The phone books are here! The phone books are here! Er, uh, I mean—the Suspicious Anatomy book launch is here! My first book! Check it:

Not since Galen’s De Elementis has been set in ink a single compendium of medicological knowledge so extensive & practicably useful as SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY Workbook No. 15: The Human Cranius. Having intrinsic value to all persons—piratical, mysterious, upright, or otherwise—The Human Cranius is a PEERLESS GEM of uncanny truth. If you are a living human, you should make frequent, unabashed forays into this field guide to your hideous secondary body—the cranius, an organ-matrix & carnival of fangs which is trying to destroy you even as you read this sentence…

From the genre-chainsawing minds of the Hollow Earth Society (Ethan Gould and, moi, Wythe Marschall) comes “the definitive guide to the horrifying world inside you”—finally available in lush, illustrated paperback!

In the tradition of John Hodgman, David Cronenberg, and H. P. Lovecraft, The Human Cranius explores an alternative anatomy at once mesmerizing and deeply unsettling. Gould and Marschall ask: What do we know about our own bodies? The answer: Very little…

In many ways, the art and human studies of modernity have given us the keys to our unconscious minds, but have left entirely to dry science (fixing plumbing, testing drugs) the workings of our bodies. What does it feel like to have guts? To face disease, age, mutation—in short, a self that is not only not whole but not even on its own side?

The SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY series seeks to address these physio–psychomological imbalances by producing, for your benefit, the entire unconscious of the body, the shadow-self, in words and elaborate images.

The official Human Cranius book launch, at Observatory Room in Brooklyn, will feature a lecture, medicological film snippets, and a live human dissection. Join us!

Of the Literary variety. Danger! Adventure! Perhaps misadventure! Check it out: Literary Death Match. Thursday, May 20, at Bowery Poetry Club.

If you want to see me win this DEATH MATCH… buy some cheap tickets.

Here’s the party line:

Not for the faint of heart, LDM NYC’s 26th episode promises to tantalize and titillate your most sensitive literary bits. We’ve assembled an army of brilliant judges — literary renegade Richard Nash, subversive comedian Jena Friedman and blogger/author/goddess Paulina Porizkova — to hold sway over the unruly proceedings.

A hodgepodge of lovable deviants will battle it out on the Bowery Poetry Club stage, including Melissa Febos, author of WHIP SMART, King of Counterculture Mike Edison (High Times, Screw), devilish storyteller Wythe Marschall (representing Electric Literature), and laconic absurdist-or-is-he Mike Topp, author of Shorts are Wrong and Happy Ending.

And—holy shit—it’s a Culture Mob article about the show.

If you live in New York, perhaps you really should come and see me win, on behalf of my friends’ stellar journal, Electric Literature. I will be winning via a story about a cowboy. I have many of them. Devil I am. Words I pitch, via fork, into flames. Pass the flask. All I read is words. If I had a car or a chuck wagon, all I would do is ride around shining:

This Saturday at 8 p.m., I’ll be playing the Logician in The Mighty Theater’s one-night-only production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, a long, funny play about… well, conformity, drinking, logic, and rhinos, among other things. The show’s in Peekskill, at the Paramount. Here are the full details. And here is LoHud’s sneak-peak. Those in the Hudson/Westchester/MetroNorth region, check it.

FUN FACT: Rhinos are perissodactyls, or odd-toed ungulates. Looking up “perissodactyl” on Wikipedia yielded my new favorite sentence of the week, my emphasis:

In contrast to the Ruminant Artiodactyl ungulates, perissodactyls are hindgut fermenters; that is, they digest plant cellulose in their intestines rather than stomach.

Actually, I didn’t meant to fool anyone, but I had Personal Crises going on last Wednesday which prevented me from reading with Mac “The Man” Wellman and others. I have apologized profusely to the Turnstyle coordinator and hope to still be allowed into the CUNY Graduate Center on occasion.

Reasons I highly respect the CUNY GC:

• Survived a mind-blowing Ph.D. history class there on the rise of Arab nationalism after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Now all I read are history books.
• Bought some wonderful outdated travel guides to the Middle East at a GC Library booksale.
• Saw Francisco Goldman and Junot Diaz interview each other in the GC theater. Hilarious, inspiring, death-defying, etc. Ran out and read all their books.
• Spartan website.
• Tried McDonald’s coffee once near the GC; could not endure said coffee; pondered long/hard about how coffee could possibly taste that much like burning tire. Found out the GC has pretty decent coffee.

&c.

Next Wednesday at 6:30, I’m reading in with hyper-inventive playwright Mac Wellman, Fiction co-founder and Edge.org contributor Mark Mirsky, and fellow MFA students Anna Marrian, Kerry Carnahan, Diana Redman, Tejas Desai, Michelle Brule, JP Howard, and Laurel Kallen.

Your mission, should you choose to venture to Midtown after work for a dose of (possible) culture and (probable) humor:

Wed., 1 April, 6:30 p.m.
Martin E. Segal Theatre
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Ave at 34th
Free

The Turnstyle reading series “features the faculty and students of four CUNY graduate creative writing programs.” Performers “will read a mix of non-fiction, plays, fiction, and poems.”

More info at www.centerforthehumanitiesgc.org.

TWIMC (to whom it may concern): I’ve been asked to “rouse the crowd” with a short story before writer-drawer Jonathan Ames takes the stage.

Feel free to stop by and drink free wine and eat free cheese, if so inclined. Ames (The Alcoholic and Wake Up, Sir!, among others) is a funny dude: He reminds me at times of John Hodgeman and the guy who writes Achewood.

The reading will take place this Friday, 6 Feb., at 7:00 p.m. at the 63rd St Y (at Amsterdam Ave., near Lincoln Center/Columbus Circle), in the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater. The 63rd St Y asks for a $5 donation.

***

Future Readings/Book Signings At 63rd St:

20 Feb. - Roger Rosenblatt, author of Rules for Aging, Children of War, Lapham Rising, and Beet (from which he will be reading).

20 Mar. - James Tate, author of The Lost Pilot and many other amazing books of poetry. Personal hero.

3 Apr. - David Means, author of A Quick Kiss of Redemption, Assorted Fire Events, The Secret Goldfish, and more.

24 Apr. - Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm, The Black Veil, Right Livelihoods (a collection of three novellas from which he will be reading), and more.