist, Noving Jumand, musically accompanied by former employees of the Moog synthesizer company and funded by a loose collective of nudist equestrian wiccans. No? Well, now is your chance to refresh your memory; these recordings are being reissued as a limited-edition cassette tape, poster, and digital download by UK experimental record label Difficult Art and Music. Click the link to preorder; the recordings will be released on August 25.
Also, since you last heard from me, I produced a new collection of my own music, which you may buy or stream now; Bambience is an album of electronic tunes for small children, specifically my own small child, whom I also have produced since you last heard from me. These gentle synthetic excursions, inspired in part by David Chesworth’s 50 Synthesizer Greats and Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby, are just catchy enough to stick in your mind, but not so catchy you can’t fall asleep to them. The delightful cover is by my friend Eli Chartkoff.
Critical Hits and Hard Girls
At the height of the pandemic, my literary publisher, Graywolf Press, held occasional Zoom meetings for their authors, to reëstablish the sense of community that readings and conferences had used to provide. A few of us—inlcluding me and Carmen Maria Machado, author of the memoir In the Dream House—liked to show up early and talk about the video games we’d been playing. Most of the Graywolf staff weren’t gamers, but one of them got the idea that it would be fun put out an anthology of literary writing on the subject. “You should totally do that” was our half-joking reply.
A month later, “Actually, you should do that” was Graywolf’s entirely earnest rejoinder to Carmen and me. Along with our in-house editor, Yuka Igarashi, we solicited new work from a couple dozen writer-gamers and complied what I think is an extraordinary collection, Critical Hits, featuring Hanif Abdurraqib, Elissa Washuta, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Jamil Jan Kochai, Ander Monson, Charlie Jane Anders, Alexander Chee, Larissa Pham, and many others. It’s coming out in November, and you can preorder it now.
In addition, I’ve decided to inaugurate a new subcareer in crime writing with Hard Girls, the first novel in what I hope will be a series featuring twin sisters Jane and Lila Pool. Here’s the flap copy:
Jane Pool likes her safe, suburban existence just fine. She has a house, a family, (an infuriating mother-in-law,) and a quiet-if-unfulfilling administrative job at the local college. Everything is wonderfully, numbingly normal. Yet Jane remains haunted by her past: her mercurial, absent mother, her parents’ secrets, and the act of violence that transformed her life. When her estranged twin, Lila, makes contact, claiming to know where their mother is and why she left all those years ago, Jane agrees to join her, desperate for answers and the chance to reconnect with the only person who really knew her true self. Yet as the hunt becomes treacherous, and pulls the two women to the earth’s distant corners, they find themselves up against their mother’s subterfuge and the darkness that always stalked their family. Now Jane stands to lose the life she’s made for the one that has been impossible to escape.
Set in both the Pool family’s past and their present, and melding elements of a chase novel, an espionage thriller, and domestic suspense, Hard Girls is an utterly distinctive pastiche—propulsive, mysterious, cracked, intelligent, and unexpected at every turn.
This one’s coming in February, and it’s also available for preorder now. I’ll send out updates when the two books are published, including details about in-person events. Carmen and I will be promoting Critical Hits with our authors in Iowa City and New York, and there will doubtless be a Hard Girls tour next year.
EPOCH
The creative writing program at Cornell University, where I work, has been continuously publishing a literary magazine, EPOCH, since 1947. Founded by Baxter Hathaway, it is known for having published early writing by Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Sexton, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and Ray Bradbury, and is one of the most anthologized small magazines in America.
Last year, I took the magazine over from my predecessor, Michael Koch, who had masterfully edited it for more than thirty years. Along with my graduate students, and the magazine’s longtime designer, Heidi Marschner, we’ve put out two big issues since then, and redesigned the website. You can now see the cover and contributors of every issue since the magazine’s founding, buy print copies of every issue we still have stock of, subscribe, or buy a PDF download of any issue from the last fifteen years.
You can also submit! We’re now open for electronic subs at Submittable, and snail mail subs directly to the office. We’d love to see your fiction, poetry, essay, and comics (a genre that Michael added and that I intend to feature in every issue going forward).
More soon. Thanks for reading and listening to my stuff.
John