The folks at the Short Form, a  new but robust site that celebrates the short story, threw me some great questions and turned Clay Enos’s author photo of me into a cartoon. What more could I ask for? http://www.theshortform.com/interview/tim-horvath

• Michele Filgate listed it on her Top Ten of the year at Salon.com http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_…, and also wrote a bit about it at Vol. 1 Brooklyn: http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2012/12/1….

• David Gutowski listed it as one of his Favorite Short Story Collections of the year at Largehearted Boy: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/a….

• Matt Bell collared it, along with Diane Williams’s Vicky Swanky is a Beauty, as one of his two favorite collections of the year at http://www.mdbell.com/post/3925923266….

• Jason Jordan cited it as his Best Short Story Collection of the year at http://www.poweringthedevilscircus.bl….

• Okla Elliot put it at on his year-end list of short story collections he enjoyed at http://heavyfeatherreview.com/2012/12….

•  Amber Sparks listed it as a top collection at http://bigother.com/2012/12/14/take-t….

•  Terry Weyna, at her Reading the Leaves blog, put it on her Best of the Year list: http://readingtheleaves.com/bestbooks….

•  Jennifer Spiegel gave it a special accolade at her end of the year blog in the delightful category of “Book Most Outside My Usual Fare That I Think You Should Read Because It’s Wildly Imaginative, Acutely Intelligent, The Prose Is Striking, and It’s Intellectually Stimulating.” http://jenniferspiegel.com/www.jennif…

• Joshua Nomen-Mutatio was kind enough to give it a write-in vote in the comments on The Millions at http://www.themillions.com/2012/11/th….

Happy New Year, everyone…onward to 2013!

I was asked by Michele Filgate to contribute to an omnibus round-up of favorite books of the year at Salon.com, which I treated as another rooftop from which to shout about Claire Vaye Watkins’s Battleborn. So, hear ye:

“Battleborn,” by Claire Vaye Watkins (Riverhead)

I felt like I was hiking up the side of a mountain while reading “Battleborn,” seduced by its moment-by-moment gifts and vistas such that the breath-shortening effects of altitude stole up on me. Her sentences can be mesmerizing in the way of mineral patterns, but in her characters the lava is very much alive, palpable in their longings for companionship, self-understanding, dignity. And just when we’ve acclimated ourselves to her craggy contemporary West, she gives us the novella “The Diggings,” akin to Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” in the ease and visionary verve with which it transports us utterly to another era.

I could’ve gone on and on about this book, but suffice it to say that it is a book I’ll be rereading for years to come. More excitement: she’s coming to read at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, where I teach, in April.

I participated in a three-way discussion with Gabriel Blackwell, Jensen Beach, and Andrew Ervin at The Philadelphia Review of Books, entitled “Inventing the Tools of Our own Evolution.” The three parts of the interview are here: part 1, part 2 and part 3.

http://youtu.be/8LYchaMfyEE

My first novel is tentatively titled The Desert of Maine, and you can get a taste of me reading an excerpt from it at none other than the Desert of Maine itself.

My story “Woodrow Wilson” appeared on Melville House Publishing’s site as part of the series Their Peculiar Ambitions, curated by Amber Sparks and Brian Carr. Each story in the series revolves around a particular American president, and mine is about Edith Wilson, Woodrow’s second wife, and arguably, after her husband’s stroke, for a short while our first woman president. Read “Woodrow Wilson” here.

To welcome Robert Kloss’s The Alligators of Abraham into the world, I chopped, twisted, torqued, and reshaped his words into some new spin-off texts based on Oulipean methods. Here you’ll find a lipogrammatic rendering of one of his paragraphs without the letter “e,” a couple of paragraphs with all the nouns replaced, a cento, or found poem, and a snowball and reverse snowball using words from his original text.

Read Tim Horvath’s Text Inspired by the Alligators of Abraham.

Clay took my author photo and the picture on the “About” page. He’s extremely talented and a great guy to boot, and it was truly a blast to wander around the sidewalks and into the nooks and alleys of Chelsea on the shoot. His website is www.clayenos.com, and I highly recommend browsing around to get a sense of the incredible range and scope of his work.