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Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

Content Note: This book contains accounts of suicide, suicidal crisis, and the deaths of family members, friends, and companion animals. Part Five includes detailed accounts of suicidal ideation and completed suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by phone or text at 988. The Crisis Text Line is available by texting HOME to 741741.

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I Wrote the Book I Was Born to Write

Fifty years is a long time to prepare for a single sentence. I did not know I was preparing. I thought I was living, which I was, and writing, which I was, and teaching, which I was, and publishing, which I was. I thought the Fractional Fiction novels and the EleMenTs trilogy and the Prairie Voice reporting and the Human Meme episodes and the dramatic literature and the ASL linguistics and the cultural criticism were separate projects, separate impulses, separate rooms in the interior country I have been building since I was old enough to read. They were not separate. They were all rehearsals for this.

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Miscast: The Playwright Decides, and No One Else Gets a Vote

There is a moment in the life of every playwright when someone walks into a rehearsal room and announces that the character you wrote is not, in fact, the character you wrote. The director has a vision. The institution has a policy. The casting committee has decided that your Irish Catholic mother from the Southside of Chicago would be better served by an actress who has no connection to the world you built because connection, in the current theatrical climate, is less important than representation, and representation is whatever the people who control the stage say it is. You sit there. You watch your play become someone else’s argument. And you have two choices: you can let it happen, or you can pull the production.

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The Westborough Crusaders: The Trilogy That Took Forty-Four Years to Earn Its Novels

Some work waits for you. Not patiently. Not the way a dog waits by the door, loyal and uncomplicated. It waits the way a diagnosis waits in a family’s bloodline, silently present, expressing itself in symptoms you do not recognize until you are old enough to understand what your body has been trying to tell you. In 1982, I was sixteen years old, living in the Midwest, and I sat down and wrote eight episodes of a television series called The Westborough Crusaders. I did not know I was writing the first draft of a trilogy. I thought I was writing television. I was wrong, but I would not understand how wrong for another four decades.

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The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf

I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.

The God in the Wire book cover

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Cat Heads in Space: The Novel That Grew a Body

Some books begin as sentences. Others begin as outlines or fragments scrawled on napkins at two in the morning. This one began as a sound. Specifically, it began as the sound of my own voice reading a line about a cat head floating through space in a Life Helmet, arguing with another cat head about whether their ship had a name, and realizing that the argument was funnier and sadder and more philosophically loaded than anything I had planned for it to be. That was twenty-eight episodes ago. The episodes lived on the Human Meme podcast as a serialized audio drama called Cat Heads in Space, and for years, that was where the story existed: in the air, in the performance, in the space between my microphone and the listener’s ear. Today, the story has a body. Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem is now available from David Boles Books as a novel.

Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem book cover

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Beautiful Numbness: The Book I Have Been Writing for Fifty Years

Every book has a birthday, but not every book has a conception date. Some books arrive late and fast, fully formed, demanding to be transcribed before they vanish. The Last Living American White Male was like that. Others accumulate across decades, assembling themselves in the background of a life, borrowing material from every stage and every failure and every standing ovation until the writer finally sits down and discovers that the book has already been written in the margins of everything else. Beautiful Numbness: Art, Sedation, and Twenty-Five Centuries of the Standing Ovation is that kind of book. It was conceived when I was ten years old. It has taken me more than half a century to deliver it. It is now available as a Kindle ebook, a paperback, and a free PDF download from David Boles Books.

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The Last Living American White Male: A Novel of Obsolescence and Love

The title may make you uncomfortable. That was the point. For the past year, I have been living inside a grey city that exists only in my imagination, spending my days with a garbage man named Robert James Miller and an administrative processing unit named Alma. Today, their story is finally available to readers. The Last Living American White Male is now published as both a Kindle ebook and a paperback through David Boles Books. This is not the book I expected to write. I had other projects in the queue, other obligations stacking up on the desk. But Robert and Alma would not leave me alone. They kept appearing in the margins of my notes, in the half-awake hours before dawn, in the silence between other sentences. Some characters arrive politely and wait their turn. These two broke down the door.

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Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

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Passage Land: What Do the Living Owe the Dead?

Some questions cannot be answered. They can only be inhabited. For sixteen decades, three families have occupied the same stretch of Nebraska prairie, and for sixteen decades they have been asking variations of the same question: what do the living owe the dead? Passage Land is my attempt to inhabit that question long enough to understand why it refuses resolution.

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