Things are coming along as the July release of Bad Faith gets closer. After a few rounds of edits and cover design meetings and inside design meetings and proofreading and proofreading, we’re almost to the galley stage. Then, some proofreading! The process has actually been pretty cool, and I’ve really enjoyed working with editor Erin McKnight. That the book ended up with Queen’s Ferry Press was a real stroke of luck. More on the book soon, including a preview of the cover in a few weeks.

-My short story “The Missing” (published in The Southern Review last year, and in Bad Faith) was featured on a new book podcast called Story Buds. The series has an interesting premise: the hosts re-imagine the plot of a published story going off of only three sentences from the beginning, middle, and end of the piece in question. (NSFW)

-Last month I mentioned how Julie Iromuanya’s novel Mr. and Mrs. Doctor was named a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize for debut writers. Not satisfied with only one major nomination, Julie’s novel was recently named a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award! Pretty cool stuff for a Lincoln native and UNL creative writing program grad. If you haven’t yet picked up a copy of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor, do so soon.

-Michael Catherwood has a new collection of poems coming out later this spring, If You Turn Around Quickly, that’s currently up for pre-order at the discount price of $8 at this link. Mike writes the best poems about Omaha going (not to play favorites) and his previous collection (Dare) is one I’ve gone back to many times.

-Richard Burgin’s newest short story collection, Don’t Think, came out from Johns Hopkins University Press a couple weeks ago and continues a solid run of Burgin books the last few years. Be sure to check it out!

In Don’t Think, his ninth collection of short fiction, Burgin offers us his most daring and imaginatively varied work to date. The stories explore universal themes of love, family, and time, examining relationships and memory―both often troubled, fragmented, and pieced back together only when shared between characters. In the title story, written in propulsive, musical prose, a divorced father struggles to cling to reality through his searing love for his highly imaginative son, who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. In “Of Course He Wanted to Be Remembered,” two young women meet to commemorate the death of a former college professor with whom they were both unusually close―though in very different ways. In “V.I.N.,” a charismatic drug dealer tries to gain control of a bizarre cult devoted to rethinking life’s meaning in relation to infinite time, while in “The Intruder,” an elderly art dealer befriends a homeless young woman who has been sleeping in his basement.