New Believer is out!

No, that's not some prototype for this month's cover—the whited-out parts are an extension of Jeannie Vanasco's essay, "Absent Things As If They Are Present," one of the last pieces that I edited. It's a lovely, learned piece, combining memoir with a smart take on the aesthetics of erasure—one of my pet interests, fittingly enough. (Discussed are Tom Phillips's A Humument and Jen Bervin's NETS, both of which I regularly taught to my Gallatin students, as well as Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, the Jefferson Bible, Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow, and more.)

Also in this issue—a great Meghan Daum piece about her encounter with online venom, Daniel Handler/Greil Marcus/Nick Hornby/Jack Pendarvis columnic brilliance, Alec Michod talking to Fred Tomaselli, Amanda Stern chewing the fat with Laurie Anderson, Michael Schulman on Polari (postwar UK gay argot), Benjamin Weissman, Blake Butler, and (what a treat) Laird Hunt talking to the one and only Harry Mathews. And of course there's MORE...

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There's always more—but for me, no more, on the Believer front.

In the notes and apologies area of this issue is an amazing, tear-jerking (but funny) piece about...well...me.

It's been a wonderful I-can't-believe-it's-been-nine years. I'm too choked up to get into it right now....I'll save it for my memoirs...........oh, some exclamation points for my amazing brilliant co-editors and constant inspirations: Heidi! Vendela! Andrew!...Dave of course!.....Ross! Karolina!..Andi!...Sheila!...Meehan!...Matthew Derby of yore—Jason Polan—Brandon Stosuy!...Max!...and all the terrific writers and artists (I'm not even going to begin to list them)...(maybe I'll do a post some day and try to list all of them, the ones I've worked with.....)

The farewell asks, "What will we do without Ed Park?" Simple! Continue being the best magazine around!

(I'm blown away by this illo from the pen of Tony Millionaire.)

T is for...

. . . and for "Where is the Asian Justin Timberlake?" as asked in today's Sunday Styles. Who knows? But researchers think they've found today's Asian Let's Active...or Long Ryders...or something?

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. . . and for The Girl Detective, a new play based on Kelly Link's delightful deconstruction of a story that closes out her first book, Stranger Things Happen. I need to see this!

I'm recently back from the AWP in Atlanta, where I happily bumped into Kelly and Gavin Grant, outside a packed panel on "literary gossip"; we then traveled (with the proprietress of Pinky's Paperhaus) to an agreeably odd, Costco-sized grocery store in Decatur. I witnessed mad Link/Small Beer love at AWP: One of my Poetry Foundation colleagues, upon seeing Kelly's name in the conference catalog, gushed with enthusiasm; the One Story table was keeping Kelly's amazing "The Great Divorce" out of sight, because it was too popular—you had to ask for it by name, you had to know it was there, it was almost illegal; on the way back to New York, someone was reading Stranger Things Happen, rapt . . .

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U is for . . .


. . . and for Up Is Up, But So Is Down mastermind (and—more importantly—Dizzyhead) Brandon Stosuy, who gives a great interview over at 3:AM Magazine.

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And V is for Believer Goddess Vendela's second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, which I read on the plane to Taiwan (I was about to say that I devoured it in a single sitting, but there was a stopover in Seattle in which I walked around and did vague leg stretching exercises, dismantling the sitting position). As the title suggests, the time to read this is now—it's a winter book, with an appealing brittleness of emotion, funny and devastating in turns...and often at the same time:

I looked over her shoulder at what she'd traced in the salt and pepper. I thought it would be a clue, a postscript to what she'd told me. In large capital letters, she had scrawled: BUY MILK.