Sam Weller's Blog, page 2

Ray Bradbury at 100

Recently, I sat down with my friend Dana Gioia for a wide-ranging conversation about Ray Bradbury’s many contributions to culture and literature on the occasion of Bradbury’s Centennial. Dana is the former Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the former Poet Laurette of California. Our discussion ran in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Check it out here.

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DARK BLACK BOOK TRAILER

DARK BLACK

My new book of short stories is now available for pre-order directly from the publisher. To be totally candid, publishers and artists, sadly, don’t see much return, if anything, from books sold on Amazon. Buying direct from the publisher is the best way to support the future of quality book publishing. The team at Los Angeles-based Hat and Beard Press, along with illustrator Dan Grzeca, and myself, have poured our absolute hearts out into this project. There are 20 beautiful illustrations to...

MY NEXT BOOK

My debut short story collection, Dark Black, will be released April 21, 2020 by Los Angeles-based Hat & Beard Press. I’m honored that it will be the first book in H & B’s new literary fiction imprint.

As of now, the book has 20 stories in it, including a few you may be familiar with like, “The Girl in the Funeral Parlor,” “Conjuring Danny Squires,” “Live Forever!” and several others that have been published in lit journals and anthologies. But there are also many new stories that I am so excited...

RAY BRADBURY'S CENTENNIAL

2020 marks the centennial of the great Ray Bradbury! Ray always told me he wanted to live to 100. And we can help him do this by keeping the man and his work very much alive in the hearts and minds of future generations!

I am currently booking centenary events. If you are interested in celebrating Ray Bradbury at your festival, library, high school, college or university, contact me.

Here are just a few of the Bradbury-centered presentations and workshops I can lead:

• The Man Behin...

NEXT BOOK!

People have been asking me what’s next? Several projects, actually. Beginning with my debut short story collection, Dark Black. All credit must go to the nearly impenetrable grind-core splendor of U.K.’s Mutation for the inspiration behind this title. When I first heard it, I absolutely loved it.

I flew to New York with my stellar wife two weeks ago and we had an amazing Manhattan evening with my agents, Judith Ehrlich and Sophia Seidner. This collection is Ray Bradbury’s The October Country fused with a fair...it.

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Next Book!

People have been asking me what’s next? Several projects, actually. Beginning with my debut short story collection, Dark Black. All credit must go to the nearly impenetrable grind-core splendor of U.K.’s Mutation for the inspiration behind this title. When I first heard it, I absolutely loved it.

I flew to New York with my stellar wife two weeks ago and we had an amazing Manhattan evening with my agents, Judith Ehrlich and Sophia Seidner. This collection is Ray Bradbury’s The October Country f...

THE BRIEFNESS OF ETERNITY

I am haunted. Some days, more than others. I suppose we all are. We all are inhabited by apparitions of one form or another. Loss. Grief. Anxiety. Failure. Confusion. Rejection Self-loathing. Depression. Loneliness. Shattered hearts.

I was thinking about all of this shit today as I took a walk, the comatose Midwest spring resisting it’s perennial resuscitation.

I am deeply drawn to art that dances with loneliness and melancholy. It is sewn through much of my own short fiction. The short story...

Unsolicted Advice for Writers

It’s been awhile since I served up a heaping chaffing dish of unsolicited advice for writers. Yeah, sure, everyone with a blog and the near sentience of a low-IQ squirrel can offer up wisdom for would-be-writers. But here’s the deal—I have been writing professionally since 1993. That’s (gulp) a quarter freaking century. I have probably published close to a million words if you count the books, the feature stories, reviews, comic book scripts, radio scripts, short stories and essays. And I ha...

WICHITA IN OCTOBER

In early October, I delivered the keynote address at the Kansas Association of the Teachers of English Conference. I have been outspoken about the relatively recent willful political attempt to strip-mine public schools and public libraries of funding in order to cultivate an uniformed constituency (see this Chicago Tribune article).

Here’s the damn deal: censorship is going on right this very minute, right before our very eyes. It’s not happening vis-à-vis high-profile, ALA banned book lists or Hitlerean book bur...article).

Here’sTribune