Month: August 2007

  • Dead Boy Found

    A few people have written me in recent days, wondering about the short story that eventually became my first novel, One for Sorrow, I’ve posted the story under a Creative Commons license on this website for the curious.  The story originally appeared in Kelly Link’s Trampoline, which is still one of my favorite anthologies to…

  • Time Travel

    Today in class one of my freshman writing students raised his hand to ask me a question and started his sentence by calling me Mr. Chris.  For one brief moment, I was in a classroom of Japanese junior high kids.  Then I blinked and asked him to repeat his question.

  • Village Voice Review

    Elizabeth Hand (Elizabeth Hand!) reviewed One for Sorrow in the Village Voice: One for Sorrow, Christopher Barzak’s lovely, melancholy, offbeat first novel, affectingly captures the emotional centrifuge that is adolescence, with sex and longing the fixed axes around which everything else spins. Fifteen-year-old Adam McCormick’s classmate Jamie is too weird and too much of a…

  • Speechless

    You know, I knew Matt Cheney had declared there would be a Barzak World Domination Day, and that he had contacted some people to blog with him about it. But I spent most of this afternoon between class and gym and class and tv interview seeing that list of links on Mr. Cheney’s Mumpsimus grow…

  • All about me…

    Over at The Swivet there’s a reallllllly long interview with me, and is also giving away copies of One for Sorrow if you answer one question for Colleen in the comments. Hey, free books, what’s not to love? And the so-called Barzak World Domination Day has begun, thanks to the evil machinations of one Matt…

  • Twas the night before…

    Just off to bed. Tomorrow the book releases. My car broke down. But tomorrow my book releases. So all is really really good. Off it goes into the world. Although apparently it’s already arrived at Japan’s doorsteps, according my Japanese mom Fusako, and in London bookshops, according to my friend Graham. Really, I’m still somehow…

  • There goes the neighborhood

    The Lutheran church across the street from my apartment building set up a little performance area tonight, with a backdrop cloth that said “Elvis Lives”. When the sun went down, fifteen cars showed up, then people got out of their cars with folding chairs and arranged them about fifty feet across the parking lot from…

  • Choux Pastry Heart

    I am a sucker for this song for more than one reason. 1.) I’ve been sucked in by Corinne Rae Bailey’s bluesy voice, and I love bluesy voices. And 2.) The way I was introduced to her was just the other day when my friend Paul forwarded me this video because it has part of…

  • Realms of Fantasy

    Doug Cohen, slush reader for Realms of Fantasy, is having an ongoing discussion over a series of posts on his livejournal about the status of speculative short fiction magazines, focusing on the one he knows best, the one he works at, which has led from a post about the slow death of short fiction venues…

  • Fooling Around

    My friend Brooke is helping me do a lot of the local promotion and publicity for my book. The girl knows virtually everyone you need to know around this place to get things noticed, and so my publicist at Bantam sent her a box of books the other week to help when getting in touch…