Curious friends, countrymen, relatives, coworkers, and others who share the name "Lee Klein," I welcome you to a page concocted to organize one particular Lee Klein's literary activity.

I live in Philadelphia near the Italian Market and the dueling cheesesteakeries. I moved there from Iowa City, where I attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where I moved from Brooklyn (Greenpoint), where I lived for four years -- before that Princeton, before that hometown Lawrenceville, NJ, before that Boston, before that Austin, before that Oberlin College, before that hometown NJ, before that NYC for a day or so after being born there.

Lately I've been reading Robert Musil's 1200+ page mega-masterpiece The Man Without Qualities as a reward for finishing a novel set in South Philly that I started in late 2010. Looking forward to writing some essays and then breaking ground on a new novel . . . I usually write by hand early in the morning before heading to work and then I type things up at night. I'm usually all outta sorts when I don't stick to this routine (although when I do stick to it I'm usually excessively tired).

In February 2012, after finishing a solid draft of the above-mentioned novel, I translated a short novel by Horacio Castellanos Moya called El Asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador. (I've translated "asco" as "disgust," although it's apparently more like the sound you make when clearing your throat, like "Yuck.") Moya has a few books out from New Directions but a translation of this one hasn't been published despite a rave review in Roberto Bolano's Between Parentheses and the growing appreciation for Bernhard. I've traveled in El Salvador, speak Spanish, and am a Bernhard fanatic, so I pretty much felt called to translate this one and send it to whoever's interested. I've also been corresponding with Moya to find out about the rights before trying to get it published. It's sort of an imitation of Bernhard's Extinction transposed to El Salvador -- a self-consciously imitative rant against imitators by a frustrated idealist. Good, clean, rancid fun. You can read my thoughts on it here.

I've also been contributing GPS-tagged "field reports" for the Philadelphia branch of an innovative digital wireless literary project called The Silent History concocted by Eli Horowitz, Kevin Moffett, and Matthew Derby. I'm sure when it's launched it will make some noise. 

Just found out that a short ranty story will be in a forthcoming issue of Ghost Town, edited by the aforementioned Mr. Moffett. Psyched to see this one in print and be in this, which apparently includes some fine writers.

I recently noticed that the complete text of a story involving virtual baseball, Atum Ra, and Thorstein Veblen published in 2008 in the third print issue of Canteen has been made available online. (Note: I wrote this standing naked in the summer of 2005 upstairs in a garage barn in Iowa City. For real.)

An essay about Barry Bonds and steroids and the good ol' USA that once was published in Barrelhouse is also in the Best American Non-Required Reading 2007. Maybe I'll put this on Eyeshot the next time Barry Bonds is in the news or a player is busted for using performance-enhancing drugs.

A semi-illustrated story called Carry Me Father No More is at AGNI, published by Boston University. I worked on this one with Frank Conroy at first and, a few months later, Ben Marcus. Guess who talked about emotion and who talked about Kafka? I was surprised.

Probably my best story appeared in the 2007 Fall/Winter print edition of The Black Warrior Review, published by the University of Alabama. (Good luck finding it.)

An essay about walking and reading ("libambulating") is on Swink. I tend to libambulate daily in the warmer months, covering about three miles/15 pages a day at lunch, plus another three miles if I walk to/from work instead of bike. A very short essayistic thing about walking while reading War and Peace in Philadelphia was also part of "Field-Tested Books" from Coudal Partners a few years ago.

Impressions of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King appeared in the form of a workshop-type response in the summer 2011 issue of The Lifted Brow.

A blurb about a nonexistent book called Cannibals is in The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature.

A few very cheap ($3.87) and very expensive ($92.17) copies of Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World can be found online. Only 250 copies were published by Better Non Sequitur in 2004. I wrote it in '97 or so. 

Here's the history of the semi-literary site I've edited since 1999:
Eyeshot's Hindenburg Complex of Infidels & Crusaders

Over the years, I've posted dozens of stories and little oddities on Eyeshot, mostly under pseudonyms, but a few things I've put up under my own name (or no name), including a story about a Michael Jackson impersonator in Madrid that first appeared in a 2005 print edition of Pindeldyboz and an essay about my half-Jewishness that appeared in an anthology from Soft Skull Press called Half-Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes.

In late-April 2012 I closed Eyeshot's submissions (most likely forever!), in part because I've been more interested in posting brief impressions of new and old books, the latest of which can best be found via the archive. Others are collected here. Most of these first appear on Goodreads, which I love and use daily. 

The site is probably best known for the rejection letters I sent and posted for over a decade and for some of the stuff that's collected here. 

To contact electronically: lee at eyeshot.net

Otherwise, I'm on Facebook but hardly use it and I very inconsistently tweet.