A literary magazine in California, Kelp Journal, asked me for a piece of short fiction in 2019, and I handed them 2 linked stories. Both are about racism in my fictional town of Calaveras Beach, and both are based on real events. Bronzeville Beach and Supper Club deals with the first known black surfer in America, Nick Gabaldón, and gives us the town’s reaction to an African-American community expanding near a segregated strip of sand. Lighthouse Scene for Miles gives us the reaction of the town to a young Miles Davis, who really did play the beachside Lighthouse Café in 1953.

A collection of interviews about The Desert and the Sea is hard to miss if you scroll down the page, or click here, but what may not be completely obvious is that links in German can be found by clicking to the left, while a great deal of English-language media can be browsed to the right. It’s a rich record of things I’ve said in public about Somali pirates and the long hostage nightmare.

Günter Schabowski was an unloved apparatchik of the East German government who brought down the Berlin Wall, inadvertently, during a rushed news conference on a new policy of tolerance for East Germans who were leaving the country in droves. Thirty years ago today he flubbed the announcement, and threw the government into confusion — which opened border crossings in the Wall, which started a chain reaction that collapsed the entire Communist bloc. Here’s a definitive English video about the whole thing by Deutsche Welle. Schabowski died in 2015, on November 1, and since then the Mauerfall anniversary also serves as a tribute to the Cold War’s last accidental hero.

Very pleased to announce that I’ll be disappearing this March to the sleety wilds of southern New Hampshire, for a MacDowell Colony fellowship, to work on a new novel.