New Chapbook called THE BASEMENT FOOD COURT OF FORKING PATHS

seems in/appropriate to allude to maestro and blind librarian jorge luis borges, who i’ve been thinking about prolly too much as i lay about recovering from yet another eye surgery… the dapper manhattan ophthalmologist said in the post-op meeting—and rather frustratingly failed to detail any further what he might mean—that when he went into my eyeball that it had felt very “unusual.” still i like the man very much even despite or maybe because he played jethro tull in the operating theater (during which i was rather squeamishly awake) … don’t worry. everyone says the eye should be nearly as good as before sometime very soon.

anyhoo. this only to say that in my rather mopey cyclops convalescence, i was gladdened this evening to receive copies of a chapbook made from a chapter from the novel-in-progress. it’s called THE BASEMENT FOOD COURT OF FORKING PATHS and the chapbook is a product of the editorial vision of David Gonzalez of Skylight Books, where copies are for sale. they should soon be available also through their soon-to-be website, which will be here. Cover art by Liana Jegers and design by Alex Hemming — many thanks to them!

[as an aside and basically unrelated to the story of the chapbook, the plot of the borges story involves a chinese professor named Doctor Yu Tsun, an early prototype for self-harming victims of the model minority myth, who justifies an act of thankless espionage because he “wished to prove to [the kaiser] that a yellow man could save his armies.”]

my chapter has little to do with borges’s tale (except perhaps in its thinking of the multiverse, chance, and regret) but does celebrate the grimy glory of the original and now-gone Golden Shopping Mall. the chapter also has not a little to do with music and so shout-outs to Danny Tunick and Chris Mannigan who guided the, um, research.

Here’s a bit from the chapbook:

I look up and see Muriel hit a record button. Then she holds up the phone and says:

Do you like it? I’m not sure what I think about it. Because my old one was getting so laggy I had to get a new one.

For the most part I trusted the cloud. That is, I had faith in the current magic to get what I needed from my old exo-brain to the new one. I mean I trusted the marketplace to take somehow from my old phone to my new phone all my memories, years and years of correspondence, all my tiny keys to all my unbreakable tiny locks, lists of songs to private parties, top scores to games I never wanted to play, selfies in front of and by things I wanted to be proven once near. But there was one thing I didn’t trust the cloud with, at least not enough that I didn’t take precautions. These were old voicemails from a friend named Frank Exit who died about a year ago.

Available at Skylight Books and directly from Breaking & Entering Lit.