My Books

On the ten books I've written so far

As a kid, books were the best objects on Earth and reading them the best activity. When I realized I could also write them, I started doing that and haven’t, over the last twenty-eight years, stopped.

Writing is a lonely art. In our current conditions of mass addiction to screen-based entertainment and widespread anti-intellectualism, the habit of reading books is declining with time. The act of laboring with language can feel important and mysterious and thrilling, but there are few cultural rewards for such work.

So: what do I want from this? Facile answers—ads and propaganda—must be ignored. Once I find the question’s silence, any sincere answer is a likely a good guide to living. Right now, I want to tell you a bit about each of the ten books I have written.

Solip is my first novel. It is short, dark, and strange. I wrote it after reading contemporary, avant-garde, and experimental literature almost exclusively for six years straight. The logic of its language is more musical than plot-driven; it is often a sickly poetry. Solip is what some critics have called “a person in a room” book. With it, I tried to convey the performative weirdness of being alone. It was published in 2013 by Tyrant Books, the concern of Giancarlo DiTrapano, a late friend and one of America’s most important publishers. It’s still in print.

Say, Cut, Map is my second novel. Like Solip, it’s structurally unlike most literature on the shelves, yet it more often uses patterns inspired by the cut-up technique of the Dadaists and William Burroughs. It follows the recovery of a man who is mutilated while working in a foreign country. Published in 2013 by Ben Spivey and David Peak’s Blue Square Press, it is out-of-print (though I’ve made a PDF available online).

EarthBound came about because Gabe Durham said he was interested in publishing books about classic video games. He challenged me to write the first title, so I focused on the most formative game of my childhood. The game is an oddly structured and surprisingly mature satire of American culture, so I tried to convey its essential goodness while showing its influence on me. My book was inspired by the early essays of Tom Bissell and other works of memoir-oriented criticism. It came out in 2014 and is still in print from the prolific Boss Fight Books.

Eat the Flowers was written during the four years I studied canonical texts at St. John’s College in Santa Fe and worked as a political organizer. It collects poetry, aphorisms, and essays focused on animality, pain, fascism, and imagination. It’s essentially a collage of how I navigated the first Trump presidency. I released it through my nonprofit publishing company Sator Press, and like all of Sator’s back catalogue, it is in print from the excellent independent press Two Dollar Radio.

The Country is a short thriller I self-published in 2019. It was the product of my preoccupation with post-apocalyptic stories and Holocaust literature. Its originating question: Can I write a page-turner with a protagonist who is amoral? I wrote The Country during downtime at work and self-published it via Amazon, hoping it would be maximally accessible to various American dads (including my own).

The City is a sequel to The Country I self-published through Amazon a year later. I wanted to expand the story’s scope and spend more time in its particular desolations. Scratching the intellectual itch of a series was fun. I have a third and final entry planned. Some day.

A Task is my best book. Set in the near future, it is about four Americans affected by a suicide cult. I wrote three wildly different drafts over the course of ten years, interspersing revisions with long periods of research. Inspired by Blake Butler’s novel 300,000,000, the first draft began like this: Three billion people must die. It took me nine years to realize the book’s final sentence. The books from which I stole the most are Madame Bovary, Preparation for the Next Life, and the first novel I completed at sixteen (during NaNoWriMo). After failing to sell A Task to a literary agent and a big corporation, I crowdfunded its publication on Kickstarter in 2020 and pledged to have an hourlong conversation with each of the book’s first thousand readers. Those conversations have been moving. I sell and distribute copies of A Task directly.

What Now?: A Sick Person’s Guide to Surviving the United States of America is meant to be read in an hour by someone in the hospital or by that person’s caretaker. I wrote it to help others practically and psychologically navigate the stressful, dysfunctional, and often cruel world of being seriously or chronically ill in America. My scars are in its pages in more ways than one. It’s available on Amazon.

Blood’s Hiding is the product of my childhood dream to write a fantasy novel. After COVID’s destructiveness, I realized there was no good reason to delay fulfilling that dream, so I got to work. I crowdfunded the book and was particularly supported by friends I had made in the Magic: The Gathering community. I also allowed backers live access to my drafts in progress. Two sequels to Blood’s Hiding are outlined, but despite the genre’s joys, I doubt I’ll return to the work of maintaining a big world and all its moving parts. You can find copies on Amazon.

The Christian: A Comedy is a sad story I recently wrote in response to the following question: What would happen to an average American man if he tried to live like Jesus? Initially I intended it to be riotously funny, but I found its final shape to be fuzzier, gentler, and less cartoonish—though it’s still got jokes. The Christian: A Comedy is likely the closest thing to a satire that I’ll ever write. I solicited a cool Russian artist for its cover and had to pay them in a convoluted, sanction-dodging way online. In maximally American fashion, the book is available on Amazon.

And that’s it for now. Ten books from twenty years of taking my writing seriously. In summarizing them, I feel both proud and hollow: on the one hand, I don’t plan on having children, so they are the work I hope will outlast me; on the other hand, writing books often feels like being a temporary boarding house for subtle yet persistent spirits. It is an art whose creation can often feel like an accident, or a temporary gift. Regardless, because of all this writing and publishing, I have consistently felt the solace of being in a community of writers and readers whom I’ve come to know online and in person, with some becoming deep and permanent friends. Literature has centered my life as long as I’ve been conscious. I believe that writing and publishing are worth the effort, even when the consequences are quiet.