The fall issue of Nar­ra­tive Mag­a­zine includes a pair of excerpts from Amer­i­can Idol, the novel I’ve been writ­ing in fits and starts during this long slow slog through grad­u­ate school. The novel tells the story of an Amer­i­can anthro­pol­o­gist who lives South Amer­ica and stud­ies Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies, though the latter don’t appear in either excerpt here. I was espe­cially pleased and grate­ful to see that on their front page the good folks at Nar­ra­tive had nudged my mug up next to my friend and mentor Annie Dil­lard, whose stun­ning Pil­grim at Tinker Creek is excerpted in the issue as well. Anyway, check it out…

Ange has a great new prose piece on Beirut, occa­sional DE glos­sator Anthony Madrid has a title-​cursing poem, and I’ve got a con­tri­bu­tion to the future of pub­lish­ing in the new issue of Poetry. Check them out…

Nar­ra­tive Mag­a­zine has pub­lished a revised ver­sion of my essay about the mines at Potosí. Check it out here, and then check out some pho­tographs from the trip here.

My review of Keith Waldrop’s Tran­scen­den­tal Stud­ies: A Tril­ogy is up at Book­fo­rum. Check it out…