I’m delighted to be a part of the Knox Writers’ House Recording Project, a national effort to record interviews with, and readings by, writers in their homes. My page is now live; click the link to listen to some Pieces For The Left Hand, and for conversations with interviewers Emily Oliver, Mandy Gutman-Gonzales, and Meg Hayertz.

I’ve got a new short essay (a blog post, really) on the Electric Literature Blog about the perils of collaboration, in which I present myself, alternately, as “a manic, self-aggrandizing loon who won’t shut up about himself” and “the picture of refinement.”

This year’s Colgate Writers’ Conference is scheduled for June 17-23. You should go. I’ll be teaching a novel workshop this year, and there will, as always, be many other workshops (fiction, poetry, and nonfiction), readings, craft and shop talks, and much revelry. Click the link to sign up.

Hey, I am reading tomorrow night, March 1, in London, on the Penrhyn Road Campus of Kingston University. Please come! Here’s a flyer.

As an exercise, I just created a Google doc and gave my creative writing students semester-long editorial access to it, in the hope that they would create a crowdsourced short story. The original text reads: It was a type of day, with a certain kind of weather, in a place different from other places in a number of key ways. Then, at some point, something happened. An event. The event had repercussions. Those involved reacted variously, resulting in changes to the place and its inhabitants. One specific person, a person with numerous qualities, underwent some especially noteworthy changes. This is that person’s story. If you’d like to follow the story’s progress over the next few months, here’s the public link to do so.

Podcast listeners: Writers At Cornell is back! It’s now on a new page of this website, which you can access via a convenient new URL (http://www.writersatcornell.com) or via the Cornell drop-down menu above. I have just posted two new interviews, with novelists Catherine Chung and Alexi Zentner. If you subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, wait a few days for the new feed to take hold; these two interviews should appear soon.

This just in from Graywolf Press: the cover of my forthcoming novel FAMILIAR (click for full size). The gist:

Elisa Brown is driving back from her annual, somber visit to her son Silas’s grave when something changes. Actually, everything changes: her car, her clothes, her body. 

When she arrives back home, her life is familiar—but different. There is her house, her husband. But in the world she now inhabits, Silas is no longer dead, and his brother Sam is disturbingly changed. Elisa has a new job, and her marriage seems sturdier, and stranger, than she remembers. She finds herself faking her way through a life she is convinced is not her own.

Has she had a psychotic break? Or has she entered a parallel universe? Elisa believed that Silas was doomed from the start, but now that he is alive, what can she do to repair her strained relations with her children? She soon discovers that these questions hinge on being able to see herself as she really is—something that might be impossible, for Elisa, for anyone. In FAMILIAR, J. Robert Lennon continues his profound and exhilarating exploration of the surreal undercurrents of contemporary American life.

It’s coming out in October. Watch this space for tour dates, interviews, and the like.

A correction to my Art of Fielding review in the LRB, from reader Mark Golden: “WP Kinsella, like so many baseball fans and like Cornell’s great classicist Gordon Kirkwood, is a Canadian, not an American.” Thank you! My penance will be an afternoon of poutine and Neil Young.

…and now, to conclude Reviews Of Novels By Other Youngish White American Men Week, I give you this piece on Ben Marcus’s “The Flame Alphabet,” from the Times Book Review.

My review of Chad Harbach’s The Art Of Fielding, temporarily flaunting itself openly on this side of the LRB paywall. Click while it’s hot!