has a blog!?!?

featuring some of his latest short stories, the author of Tund and the critically acclaimed Smell has breached the interwebs – perhaps inspired by obamas trip to Prague?

there is joy in mudville, as stories like “Dagger” can now find a worldwide audience. an excerpt:

The sun fell down on California. Inside a large beach villa, lights flared. The place belonged to Pete Dagger, all-star American writer.

Dagger was among the biggest of the writers, perhaps the largest of the era. He was a top multi-millionaire popular artist who was loved by the critics. He was huge with the academics, who sucked from his marrow, and with the underground, which was hot and bothered by his slashing, ripping style and bottomless defiance.

Like many of the greats, Dagger was no genius-come-lately. He had been recognized only after years and years of surviving on ketchup soup and kool-aid, after years and years of struggle up mountains of scorn and indifference. He had survived the painful years of short-story writing; the dabbling in “journalism”; the job stints as dishwasher, data-input man, and motel clerk. He had overcome the harrowing years of hostility and suspicion from friends, colleagues and family. He had prevailed despite his stabbing bouts of doubt; his frightening drunk sprees; a general case of self-loathing.

Few critics had initially discerned Dagger’s particular epochalness. His first book, Copper’s Gold, had received vague, if somewhat polite, notices in the small number of journals that chose to review it (many a career was in fact badly tarnished by the early failure of critics and editors to identify the breadth of Dagger and his achievement). The public response to this sterling volume was similarly rather sluggish, and initial hardback sales of Copper’s Gold petered out at about 910,000 copies.

However, Dagger’s second book, the cutting, bittersweet masterpiece The Sun, Hey, Strawberries, was an instant global paperback best-seller, prompting a renewed wave of interest in Copper’s Gold. The first book had mounted a keen comeback, soon overtaking the second on the sales charts – and to the amazement of Dagger and many others, Pete Dagger had become all the proverbial worldwide rage. With critics from Maine to Madagascar suddenly struggling to say enough good things about these two textual jewels, Dagger was inexorably propelled to the summit of literary regard, a position he maintained to the present day.

read all the rest here on Thor’s little nook on the web. welcome aboard, sailor.