The Mumpsimus

The new issue of Conjunctions  collects stories, essays, and poems that are, in some way or another, "Earth Elegies". It includes my most recent story, "A Liberation", which I chose to dedicate to the memory of my friend and mentor Katherine Min . She was generally known as Katherine, but to me she was Kathie. Or just K. (Kafka was one of the interests we shared.) She died in March, one day after her 60th birthday. It was the end of a long, hard struggle with cancer. I've wanted to write a tribute to her ever since the day of her death, but could not summon words that felt accurate or adequate. I'd known her since I was in college, when she worked in the office next to my mother, and one day she said to my mother that she was thinking about writing a screenplay but didn't know how, and my mother said, "My son's at NYU studying playwriting and screenwriting. I'll put you in touch." And she did. Though neither of us went on to do...

Katherine Min is coming to New York for a reading and interview at The New School tomorrow night : Fiction Forum: Katherine Min 6:30 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. The Writing Program presents Katherine Min reading from Secondhand World and discussing her work with Jackson Taylor, associate director of the Writing Program. Location: Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building, 65 West 11th Street, 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street) Admission: $5; free to all students and New School faculty, staff, and alumni with ID I'll be there (fashionably late, I expect), as will all my imaginary friends, and perhaps even a few of the not-quite-imaginary ones.

I know you all think that now I live in the New York metro area I have friends quoted in every new issue of the New Yorker , but that's not entirely true -- certainly not true enough for me to be blasé about it -- so I was thrilled to read this Talk of the Town piece about the presence of characters named Felsenfeld in novels by a group of writers who hung out together at the MacDowell Colony , including Katherine Min . (Katherine, too, has recently left New Hampshire, and will soon be teaching at UNC Asheville .) I was also pleased to see that Michael Chabon was quoted in the article. He's quite the up-and-comer now that he's blurbed Best American Fantasy ...

Here at Mumpsimus Central, we love it when our friends hang out together, and so we're having a little party* to celebrate Friend of the Mumpsimus Katherine Min guest-blogging for Friend of the Mumpsimus The Happy Booker . As Hero to the Mumpsimus Col. John "Hannibal" Smith used to say, we love it when a plan comes together. Or something like that... In any case, we loved in particular these sentences of Katherine's: I come to fiction from the premise that reality isn't so great. Reality is what we're stuck with. Fiction is compelling precisely because it takes us beyond what is merely real. *What is a little party at Mumpsimus Central? All I'll admit is that it usually involves archaic words, obscure books, and shotgun shells.

Katherine Min's first novel, Secondhand World is being released by Knopf in the U.S. today. I cannot pretend to lack bias about this book -- I've known Katherine and her family for ten years now, we spend time together whenever we can, and the day she sold Secondhand World to Knopf I bounced around with joy and happiness for hours. It is a lovely book, beautifully written, sensitive and disturbing. Katherine's short stories have been published in many of the major literary magazines in the U.S., and her story "Courting a Monk" won a Pushcart Prize and was reprinted in The Pushcart Book of Short Stories . Secondhand World has been chosen as the October pick of the Redbook Book Club , and Katherine is about to begin a book tour that will take her to various cities throughout the U.S. If you're immediately curious to hear her read and discuss her work, you can listen to a recent interview at New Hampshire Public Radio . We could have done this interview ...