Button Man reviewed on Robert Lopresti's Little Big Crimes blog

Author Robert Lopresti says some nice things about my short story Button Man, in his weekly blog Little Big Crimes. The story ran in the March 2013 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

It’s nice to get noticed by Lopresti, the 2012 winner of the Black Orchid Novella Contest, which is devoted to stories in the spirit of Rex Stout’s creation, Nero Wolfe. Lopresti’s winning novella, announced at the Edgars last year, will run in the July/August issue of AHMM. I know Lopresti only by his work. He’s a hugely prolific short story writer with credits going back to the 1970s!

I actually wrote a first draft of Button Man in a creative writing class back in the mid-1980s. I was still in college, taking a class led by Tobias Wolff. I revised the story for class, and Wolff urged me to start sending it out, but I never did. It sat around in my hard copy files for about twenty years before I digitized it and revised it once again in 2012. Interestingly, the revised version which ran in AHMM is actually closer to the original story. Prior to submission, I ended up cutting two big scenes I remember adding upon the advice of that class. They just didn’t add anything to the story. Must be a moral in there somewhere.

Official Website for THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY

New website. Four cities, four parties.

Denise is announcing a new “official” website for her book this week. With it comes her schedule for events in four cities: Asheville (duh); Oak Ridge; Washington, DC; New York City. All events are in March.

The Death of a Chimp

This op-ed, which appeared this weekend in a Kentucky newspaper, references an article I wrote back in 2002 for Discover magazine, about the strange plight of lab chimps.

Simply put, the U.S. bred tons of chimps during the height of the AIDS epidemic, thinking medical labs would need an animal model on which to test potential treatments. But scientists discovered too late that when injected with the HIV virus, chimps don’t get AIDS the way humans do. That left lots of chimps looking for a place to live out the rest of their natural lives. Since they were infected with HIV and heaven knows what else, they couldn’t be returned to the wild. Either their home labs euthanized them, or they had to to be move to sanctuary facilities.

I just happened to visit one such sanctuary on the day a beloved chimp took sick and died. I went there thinking I was writing one type of story, and left with something completely different. The result won me an award from the Humane Society; Oliver Sacks picked the story for a spot in the Best American Science Writing anthology the following year. 

I still get emails from people from time to time saying how the piece moved them. In hindsight it’s weird to think that I actually struggled with how to write the piece. I was guided in my choices by the advice of a fine editor who asked me: “Why don’t you just tell the story you’ve been telling all of us since you got back?”

The story is included in my ebook of nonfiction pieces, The Scientist and the Sociopath. But you can read the chimp story for free right here.

When the 'Zon Goes Blooey!

Seriously, Amazon, you really want to know what I thought of this title?

Remembering writer John C. Keats

OpenRoad Media got some press recently for releasing The Lord of Publishing, the memoirs of an old literary agent. And I do mean old. Sterling Lord is 92 years old, and still sharing stories of his past clients, such as Jack Kerouac, Dick Francis, Jimmy Breslin, Frank DeFord, Howard Fast, and Nicholas Pileggi.

I first heard about Lord when I was in my teens. One of my journalism professors, John C. Keats (top), was a Lord client. Keats had spent his career churning out books of social criticism during the 50s. He attacked the suburbs and their cookie-cutter houses, Detroit and its dangerous cars, and on and on. One of the best descriptions I heard about Keats’ work was that “he took on Detroit when Ralph Nader was still in his Buster Browns.” Later he wrote biographies on Howard Hughes and Dorothy Parker. He was a definitely a 50s man, and by the time he and I met he was heading into retirement but still teaching journalism. The rap on the teachers in the magazine journalism department was that you ought to take magazine writing with Bill Glavin, my dear professor whom I wrote about last November, and magazine editing with Keats. Keats struck me as a professional curmudgeon. He read one of my short stories once and said, “Nice writing. You have talent. But I don’t believe a word of what you’ve written.”

Ouch.

Keats told us that even if he landed a magazine assignment on his own, without Lord’s intervention or assistance, he always sent Lord a check for his 10% anyway. Knowing what I know about agent-writer relationships today, I’d regard this as unthinkable, but Keats said he did it because he believed Lord had invested in his total career and was entitled to that small token.

I enjoyed reading about Keats in Sterling Lord’s book:

John was in the process of withdrawing from the society he critiqued. He and his wife Margaret moved to Pine Island in the Thousand Islands area of the St. Lawrence River… When I needed John, I would call the Andress Boat Works, in the tiny town of Rockport, Ontario, and tell them I wanted to talk to John Keats. Someone would board a motorboat and bounce over the two miles to Pine Island to deliver the message. Once it was received, John would hop into one of this boats and motor to the tiny Canadian general store that had the phone to call me back. It was quaint and cumbersome, but it worked.

I saw that island once, the day before I graduated, when Keats took a group of his “student bodies” up there to help him and Marge open the house for the season. Keats forgot the food he was supposed to bring for our lunch, and we made do with soup out of the pantry. I’ll never forget how angry he was at himself for that, and how he chalked it up to his advancing age. 

He and I stayed in touch after Syracuse and I treasure the letters that originated on that island, where he’d tell of listening to Caruso on the record player while turtles and “Devonian-seeming pike” plied the waters. When his wife died and he got too old for the island, he moved to an assisted living home on the river. He wrote some letters from there and we talked a few times, but he suffered from aphasia, which made everything difficult. I was sad to hear the news of his passing in 2000 at the age of 80. I helped another Keats alum write and submit the obituary which ran in the New York Times. The photo Dana sent to the Times is the one above, which hangs on my office wall today.

It was nice to think of Keats again, and see him come to life — even if only on three pages or so — as I read Lord’s recollections.

Lord’s book is available in paper and ebook. It’s a neat look at a world that feels long gone. You can catch a taste of it in this Vanity Fair article about Lord that ran recently.

If you have ever read any of Keats’s books, please consider leaving a review for them on Goodreads, where I set up a profile for him.

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2019 Update: I’ve corrected the dead link to the New York Times obit, and have re-named the link to this post due to advice from Google’s search engine. In the future, I’d like to post other links about Keats that are available online. If anyone reading this finds interesting articles about him, kindly let me know via the Contact page, and I’ll post them in the future.

And yes, I am trying to post here more often. Thank you for noticing. If you want to sign up for my newsletter and claim your free ebook, go here. Thank you! — Joseph D’Agnese

Surprise Review of "The Mesmerist"

Also today, Loren Eaton has a zesty review of my book, The Mesmerist, up at his blog I Saw Lightning Fall.

I first read Loren’s work in the Winter 2012 issue of Needle, and started following his blog shortly after. I participated in his Christmas flash fiction event this past Christmas, and I’ve been enjoying his march through the work of H.P. Lovecraft.

Simply put, Eaton’s a master at saying a lot in 100 words, so I’m touched he would deign to lavish four, unexpected grafs on my cheese-fest masterpiece. If nothing else, I guarantee you that you will come away with more books (not mine) for your wish list after reading Loren’s review.

BTW: I was telling a baker friend the other day that I first wrote a draft of The Mesmerist in 1981, which may freak out some people. I keep meaning to do a post on my unusual writing experiences during those years, and maybe I will soon.

Mention of THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY in Oprah's Magazine

Eventful couple of days here on The Girls of Atomic City front.

* The first hardcover editions arrived at home, to Denise’s delight.

* Karen Abbott, author of the NYT Bestselling books Sin in the Second City and American Rose offered up a generous, unexpected blurb:

The Girls of Atomic City is the best kind of nonfiction: marvelously reported, fluidly written, and a remarkable story about a remarkable group of women who performed clandestine and vital work during World War II. Denise Kiernan recreates this forgotten chapter in American history in a work as meticulous and brilliant as it is compulsively readable. 

Anyone who does narrative nonfiction is awed by Abbott’s work, so Denise couldn’t be more thrilled.

* And today came news of Denise’s book’s mention in the March issue of O Magazine. The headline of this spread is How Should I Celebrate International Women’s Day?

* A new website for the book should be going up soon, replacing the existing GirlsofAtomicCity.com. The new design looks amazing. Looking forward to sharing it with you all.

Still here, still alive

Spooky ghost window of the house I visited last week.

Thought 1: Not to get all Scalzi on you, but I am actually here, alive and kicking, just with little to report. The personal writing seems to be going well, but I’m realizing that the two projects I’ve chosen to do next require some intense research. To prevent myself from freaking out completely, I’m telling myself that a) I tend to over-research and need to stop that right now, b) I can get by reading just a few nonfiction books, and c) those few books do not have to be read in their entirety since I’ll be going forth and immediately fictionalizing the hell out of those worlds anyway. All easy to say, hard to do. I’m also falling behind on the fun novels and stories I’ve been wanting to read for months. So be it.

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Thought 2: You wanna laugh? Here’s a glimpse into the trad pub world, via my ghostwriting window. (See above.) I’ve been working for a year on a book that was slated to be pubbed late July 30. Understand that typically once that date is set, everything in the trad publisher’s world with respect to that book revolves around that date. That date is golden. Yes, they’ll tell you, we can change the date but you don’t want us to because it confuses retailers and contradicts what we put in the catalog, and so on.

So late Friday comes news from the publisher that they’re accelerating the pub date for this book. It’ll be in stores early June now, not late July. Virtually a two-month acceleration. Why? Because they just heard that the buyer for a large retail chain wants the books for sale on Father’s Day. Very strong father component in this book, they think. Which is actually freaking true.

Two questions: Why didn’t the the rest of us—myself included—figure that out a year ago when we started having endless conference calls about the book? And why is it suddenly so easy to pub a book early? I heard it took months, and every single month was precious, once set in stone. Why is another major memoir that my wife is ghosting going from final edit to press in two weeks?! (I know, that’s three questions; sue me.) Gee, I guess these guys can really get a book out when they put their minds to it.

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Thought 3: Why is it that as soon as I got my sweet new standing desk apparatus all tricked out in the office do I suddenly develop a need to do all my work from the couch in the living room? Seriously, all my junk’s piled on the coffee table. And I show no sign of leaving. I’m camped out here, now. I’m staying. To hell with my health.

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Thought 4: Finally took down the Christmas tree. Good. More room for me.

Video: Denise talking about THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY

Simon & Schuster put together a video of my wife, Denise Kiernan, talking about her upcoming book, THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY. It’s about 4 minutes; I hope you’ll check it out. The book pubs March 5. Good reviews so far from the book trade magazines.