An essay about Barry Bonds and steroids and the good ol’ USA that once was published in Barrelhouse is also in the Best American Non-Required Reading 2007. This essay, written in 2005, argues that Bonds and steroids are distractions from unseen/icebergian issues up ahead: turns out I was unconsciously referring to the credit-default swaps/mortgage crisis at the time taking shape that eventually helped capsize the economy in 2008. This is also in an excellent anthology of essays from Barrelhouse. And I semi-recently posted it here.
On December 10, 2012, Full Stop posted a longish essay (~5K words) about Goodreads, critical takedowns, and reviewing in general.
In 2005, an essay about my half-Jewishness appeared in an anthology from Soft Skull Press called Half-Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes.
On September 23, 2014, Memorious posted a little essayette about how I like the way Thomas Mann likes to endanger solitary young men.
An essay about walking and reading (“libambulating”) came out on Swink in April 2011. For years when I lived in Philadelphia I libambulated daily in the warmer months, covering about 2 miles a day at lunch, plus another 3.5 miles if I walked to/from work instead of biked. Also posted it here in Dec 2025.
In August or maybe September 2014, Barrelhouse published its 13th issue, which includes an essay I contributed called “Thomas Bernhard and the Comedy of Complaint” — in part, it envisions Thomas Bernhard’s experience on Twitter and compiles a few of Bernhard’s remarks about writers from his novel Extinction. This essay, in somewhat expanded form, is immediately accessible here too.
On July 21, 2014, the London-based 3AM Magazine posted an essay/review called Literary Citizenship Depletes Crystal Count and Other Controversial Claims. As noted in the title, I intended for some of what I wrote to be a bit controversial — and it was!
On November 7, 2013, A Prayer for Lost Phones appeared at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and then in April 2015 in A Book of Uncommon Prayer: An Anthology of Everyday Invocations, edited by Matthew Vollmer, published by Outpost19.
In May 2015, Verbivoracious Festschrift, Volume III: The Syllabus, which includes brief streaks of writing about 100 books (I wrote about Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories), appeared — it’s edited by an irrepressible youth known as M.J. Nicholls of Glasgow and Goodreads.