Who’ll get me a book I ain’t read….

Oh, where to begin?

It seems like the publishing market — or, at least, the small press and indie lit markets — like to work in tandem, with everyone publishing stuff all at once. It’s like our literary periods are in synch or something. I say this because a lot of my friends and acquaintances have been announcing new publications recently. And since I like to plug the writers I know, I figured I’d try to issue a bunch of plugs all in one place.

So, here goes. And I’ll just tackle this alphabetically, because trying to sort it all chronologically would take up NaNoWriMo time.

Looking for a writer you know? Use these handy — UPDATED with a new writer! — links to skip through the list! Because I have news about and publications by loads of writers, including

• Hobie Anthony
• Christopher Cook
• Molly Gaudry
• Wayne Lee Gay
• Dena Rash Guzman
• Hosho McCreesh
• Riley Michael Parker
• Stephen Schwegler and Eirik Gumeny
• Ryan Werner

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Portland writer Hobie Anthony has loads of work all over the web and in print, but his most recent piece is the flash fiction “The Theater of Normal People” over at Housefire.

He also has a piece forthcoming in Palimpsest sometime this month, and another story will eventually turn up in Ampersand Review, where I published a while back (I love that Hobie and I are going to be literary neighbors now!).

You can find links to more of Hobie’s work at his website.

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Christopher Cook, who lives in Prague but hails from Port Neches, Texas, where I also spent part of my childhood, has a whole slew of things going on right now. He has three pieces available through Amazon — two novellas and a collection of three stories — that operate together as a kind of long narrative cycle, with shared settings and so on. So if you plan to read Cloven Tongues of Fire, for example, you might as well go ahead and download Storm and Tiger Ridge, too, because you’d be cheating yourself otherwise. (Christopher’s artist wife, Katerina Pinosova, did two of the covers. Which is very cool.)

You can also read a free excerpt from Christopher Cook’s novel Robbers in the newest issue of SOL: English Writing in Mexico, which just went online today. I should warn you, though: if you start reading that excerpt, you’ll want to go ahead and just buy the whole novel, because Robbers is gripping, hellaciously fun stuff. I read it a month or so ago and was spellbound. Really damn fine fiction.

You can find out more about Christopher Cook and his fiction at his website.

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Molly Gaudry, writer, bookseller, and friend to small presses and indie publishers across the country — and founder and director of The Lit Pub, the coolest online bookstore/literary social community you’re going to find out there — had HUGE news this fall: her book We Take Me Apart was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards for Poetry. Which is just epic. But then it gets even cooler — because We Take Me Apart defies easy categorization, this book that was a finalist in a major poetry prize also has been nominated for the McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns First Novel Prize. Go figure.

But that’s how cool Molly is.

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Oklahoma native and a former classmate of mine, Wayne Lee Gay, is kicking literary ass lately, too. His memoir “Bird of Paradise” is appearing in cream city review, a publication I admired a lot when I lived and worked in Wisconsin (it’s published out of the U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). And, even more impressively, Wayne’s story “Ondine” is in Best Gay Stories 2011. Seriously, gang: a Best anthology! That’s awesome. And well deserved, too — Wayne was one of the finest prose stylists I had the privilege of studying with down at the University of North Texas, and I still think fondly on some of the excellent stories and essays he wrote for our workshops. I don’t recognize the titles of either of these pieces, though, so I’m really looking forward to reading new work from him! (You can read the first page of “Ondine” in Amazon’s “Look Inside!” feature.)

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And then there’s Dena Rash Guzman. Dena, Dena, Dena. Another Portland writer, she has been basically tearing up the literary world.

Her essay “Not For All The Tea In China,” a guest post at The Faster Times, has one of the most killer first paragraphs I’ve seen in an essay, and I dare you not to get sucked into it.

She also has a terrific new poem, “Mexican Coke,” at Ink Node, and she has a short new piece, “I Dream In Italics, Eat In Mandarin and Order In English At the Noodle Shop” at Sqwawk Back.

As if all the pubs weren’t enough, Dena’s also heading to Shanghai — actually, is being flown to Shanghai! — for a book release with HAL, a publisher for whom Dena is the North American director.

And Dena has two stories included in HAL’s next book, Middle Kingdom Underground, which should turn up on our shelves here in the US sometime in January; AND she also was featured in the first Viva Las Vegas Poets Anthology. (I really need to get into the anthology business.)

And because all of that isn’t enough, she has two more pieces forthcoming online, at www.asiancha.com and on the www.haliterature.com website.

Oh, and in a couple of months, she’ll be at Lolita Bar in NYC to feature at the Earshot series, so if you’re in the area on Jan. 19, stop by and tell her hello.

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Hosho McCreesh, whose poetry collection inspired my NaNoWriMo novel, has recently published a short story ebook with mendicant bookworks. The story, “Something That’s True,” is generating a bit of buzz online, both at Poet Hound and at Orange Alert Press, and if it’s anything as good as the novel excerpt he ran in Sententia‘s special “pitch” issue this September, the buzz is well deserved!

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Yet another Portland writer, Riley Michael Parker, has a new story out today in — wait for it — PANK. As in, that literary magazine we all wish we could get published in. He just got published in. Seriously. Which is awesome, so go check out “Silver Dagger.” You can thank me later.

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My cohorts over at Jersey Devil Press have also been busy! Stephen Schwegler and Eirik Gumeny‘s book, Screw the Universe, has been out as an ebook for a while now, but just a couple of weeks ago, it became available on Amazon as a full-grown paperback (“Just like grandma used to make,” Stephen says). I confess I have’t read it yet, but it’s supposed to be hilarious, and I love the stuff Stephen and Eirik write, so join me in rushing over to check it out.

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And, last and possibly least (just kidding, Ryan), we have Ryan Werner. Ever the prolific — and talented — bastard, Ryan has been on such a publishing run lately that he’s had to make his own damned list, which you can check out at his lit magazine/blog Our Band Could Be Your Lit. The short version: he has something like half a dozen stories currently online or coming soon to a lit journal near you, and I can tell you, they’re all worth reading. All joking aside, Ryan is a hell of a talented writer, and I’m proud to know the guy.

Ryan will also have two pieces in the upcoming December issue of Unshod Quills, which is edited by Dena Rash Guzman. Remember Dena? Yeah, she edits Unshod Quills, too. And Ryan’s gonna be in that in December.

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Wow. Am I done yet?

Only for now, gang.

Do I know you and I left you out? Feel free to leave a reference to your work — or even a link, if it’s online — in the comments!

(Oh, PS: the title of this post? It’s a line from Abe Lincoln: “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.”)