Leslie Jamison News

Last night I read at Iowa City’s venerable cultural institution, The Mill, with Quickies!, a reading series touring out of Chicago. You can read more about the series here, but in short: they read shorts. The deal is you have four minutes and after that they’ll kick you off, but I think I went over four and they let me read in peace because I’m on crutches and they felt bad. In any case, they’ve been touring the midwest and picking up readers as they go. I got to read with Blake Butler, author of Scorch Atlas, and others. His piece was gorgeous and it had dogs and a sidewalk made from the melted vinyl of every record ever made.

A publishing house in the Czech Republic has just bought foreign rights to The Gin Closet. This is possibly the most exciting thing that’s ever happened in my publishing career (except for, perhaps, being invited to “Encuentro de Literatura,” a conference in Mexicali this October, see below). The house is an imprint of Albatros called Plus, based in Prague. If they translate the title directly, it will be: Gin Skříň.

So the conference will be a three-day binge of readings and workshops in Mexicali, Baja California. One of the organizers read “Hombres Callados” in Hermano Cerdo and offered to fly me down. Here is some information about last year’s event. I have two-and-a-half months to revisit my Spanish conjugation skills and get them in working order.

The L Magazine published a story of mine in their summer fiction issue a few weeks ago. You can find it here, beneath a man in a Budweiser T-shirt.

About a week after it came out, I got a note from a Brooklyn artist named Taibi Mastelse asking whether she could use an excerpt from the story in a collage. I said yes, of course, and proceeded to dream about it. She made a collage called “Let’s Clear the Air,” and she made it for somebody named Masha. Here it is. It’s a few collages down. There’s a cat with a shirt that says “Oh Shit.”