Roxane Gay on Truth & Fiction, and Trillium talk
Well, yours truly forgot her camera cord at home, so I cannot upload photos from the Trillium Award readings yet, but you can read a fun conversation in the National Post with my fellow nominee Steven Heighton. We jaw about our work, how it’s similar, and what we really think about being nominated.
Elsewhere, in the latest Truth & Fiction podcast, you can listen to my talk with author Roxane Gay about feminism, TV, and hiding our writing from our parents.
The Blondes nominated for Trillium Award
Very excited to say that my novel The Blondes has been nominated for the Trillium Book Award alongside books by Alice Munro, Tamara Faith Berger, and others.
Longreads
Longreads selected my fiction “The Side Sleeper” (published in Taddle Creek) as one of their top picks for the week. Then I was asked by them if I’d like to contribute my own picks to their blog. I chose a piece from Daily Beast by Roxane Gay, “The Werewolf Novel as Post-9/11 Political Allegory,” where she reviews Benjamin Percy’s new novel, Red Moon, and another terrific long essay by Bruce Handy, “Budd and Leni” that appeared in Tin House #55.
My podcast
I’ve been busy the last couple of months getting the new Joyland podcast, Truth & Fiction, up and running along with producer Brian Joseph Davis. We have a brand new episode this Monday featuring Ben Greenman, author and editor at The New Yorker, talking about his novel with HarperCollins, The Slippage. Truth & Fiction is available for free download or subscription via iTunes.
It’s also streaming at The Public Radio Exchange. I’m looking forward to the next episode, which is a talk with screenwriter James Greer, about his days in Guided by Voices and working on the Cleopatra musical with Steven Soderbergh. Look for that in May.
The Blondes coming soon to the US
Just a quick note to say that The Blondes now has a US home at St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne Books. The release will be in the spring of 2014. Expect more details soon. I’ll be reading from The Blondes at Unameable Books in Brooklyn on February 28 at 7:30PM along with poet James Arthur and writer Melinda Moustakis. Details here.
The blond inside of me
Some of you may have heard me talk about this piece I wrote for Elle about turning blond for four months and my resulting odyssey into identity. They generously let us republish it on Joyland. You can find out my entire tormented hair biography, and its influence on my novel.
Les Blondes
I’ve just signed the contract for the French translation of The Blondes. It will be published by Editions Alto where I’ll find myself in good company with the likes of translations of Patrick deWitt, Sarah Waters, Annabel Lyon, and Rawi Hage, as well as original French novels. Watch for it in 2014.
In other news, The Blondes was placed on Quill & Quire‘s Top 5 list for best book cover design of the year. Zoomer Magazine asks me 5 questions about the inspirations for the novel. Taddle Creek publishes a new short story by me for their 15th anniversary issue.
And over at Joyland Magazine, we continue our Joyland TV series. I interview author and producer Anne Swan about her short story “Emote Control.”
