News + more news + how I learned to teach

A roundup of links and news and so on below:

1. In the past couple weeks, How to Be Safe has gotten starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, and Library Journal. A sample from Booklist: "Combining a deep character study, prescient satire, and an unfortunately all-too-timely evisceration of U.S. gun culture, McAllister’s well-voiced and remarkably observed page-turner is in almost all ways an anti-thriller—itself a comment on the current, terrifying mundanity of similar events."
    
2. In The Washington Post, Ron Charles wrote some of the nicest things anyone has ever written about my work. A sample: "Like nothing else I’ve read, 'How to Be Safe' contains within its slim length the rubbed-raw anxieties, the slips of madness, the gallows humor and the inconsolable sorrow of this national pathology that we have nursed to monstrous dimensions."
    
3. If this sounds like the sort of thing you would like to read, you can pre-order the book from pretty much anywhere.
    
4. How to Be Safe is also on the LibraryReads top 10 list for April. Librarians, as always, are our favorite. 
    
5. I've been adding a lot of events for HTBS. Right now, they're mostly in the Philly area, but I'm continuing to update that page, so please check back occasionally to see if I'll be in your neighborhood. 
    
6. The Millions published another short essay of mine, this time about how I learned to become a better creative writing teacher by breaking away from a default syllabus and giving students more freedom. There's also some discussion of the worst day of class I ever endured. 
    
7. I think that's it.

New book

This is a short, but pretty important, update: I have a new book coming in April 2018. I love the cover (though I never would have guessed I'd be a guy with two books with roses on the cover), and I love the publisher, and I feel extremely grateful to be publishing books at all, let alone to be working with such talented, energetic people. When I showed the manuscript to my agent, she said she loved it, but then warned me that we might not find anyone who's willing to publish it; it's a dark book, and it's a little weird, and so I feel even more fortunate that Liveright is willing to take a chance on this one. 

I'll wait to share all the details, but for now I can say: this is the closest I've ever come to writing the kind of book I've always wanted to write. I tried so many times, but was always too young, or too afraid to take chances, or something. So I am extraordinarily excited to have this book on the way. 

More details soon! Until then, you can pre-order from Amazon and add it to your list on Goodreads (or tell your local indie bookstore you'd like them to order it).

And, hey, if you've read and enjoyed The Young Widower's Handbook, please consider leaving a review at one of those places. User reviews matter more than you might think, and they really help other people find the book. 

Two new essays

Another quick post just to note that I had two new essays published last week. 

First, this piece at The Review Review, in which I offer advice to writers on how to conduct themselves at readings when promoting their books. Here's a sample:

“A lot of these tips, I admit, come down to issues of personality. Your job is to just try to act normal for a couple hours. This is difficult for some people; if you’re an asshole, you can’t fix it, but you can at least try to hide it for a while. Some days, selling even a single book seems impossible. You need to do everything you can to improve the odds.”

Next, Miracle Monocle, the literary magazine from the University of Louisville, released their latest issue, which includes my travel essay, "The Least Authentic of All Experiences." It's a little longer than the travel essays I wrote on this site last summer, and it's about Italy, romance, authenticity, vanity, and a lot of other stuff. A sample of this one:

“ On this trip, we will see so many priceless artifacts that I will get tired of seeing them. Before this vacation, a friend described seeing the Pietà as one of the most moving experiences of his life, witnessing such a profound testament of love and beauty. I look at it for a long time and agree it is well-made, and then I look longer, wondering why I haven’t been moved in the same away. I take a picture and walk to the next sculpture. When we get to the Sistine Chapel, the woman in front of me falls to her knees in tears, and my first thought is: okay, we get it. You’re moved. And my second thought is a deep well of regret for being so cynical I would assume this emotional reaction is contrived. I want very much to be the sort of person who sees amazing art and falls to his knees in wonder, but this doesn’t seem like something you will yourself toward.”

News roundup

It's been a full week of book-related action, including a fun but exhausting trip down to Washington, DC for the AWP conference, where I met a lot of cool, supportive people who were very excited about reading the novel. Full details/links below: 

1) Research Notes at Necessary Fiction - In which I discuss my (probably not great) research habits as a writer, and specifically what I had to research to write The Young Widower's Handbook

2) Salon Author Questionnaire - A group Q & A with authors Cara Hoffman,  Sara Flannery Murphy, Jason Rekulak and Amanda Eyre Ward. Some fun questions in this one, including, "How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?"

3) Huffington Post interview - Brandi Megan Granett asks a few questions about point-of-view, writing masculinity, and more

4) Radio Times interview - I linked this in my last post, but, I don't know, here it is again. A 50-minute interview about writing, teaching, grief, and a lot more. The very bad picture at the top of this post is of the control room at WHYY. 

5) Largehearted Boy playlist - for the great Largehearted Boy site, I compiled a playlist of songs to accompany this book, and talked a bit a bout how music influences my own work. 

6) Review at The Big Smoke - A really nice review by Joseph Edwin Haeger. A sample: “What is appealing about The Young Widower’s Handbook isn’t that it’s funny and entertaining, but that it is both of those things while being honest about grief. Even though it’s a sad book (I mean, what do you expect from the title?), it’s a book full of truths that speak to the full human experience, from happiness to sadness and everything in between.”

7) ADDED 2/14: I wrote a piece for the "If My Book" series on Monkeybicycle, in which I compare the novel to a variety of sights and sounds you'd encounter on a road trip. 

I have events coming up on 2/15 (3:30 at Temple U's Paley Library, and 7 PM at the Cherry Hill Barnes & Noble) and 2/23 at the Tirefire Reading Series in Philly.