Last year I wrote a weird Western called
The Sunset Suite. It's actually a set of flash fictions linked by a framing device. The novella is about what happens when cups of coffee turn into tall tales after two cowboys set up camp for the night. 26 cups of coffee in total means 13 weird stories each. So it's a sort of portmanteau novella. The cover of the book is a painting by
Mia Wolff and the paperback edition is less than $5. Now that this book has been published, I have been thinking about the weird Westerns I wrote in the past and those I plan to write in the future.
The first weird Western I wrote was the middle part of my novel Captains Stupendous.
The second was my novel The Honeymoon Gorillas, which I guess can be seen as a collection of linked short-stories rather than a novel.
The third was the collection Weirdly Out West, which contains short-stories, one-act plays, an article, and poems.
The fourth was Yee-Haw, a collection of poems and illustrations with one-act plays and flash fictions.
My next weird Western will be Growl at the Moon, a novel I wrote last summer. It shuld hopefully be published later this year. And next year I plan to start work on another, a novel called Fists of Fleece that I conceived more than thirty years ago but still haven't done anything about. There might be others after that, I don't know.
I have written 1104 stories in the past thirty-three years, but if I had to choose only one to survive an unspecified disaster, I would select the novella
MY RABBIT'S SHADOW LOOKS LIKE A HAND, written in 2019 and published two years later by Eibonvale Press as a chapbook.
The reason I would choose this one is because it showcases all the things about my writing that I regard as most fulfilling to me. It's an integrated work with a philosophical concept at its core and a twist ending; but it also consists of a mosaic of smaller tales and poems, and some of those tales and poems are OuLiPo based; also I believe that the language of the text is lyrical and suitably witty. That's my opinion anyway...
And to my delight, this is also my first work translated into German. Peter Mordio is the person responsible for arranging this alchemy and I am hugely indebted to him. Christian Veit Eschenfelder is the translator; his task was very difficult, and although I won't go so far as to compare him to David Bellos translating Georges Perec, I certainly am amazed that he agreed to tackle such a complex project as my novella.
Der Schatten meines Hasen sieht aus wie eine Hand is available in paperback and also ebook editions and I am hoping it will be the first of many translations of my fiction into German...
