"First off, our next book will be Put Your Head in My Lap, a collection of flash fiction by Claudia Smith, a wonderful writer I've loved ever since reading her award-winning chapbook, The Sky is a Well (Rose Metal Press). This new collection is full of emotionally taut and sweetly melancholic stories that evoke the pain of lost love and broken families. Cover art will be by the awesome Hayley Barker. Look for it in September. You can pre-order it in mid-July on our books page."

• "Marks"
• "Valentine"

My shorts "Window", "Overflow", and "Autumn" are up now at Action, Yes. The stories relate to a song and painting by the artist and musician Dan Grissom. All three of these shorts involve the changing of one season into another...summer into fall, spring into summer, and fall into winter. Also in this issue are stories by Amy Clark, Elizabeth Ellen, and Girija Tropp.

If you aren't familiar with Dan Grissom's work, check out his artwork and music ..... Some Say Leland and Dan Grissom's art

Description: Novel about a war waged by a group of balloonists against the month of February.

Here is his site: Light Boxes

Here are some of my thoughts on the book:

Light Boxes is a wonderful, strange little book. The book delights in the landscape of childhood fantasies and literature; there are balloons, kites, teacups, parchment letters, secret passages, and ghosts. With a palpable affection for these worlds, Shane Jones also explores the human condition, leading his characters through a cliffhanger that will keep you reading.

This is the kind of book that's best digested in one sitting. Jones has an intuitive feel for mixing the everyday with the sublime. The personification of February, the explorations of utopia and our own sense of mortality, put me more in mind of George MacDonald than Lewis Carroll. There is an archaic sense of loneliness, and deep sympathy for humanity, in Jones' words. Striking, visceral, atmospheric, and absorbing.

My friend and editor Kathleen Rooney is going on book tour with Kyle Minor. Here is their tour blog

Live Nude Girl in the Devil's Territory blog.

A diary of the Spring 2009 Live Nude Girl In the Devil's Territory Tour,a 25-city traveling literary circus in support of Kathleen Rooney's memoir Live Nude Girl and Kyle Minor's story collection In the Devil's Territory. Special guests include Daniel Handler a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, Steve Almond, Joshuah Bearman, and more!

I'm ordering Kathy's memoir about art modeling, Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object, as soon as I can. If anyone reads this who lives in one of the places Kathy and Kyle Minor are visiting, I encourage you to go. Wish they were coming to SA.