LK-related updates now appear here.

Curious friends, countrymen, relatives, coworkers, and others who share the name "Lee Klein," welcome to a page concocted to organize one particular Lee Klein's literary activity. (Note: I am not the "poet, essayist, and writer on the arts" with the "Lee Klein" Wikipedia entry.)

The newest news:

Looking forward to July 2016 when New Directions publishes my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya's Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, which received a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award. Here's a short essay on translating it and an excerpt. Excerpts also appear in the next edition of PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers and in the February 2015 issue of Harper's. As a long-time Bernhard fan who speaks Spanish and traveled through El Salvador when I was 23, I pretty much had to translate this, especially once I read Roberto Bolaño's praise in Between Parentheses.

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On February 8, 2016, Vice posted an interview I did with Álvaro Enrigue about his new novel Sudden Death (translated by Natasha Wimmer). And on January 8, 2016, Vice posted my translation of this interview with Ciro Guerra, director of the unforgettable, hypnotic, "Embrace of the Serpent."

On May 27, 2015, Vice posted my translation of this interview with director, Claudia Llosa, about a week after the Philadelphia Review of Books posted A Madeleine for Memories of Bad Teen Sex, a review of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle Book 4.

I've also contributed to two anthologies, one published in April 2015, A Book of Uncommon Prayer: An Anthology of Everyday Invocations Edited by Matthew Vollmer, published by Outpost19, and another in May 2015, Verbivoracious Festschrift, Volume III: The Syllabus, which includes brief streaks of writing about 100 books (I wrote about Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories), edited by an irrepressible youth known as M.J. Nicholls of Glasgow and Goodreads. 

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The Shimmering Go-Between (see below) is now available on Kindle. Also, on March 17, 2015, Vice posted my translation of an interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky --  the 86-year-old writer/director of surreal '70s films like "The Holy Mountain" and "El Topo." A few weeks before that, on February 23, Vice also posted my interview with young Spanish director Eduardo Casanova about his short viral film "Eat My Shit" -- we e-mailed in Spanish and I translated everything into English.

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On December 31, 2014, Proustitute posted a very brief thing I wrote about Jens Bjørneboe's "The History of Bestiality" trilogy.

On December 18, 2014, the Brooklyn Rail posted and printed an ~2K-word review I contributed entitled Warm Core: The Unusually Associative Cyclonic System of Ben Lerner's 10:04

On December 8, 2014, 3AM Magazine posted a review called More Than That: Contemporary Complexity in Mathias Énard’s Street of Thieves

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Psyched that two of the many book-length manuscripts I've worked on over the past decade or so found their way into print in 2014:

Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox became available in beautiful book form on March 4, 2014, thanks to Barrelhouse Books. Here's the first review. This review in Paste Magazine nicely conveys the history and context of these rejections. Here's the Goodreads page for it. Here are my mom's thoughts. Get it here from the publisher. Or Amazon or Powell's.

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The Shimmering Go-Between, a good-natured novel about confronting disbelief, escaping literal and figurative enclosures, and the old literary standbys of longing, love, and loss was published on August 19, 2014, in quality paperback by Atticus Books. It's available now from Atticus or Amazon. Here's the first review. Here's a good review. A quick summary, suitable for today's digital natives, might be "an OMG exploration of WTF." I recently read it over again -- this time through I was thinking about how its events are unhinged but, formally, the language and the plot mechanics are tightly controlled, which syncs with characters' struggles with impulsivity and restraint. In the best possible way, it's like a semi-perverted post-YA novel, replete with author-drawn illustrations like this: 

On August 19, 2014, the day of the novel's official availability, Atticus Review posted Not Quite a 'Manifesto of Sensationalism': Some Thoughts About Some Terms That Might Describe a Novel I Wrote. A paragraph toward the end describes the time Marilynne Robinson workshopped an excerpt from the novel involving an autofellator.

On October 3, 2014, the Brooklyn Rail ran this interview with writer friend Matthew Vollmer -- we talk about both books and the old grad school experience, among other things. 

And then a few days later Book Fight posted its first live podcast on which you can hear me lisping and slurring at some point exactly 49 minutes into it (I recommend listening to the whole thing, of course).

On October 24, 2014, Largehearted Boy posted a playlist of songs I selected for relevance to the novel more than any special place in my heart.

On November 18, 2014, Atticus Books posted upon their site an interview I conducted with myself. I asked myself one-word questions beginning with the prefix "auto-," although the last question begins with "audio-" and relates in excessive detail exposure to a certain band way back in what is commonly referred to as "the day" -- of particular note may be the revelation of information regarding how an extra-sensory instance of a live performance by this band may have influenced a scene in The Shimmering Go-Between.

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On September 23, 2014, Memorious posted a little essayette about how I like the way Thomas Mann likes to endanger solitary young men. 

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In August or maybe September 2014, Barrelhouse published its 13th issue, which includes an essay I contributed called "Thomas Bernhard and the Comedy of Complaint" -- in part, it envisions Thomas Bernhard's experience on Twitter. Here's a photo of a page from the essay that compiles a few of  Bernhard's remarks about writers from his novel Extinction.

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On July 21, 2014, the London-based 3AM Magazine posted an essay/review called Literary Citizenship Depletes Crystal Count and Other Controversial Claims. As noted in the title, I intended for some of what I wrote to be a bit controversial -- and it was! This essay/review also included Tweet embeds and the following magic-eye pic:

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On May 21, 2014, Brad Listi's excellent Other People Podcast aired our interview. I haven't listened to it because my voice freaks me out. All apologies for the sound quality. We don't have a land-line so I had to use Skype but didn't have a headset. Had to use iPhone headphones with a little mic that sound like I'm in the bottom of a deep well of white plastic. Toward the end, I switch to my phone -- apparently the qualty is a little better. I've heard I say "but" to fill silence and clear my throat too often. Anyway, I listened to the Other People Podcast all winter (2013-14) while walking around at lunch. Scroll through the archives. Great interviews to listen to on your commute.

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What else?

I've recently had three dense slabs of text posted at Full Stop. The first bit went up on April 17, 2014 -- it's called Accounting for Taste and includes two illustrations that maybe make me look (in the best possible way) a little like a cross between ET and Mark E. Smith. The second bit went up on April 22, 2014 -- it's a longish one-paragraph spiel mostly about good old American Minimalism in fiction called The Great American Richards. The third one -- called Agents on the Beach -- went up on August 20. It's about the ebb and flow of enthusiasm related to literary creation and responses from agents.

I contributed a ~2K-word review of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle Book Three posted by the Philadelphia Review of Books on April 24, 2014.

Two quotations that appeared in this interview on Vice also appear on interstitial pages (ie, black pages separating proper essays) in the collection of essays, MFA vs NYC published by n + 1 in February 2014. I wrote about it a bit on goodreads -- might write more one day soon.

On November 7, 2013, A Prayer for Lost Phones appeared at McSweeney's Internet Tendency. 

A longish story called "Incantation for Beard Reattachment" (title comes from this scene in Don Quixote) is in the Spring 2013 print issue of The Normal School published by Cal State, Fresno. Not available online.

A short ranty "work" story is in the beautiful/excellent current print issue of Ghost Town, edited by Kevin Moffett, published by Cal State, San Bernardino. Also available online. (Looking forward to publishing in every Cal State lit journal!)

I contributed ~4K words on Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle Book Two and ~3K words on Owen King's Double Feature to the Philadelphia Review of Books on May 23, 2013 and March 20, 2013, respectively — not to mention ~1.5K on Rudolph Wurlitzer's Slow Fade on January 16, 2013.

On December 10, 2012, Full Stop posted a longish essay (~5K words) about Goodreads, critical takedowns, and reviewing in general. 

In the first half of 2012, I contributed several "field reports" to The Silent History, an innovative wireless collaborative project headed by Eli Horowitz, Kevin Moffett, and Matthew Derby that launched October 1, 2012. Lotsa folks these days skulking around East Passyunk in South Philadelphia, their iPads accessing location-specific testimonies about what happened to silent kids in 2017 etc.

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. Not online.

An essay about walking and reading ("libambulating") came out on Swink in April 2011. 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.

A story involving virtual baseball, Atum Ra, and Thorstein Veblen published in 2008 in the third print issue of Canteen is now available online (and accessible in its glorious entirety as long as you're not using Internet Explorer). They nominated this for the Pushcart but it didn't get selected, probably because it involves verboten themes such as video art (ie, filming aspects of one's anatomy).

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. This essay, written in 2005, argues that Bonds and steroids are distractions from unseen/icebergian issues up ahead: turns out I was unconsciously referring to the credit-default swaps/mortgage crisis at the time taking shape that eventually helped capsize the economy in 2008. This is also in an excellent anthology of essays from Barrelhouse. 

A semi-illustrated story called Carry Me Father No More is at AGNI, published by Boston University in May 2007. 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. 

Another story appeared in the 2007 Fall/Winter print edition of The Black Warrior Review, published by the University of Alabama. It's not online, though. An important story for me (a model for how I should write) and a great issue worth tracking down. 

A blurb about a nonexistent book called Cannibals is in The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature, a cool little collection including contributions from a lot of famous writer folks (famous in the online lit world at least) -- an excellent bathroom book if you can find it.

Select older stories/essays, some written in the mid-to-late '90s, appeared herein: 

• Konundrum Engine Literary Review 
• The Barcelona Review (also in Spanish)
• What's Your Exit?: A Literary Detour Through New Jersey (Word Riot; 2010)
• What Happened to Us These Last Couple Years: An Anthology of the Bush Years (Elope/So New; 2008)
• The Encyclopedia of Exes (Three Rivers Press; 2005 -- a stranger noted my contribution in a kind Amazon review)

Currently, eleven copies of Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World can be found online for anywhere between ~$26.94 plus shipping and $2,206.64 plus shipping. Only 250 copies were published by Better Non Sequitur in 2004. I wrote it in '97 or so. Thanks to Steven Coy for putting this together/out. 

Here's the history of the semi-literary site Eyeshot's Hindenburg Complex of Infidels & Crusaders I edited from August 1999 until August 2014. The site was probably best known for the rejection letters I sent and posted for over a decade and for some of the ridiculously good stuff collected here. Over the years, I also posted dozens of stories and little oddities on Eyeshot 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. Brief impressions of new and old books, the latest of which can best be found via the archive, are collected here. Most of these first appeared on Goodreads. 

Otherwise, I live in Philadelphia near the Italian Market and the dueling cheesesteakeries with one wife-type person, one toddler girl-type person, and two cat-type people. I moved to Philly 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.

Here's what I used to look like a long time ago. Here's what I looked like a little before the Y2K apocalypse. Here's a picture of me and my daughter on our birthday weekend in February 2014. Here's my current very serious author photo from November 2014.

To contact electronically: lee at eyeshot.net. (Ask me about my dwindling supply of unpublished manuscripts -- only four novels, two novellas, and a story collection left!). To send gifts: Box 18009 Phila PA 19147. Otherwise, I'm on Facebook -- I rarely use it for anything other than naughty self-promotion and baby pics -- and I inconsistently tweet and post to instagrizzle. 

I once posted 49 sloppy acoustic guitar improvisations here. Lately, I've been posting electric improvised epics you can stream or download here -- these "songs" are also available via iTunes and your favorite podcast app.