Publications
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Gone in the Night
Upon arriving at a remote cabin in the redwoods, Kath and her boyfriend find a mysterious younger couple already there — the rental has apparently been double-booked. With nowhere else to go, they decide to share the cabin with these strangers until the next morning. When her boyfriend disappears with the young woman, Kath becomes obsessed with finding an explanation for their sudden breakup— but the truth is far stranger than she could have imagined.
PODCASTS
Harley Quinn and The Joker: Sound Mind
In “Harley Quinn and The Joker,” when we meet Dr. Harleen Quinzel, she’s fresh out of grad school, a new psychologist at Arkham Asylum who’s determined to help the patients her colleagues have written off. But her dad is sick, and in need of an expensive, life-saving operation she can’t afford. Pushed to her breaking point, Harleen is tired of playing by the rules. So when she meets “Patient J,” a magnetic inmate able to manipulate everyone but her, Harleen makes a fateful decision: to use her relationship with The Joker to get what she wants, leading both of them down a dangerous path that will change them, Bruce Wayne — and Gotham City — forever.
Phreaks
The year is 1970. Emma Gable, a blind teenager coming of age in a small industrial town in Western New York, is about as far from the seismic cultural transformations rocking campuses and city streets across America as a person can get. Emma escapes the chaos of her dysfunctional family by dialing up random numbers on the phone in her bedroom, just to see who'll answer.
But when a fateful call connects her to a mysterious band of proto-hackers calling themselves "Phone Phreaks", the revolution comes home, changing Emma's life for good. Because, Bell Telephone, the world's biggest corporation, is not amused that a handful of teenagers suddenly have the power to seize control of its vast and lucrative network and bend it to their will.
An Audible Original, directed by Shaina Feinberg
Sandra
Helen thought her new job would help her forget her dreary hometown, but working behind the curtain on everyone’s favorite A.I. isn’t quite the escape she expected.
Produced by Gimlet Media.
Books
The Silent History
The first major serialized, exploratory novel written and designed for iPad and iPhone, now available in print form from FSG.
"A compelling story about difference, rights and power." The Guardian
"Has the energy of an airport page-turner, with the coherence and ambition of a more earnest book." The Economist
"Here is a novel at once fun, clever and humane with the scope to outlast its hipper-than-thou origins." The Independent
"An ingenious variety of perspectives and locations that create a richly textured vision of a dystopian future." Publishers Weekly
"A landmark project that illuminates a possible future for e-book novels." LA Times
"Entirely revolutionary." Wired
Super Flat Times: Stories
"Beneath the busily mutating surface weirdness, the stories are rife with abandonment and loss." Village Voice
Full Metal Jhacket
Available from University of Michigan Press
Chapbook
The Snipe
She walked up to the driver’s side door and stood with her hands at her sides. The young man did not move. She saw, in his eyes, a tightness that might have been a well-concealed panic.
“I know what you have in there,” she said.
Anthologies
The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, edited by Ben Marcus
The Apocalypse Reader, edited by Justin Taylor
Dzanc Books Best of the Web 2009
Stories
January in December
In Guernica
He opened the box and looked at the rocket launcher. It looked like nothing, like a big black tube with a trigger and a stock. He picked up one of the rockets and hefted it in his palm. It was freezing cold in his hand. He breathed on it, which only made it wet.
Full Metal Jhacket
The floor was covered with a jagged spread of magazines, Fangoria and Starlog and Mad and Black Belt and Rolling Stone, their covers half-torn, dog-eared, folded backwards, drawn on and cut up. Disemboweled action figures dangled from strings where the boys had hung and flogged them with mini souvenir baseball bats. A burned, melted Millennium Falcon sat precariously on the edge of a half-empty fish tank, which was furry with dark green algae.
The Sound Gun
In Conjunctions
I went upstairs and ate a Starburst on the bed.
Behavior Pilot
In Failbetter
Helping Aescha down the man-hole, I felt the weight of her body, the true weight--I had her by the hips, guiding her down the thin rails of the step ladder, and I could feel this other body going on inside her, this thing that would, birthed in glaring, nude stupidity, reach out for the world, for whoever in the immediate area gave the sincerest impression that they cared about it.
Mammal: The Unicorn
In The Believer
At night, our daughter stayed up late, sewing articles of clothing for the unicorn. “Do you think she’ll need mittens?” she would ask. “I don’t know. I don’t know about unicorns,” I said.
Yeti
In Smallwork
“Look at that yeti,” Murphy said instead, gesturing with his sandwich at The Yeti, who was assembling a window-washing nozzle on the soccer field at the bottom of the hill. The Yeti’s real name was Laura, but on the first day, when all the summer workers got put into teams, Murphy had called her The Yeti and that was the end of the name Laura for her.
Essays
SXSW OnDemand
The Believer online exclusive
Maybe I feel this way, though, only because my life has largely been about not doing things, and then finding ways to make the things I don’t do ridiculous or undesirable in order to destroy their seductive power.
Not Enough Protection from the Song
The Believer online exclusive
This cannot possibly sound like a compliment, which it is, but the chaotic, fervent night had all the trappings of a public burning, wherein the Arcade Fire were the fierce, indignant victims, railing out against the injustice of their sentence as the crowd tossed whatever would burn into the conflagration.
Well-Dressed Men Sing Songs for Oblivion
The Believer Issue 1
I can’t tell which of the two is scarier—Paul Banks with his I’m-not-really-here-right-now stare or Carlos Dengler, dressed like an extra from The Hunger.