The Mumpsimus

  I'm thrilled that the ebook edition of The Last Vanishing Man is now available from the major ebook vendors: Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Kobo , and probably some others I don't know about. For the announcement image we're using on social media, we added a rainbow in honor of Pride Month, one of the only times we're violating the austere palette of the book's design. But Pride's important right now, during a time of escaling attacks on LGBTQIA+ people and culture. The Last Vanishing Man is a queer book in just about every way — indeed, if any general genre accounts for it all, that genre is the Queer Weird (Queird?). In the latest issue of Locus , Ian Mond offers a generous review of the collection and of my work generally. He notes that the book "depicts the melancholy of older gay men who were never able to fully express their affections" and "the loneliness and isolation of younger gay men in a post-AIDS world". Not easy stuff, of co...

David Gutowski's Largehearted Boy website is a longlasting (longplaying) wonder of literature and music. I have been lucky to be able to create a playlist of music to accompany both my first book, Blood: Stories , and my new collection, The Last Vanishing Man . In both cases, I spent an inordinate amount of time creating versions of the playlists, listening to them, fiddling with them, adjusting and revising, shaping, tuning...  (Largehearted Boy uses Spotify for playlists, but I also created an Apple Music playlist, which is what I use myself. If that's your thing, here's a link to it .) I'm a relic of the mixtape generation, and I realized in putting together my first book that one of the attractions of story collections for me is that they function like literary mixtapes. This is based on something of a fantasy of control, however. Collections are actually more like CDs and streaming playlists, because you can easily skip around in a collection in a way you can'...

May was the month when The Last Vanishing Man appeared in the world. Here's some stuff related to that, some places I've been and places I'm going... First, I will be in Brooklyn two weeks from tonight to read and converse with my friends Franz Nicolay and Hannah Tinti . It's at the Powerhouse Arena on June 14 at 7pm. Tickets are required and available at this link , ranging in price from free general admission to buying a book. Jeff VanderMeer interviewed me for Literary Hub . I was sure the pullquote would be, "I tend to gnaw at the same subject matter again and again until I chew off enough of myself to get out of the trap." But they went with other sentences. Yvonne C. Garrett reviewed the book generously for Brooklyn Rail .  "Cheney’s new collection is less the 'horror!' that his publisher hypes  and more a combination of wildly post-apocalyptic brutalism and deeply sympathetic studies of people—lost or irreparably harmed by modern life  an...

Today (May 2, 2023) is the official release date for The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories . Mostly, that just means it's now available from the online booksellers — it's been available from the publisher for a month and has been making its way into independent bookstores for a week or so. International distribution will be a little longer. Ebook, too.  But still, we need one day to say, "The book is published!" — and today is that day. I have some interviews in the pipeline (keep your eyes on Lit Hub and Cemetery Dance ) as well as a Largehearted Boy playlist. Also, I will be doing an event at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn on May 26 with a couple friends (details TBA). I'll put some notes about the book below, but like a public radio or tv broadcaster, I must pause here to say that if you appreciate the book and/or me, the best thing you can do other than buying a copy is to rate it and leave a review on sites like Amazon and Goodreads . Like so much else i...

My new book About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community has now been published by Punctum Books as an Open Access work, which means there is a free PDF and the paperback is published at a reasonable price. The book's copyright is replaced by a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, giving everyone the freedom to copy, share, and remix the work for noncommercial purposes. This summer, I'm going to play around with alternate forms myself (at the very least an ePub file for ebooks, but maybe also an illustrated website). About That Life was not going to be a book. I began writing it moments after I learned of Barry Lopez's death on Christmas Day, 2020. Lopez had been my workshop leader at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in the summer of 2000, and he really changed my approach to life and especially to writing. I wanted to write a short article in his memory, and I especially wanted to share the writing exercises he h...

I do not think of myself as a sadistic person. I have been, at heart, a pacifist from my teenage years. I was a strict vegetarian for 13 years because I did not want to benefit from the suffering of animals, and even now, an omnivore, I only occasionally eat meat. I have spent a lot of my professional academic career working against the cruelty that often pops up in education. I believe that anger is a poison and kindness is the only sure guide to ethical behavior. And yet ... I love it when readers of my stories tell me they were disturbed, unsettled, uncertain, discombobulated — and I especially love it when they say, "Your writing gave me nightmares." For instance, a friend who picked up an advance copy of my new story collection at the AWP Conference texted me: Reader, I love this reaction. Like laughter at comedy or arousal at pornography, a nightmare is an involuntary response. In their own ways, such responses are the ultimate praise for the work because they do not...

  I spent the last week in Seattle, Washington at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference , a conference I have been going to off and on for more than fifteen years now. AWP has provided some great memories for me. I first attended when the conference was in Austin, Texas. I had been invited onto a panel with Jeff VanderMeer, Kelly Link, Laird Hunt, and Brian Evenson. (Wonder what became of any of them?) We also did a reading and had dinner with Michael Moorcock. Is it any wonder I remember virtually nothing else about that conference? Then there was the New York City conference where I worked in the Book Fair trying to sell or give away copies of Best American Fantasy and Weird Tales , which was a really exciting experience at the time because AWP was even more of a big-L Literature conference back then, and anything with "fantasy" in the title (never mind "Weird Tales"!) was quite a shock for some people. Then there was the Boston conference ...

  I am excited to share the cover of my upcoming collection, The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories , which will be released by Third Man Books in May 2023. The cover image is by my friend Julie Hamel , a marvelous artist who also happens to be based in New Hampshire. Design is by Amin Qutteineh , who has been a joy to work with, alongside Third Man's art director Jordan Williams and valiant editor Chet Weise. I'm thrilled that my friend Franz Nicolay liked the book enough to provide us with an endorsement — and that Chet thought it belonged on the cover. Though he now lives in New York, Franz and I grew up together in the wilds of New Hampshire, and having his words there with Julie's art puts the book's Granite State roots right up front.  Here's Franz's full blurb, for which I am terribly grateful: “An unforgettable collection of ghost-haunted memory and blighted futures, in the lives of people from the isolated and quietly paranoid to the criminally insa...

  It began as a blog post. I was just going to write here some quick thoughts about H.P. Lovecraft's 1924 story "The Rats in the Walls" and how the narrator made me think about people who've lost their brains to QAnon conspiracies.  Then I couldn't help thinking about the concept of degeneracy, and of eugenics, and of Madison Grant, a name once famous and now forgotten, literally erased from the archives. I returned to a book I had read a decade or more ago, Jonathan Spiro's excellent Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant , a book that explains so much about the United States, popular ideas of science, the troubled history of environmentalism, and, in its own way, people like H.P. Lovecraft.  And then I wondered if maybe we ought to see Lovecraft's narrators as deeply unreliable rather than as visionaries. What if Lovecraft's fiction is a testimony to yearning as much as to horror, and what if the yearnin...

Over at my website-website, I've posted a new story, "At the Edge of the Forest" . It's about a man with a disfigured face who has certain connections to death, and maybe the dead. It's not quite a horror story, though — more a strange story, unsettling at times, with its development influenced by some Buddhist material I was reading at the time I wrote it. The story is not exactly new, as I began writing it two years ago at least, and though it did prove quite difficult to wrangle into shape, I finished it a while back. I sent it out to some literary journals, but, unsurprisingly, it wasn't to their taste. At a bit over 7,000 words, it's too long for most such places, and it's too contemplative for the genre market. So, like "A Suicide Gun" last year, it really only makes sense to publish the story myself. This lets me release it under a Creative Commons license, too, which I prefer. And as a bonus, I created an audio file where I read the ...

  My new horror story, "Hunger", has just been published by The Dark magazine and is available to read online. (Though consider a subscription to help them continue to be a high-quality market that pays its writers.) The story began from a moment of disappointment: I watched the recent movie The Dark and the Wicked and was annoyed that a film with lots of creative ideas would end up feeling shallow and pointless because its characters were so empty of history, personality, or purpose. What might such a story be like if its characters were more developed? That initial inspiration is still visible in the story, but, as often happens once you get writing, the characters and narrative went in new directions that I couldn't have predicted when I began. I'm hugely grateful to Ann VanderMeer for commenting on an early draft and to Sean Wallace for seeing value in the story and publishing it. Here's the first paragraph, for a taste: It was only a few weeks after my mo...

A few days ago, I put a previously-unpublished story up on my website, "A Suicide Gun" , and gave a little bit of background here . Somewhat to my surprise, a number of people read the story immediately and then asked questions. (I'm not being disingenuous about the surprise — it's not just a somewhat off-putting story, but it's also pretty long. I certainly hoped some people would read it, but I didn't expect anybody to get to it quickly.) The questions led me to think again about the story and what it's doing, and they also got me thinking more generally about how and why we read stories, and about the aesthetics of short fiction. Thinking that some of those ideas might be helpful, interesting, provocative, or at least of passing interest to a few people, I decided to write up some of the questions and my responses in a kind of interview. Note, given the subject matter here:  If you are in crisis, call the toll-free National Suicide Prevention Lifeline a...