Paperback birthday

Today is the official release of Alcestis in paperback!

In the year since the hardback release, I’ve:

• had a book launch party (photos here)
• read at a college
• read in Ashland, Oregon, met with a book club there, and filmed an interview/reading with a local book TV program
• read at Wiscon
• read at ArmadilloCon in Austin
• met a huge number of amazing writers on Twitter
• taught an intensive summer fiction workshop at the University of Texas
• spoke to a UT honors class after they read the book
• learned that the book will be available in a Turkish edition and in audiobook form from Iambik
• led a discussion about the book in the Blanton Museum, for their book club
• written a bunch of blog posts for other sites, including the always fabulous Hipster Book Club and Small Beer’s Not a Journal (see the Alcestis page for more guest blog posts, interview, and reviews from sites like Open Letters Monthly and Lambda Literary)
• written more blog posts here than I ever expected to!

I continue to be amazed that people want to read my book. I mean, obviously that’s what I hoped for when I wrote it, though I also wrote it because I wanted to read it. But the fact of the book being in the world, of going into a room for a book club meeting and seeing fifteen people who have all spent at least a few hours of their lives reading something I wrote and are now eager to talk about it — there’s nothing quite like it. Thanks to my time as an English grad student, I’m well aware of just how far back the English-language literary tradition stretches, and how very many books have been produced since print became widespread. I like knowing that Alcestis is among them, and that it’s reached some readers who have really enjoyed it. I hope the paperback edition will allow it to reach even more.

The book is available in paperback via IndieBound, Amazon, B&N, Chapters/Indigo, Powell’s, Borders.com — and of course it’s still available in hardback and ebook form on those sites, too. If you buy and read the book, please do take the time to leave a review on the site where you bought it and/or at Goodreads, if you can. It means a lot to me and will especially mean a lot to other potential readers who want to know what you thought of the book.