Ken Foster's Blog, page 6

Yesterday I tweeted a story; it was like a tree falling in the woods.

[View the story "Missing: The story of a bird, and the couple who lost him" on Storify]Visit the archive at www.ken-foster.com

The Kind I'm Likely to Get, Special Edition

Back before there were dogs in my life, there were short stories, and I wrote them.  Later this month, Trajectory will be reissuing my collection of short stories, The Kind I'm Likely to Get.  Here's the introduction from the new edition, which explains where the book has been and why now seemed like a good time to reintroduce it to the world:

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The Tenth Good Thing About Brando

From an email I sent on April 16, 2013

When I was in first grade, I wrote my first "published" story, for our school's mimeographed weekly publication. It was a memoir actually. It was the story of our family cat, Puss, who had just passed away. It was only relatively recently that the significance of this first piece of writing came clear to me: this was, at that point in my life, a huge, mysterious event. It read, in it's entirety, "My cat died. My cat is dead." I hadn't learned to be sentim...

Upcoming events in Los Angeles, New Orleans, New Hampshire, Maine and Boston

And then, seriously, the tour is over.

On Saturday April 20th I'll be in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. My panel is at 3:30 and tickets are free, but required. You can buy them here.

On Saturday May 4th, I'll be in New Orleans at the Jazz Festival, signing books at 2pm.

In May I'm zipping up to New England for several events:

Friday May 5th, I'll be the guest speaker at the Concord SPCA's annual Dinner with the Animals.

Saturday, May 6th, I'll be joining Traer Scott fo...

Storming the Capital...with pit bulls

I've been terrible at keeping this blog up to date. TERRIBLE! But today (Friday, March 22nd) I'll be in our nation's Capital for a pit bull adoption day at the US Chamber of Commerce from noon til 2pm. I'll be signing books as well, with the proceeds going to the Washington Humane Society. Tomorrow from 1-3 we'll be at Doggy Style, a DC dog bakery. Then I'm back to Charlottesville for the Virginia Festival of the Book and on home to New Orleans. Visit the archive at www.ken-foster.com

Jake eats an orange

Jake has been settling into life in New Orleans, which, for him, means jumping into orange trees to gorge on fruit. Visit the archive at www.ken-foster.com

Waking up in Memphis

Yesterday I sent the dogs off to Canine Connection and boarded Amtrak for an eight hour train ride to Memphis. I love riding the train, but it was my first time on this stretch of track, and boy, was it bumpy. As one passenger observed, if we had been on a plane, we wouldn't have been allowed out of our seats the whole time. But it beat driving.




I went straight to bed and woke this morning just in time to frantically iron, shower and change for three TV interviews on Memphis morning shows. In...

Most unnecessary souvenir? Oh, Jake, not really!

In my most recent email newsletter, I referred briefly to Jake as the most unnecessary souvenir of 2012, and claimed he was a gift from the city of New York. But this is only partially true. Jake is a strange little 62-pound dog, part basset hound, part mastiff, who was tied to the front of my editor's Harlem apartment building after Hurricane Sandy. I first learned of him in my editor's frantic, middle-of-the-night Facebook posts, and, as a favor, posted his ridiculous mug online, hoping som...

Rainn Wilson on "I'm a Good Dog"

“This is a brilliant bible of the glorious, gorgeous terriers.”
—Rainn Wilson, star of The Office

A few weeks ago, Rainn Wilson, who apparently has three pit bulls along with a wife and child, tweeted about my new book, I'm a Good Dog. I might have completely missed this, except that someone at Penguin discovered it within minutes and sent it to my publicist, who sent it to me. And, of course, I thought, "Well, if I'd known he had pit bulls I would have asked him to be in the book!"

Early on (in...

I'm a Good Dog--Book Trailer & Tour Dates

Time flies! We're just four days away from publication--and I'm busy packing and spending extra time with my own dogs as I prepare to hit the road. I'll be posting blog updates from the tour at Stubby Dog, and of course, I hope to run into everyone in person along the way.

I've also been lucky to get some early coverage of the book, including in The Atlantic Magazine's "Cities" site, Bark Magazine, Writers Digest and Animal Farm Foundation's blog. AFF was incredibly generous while I was resea...