The NEA Big Read

On tuesday, may 6, I'll be reading with Leslie Pietrzyk at The Arts Club of Washington, 2017 I Street, NW, at 7 p.m.

Free liquor.

Fine Arts Work Center June 15-20

I'll be teaching for a week at good ole' FAWC....

a profile of RD Jr

Washington City Paper story

The Washington City Paper has written a nice piece on a group effort I'm part of to start a writing tutoring center here in DC. You can find the article here.

Paragraph NY

On Friday, February 1st at 8:30pm, I'm going to be reading with an amazing writer named Nam Le, the author of the forthcoming short story collection The Boat, at Clay, 25 West 14th Street, sponsored by Paragraph, the writer's place on 14th Street.

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink

This book has about twelve thousand stories and many cartoons that mention food, all pulled from The New Yorker, going back to the 1920s. There are stories by Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach, Don DeLillo, Janet Malcolm, Steve Martin, M.F.K Fisher and many others. Every story has some food in it. A story of mine with a chicken in it, cooked in a special way, appears here as well. The story is called, "There Should Be A Name For it."

The New Granta Book of the American Short Story

Richard Ford has edited a second enormous volume of short stories for Granta. A story I wrote a little while back called "Issues I Dealt With In Therapy" is in it, among stories by T.C. Boyle, Sherman Alexie, Nell Freudenberger, Mary Gaitskill, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore, Raymond Carver, Thom Jones, Z.Z. Packer, Tobias Wolff, John Updike, Denis Johnson, John Cheever, Mary Gaitskill, and MANY OTHERS!

reviewed in

Important News Regarding Knut Hamsun's Hair

My friend Josh sent this photo Knut Hamsum from Knut's childhood home in Norway.



"... saw this picture on his first
desk.. sporting a very Klam-esque haircut..."


It's nuts.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007

info, buy

"Adina, Astrid, Chipewee, Jasmine," a short story that appeared in The New Yorker, will run in this fine anthology, coming out soon.

tennis piece

I wrote about Rafael Nadal for GQ in their June issue. It's not online anywhere, unfortunately. This picture above is from Dubai. I don't believe he's playing tennis in this photo, because tennis players don't wear helmets anymore.

reading writer interviews...

as long as I'm here posting up a storm, this is also a good one, an interview with Lorrie Moore, from



BLVR: You say that that feeling of inadequacy never goes away, that you have to keep on trudging through the rain. What do you do when writing isn’t going so well?

LM: Did I really say “trudging through the rain?” So Rodgers and Hammerstein. It must have been raining when I said that. That’s the kind of clever mind I have. What do I do when writing isn’t going well? Well, I don’t write—which is symptom, cure, and cause. And then sometimes I just tell myself, as I’m writing, “I’ll fix it later.” And sometimes it’s true, I do.

a rambling conversation on story writing

between Ann Patchett and Elizabeth McCracken, it's from a little while ago and it's all pretty interesting.... click here

AP: Keeping on the whole short story/novel thing, I believe there’s practically no one who is equally good at the short story or the novel. I think Updike is, I think Márquez is. Just about everybody I can think of who write both I can say, well, you know what he really is a better X, she really is better at Y. ...I’m judging Best American this year and I’m reading now tons of short stories and they are all fabulous. I don’t know how in the world I’m going to choose, they are so incredibly good, which made me wonder what’s going on, why is it that there are so many better short stories than there are novels—in my humble opinion—because I’ve always thought that actually it was harder to write a really great short story than it was a novel.

This summer...

June 10th -- 15th, I'll be at the the writing conference at ...





Then in Provincetown June 24th -- 29th...







and then July 18th -- 29th at...

Two Readings

I'm reading with a bunch of very fancy writers on Thursday night:

info here

Thursday, December 7 at 7:00 PM: The Writers Studio celebrates its 20th anniversary with readings by Jennifer Egan, Julia Glass, Matthew Klam, Martha McPhee, Carl Dennis, Grace Schulman, Edward Hirsch, and Robert Pinsky at Judson Church, 55 Washington Square South. Suggested donations $5. Reception and book signing follow the reading.

Friday night, please come see Tobias Wolff and Adam Haslett receive the Pen/Malamud Award for short story writing in Washington, DC:

click here for tickets and where to go

And on Saturday night I'm reading at the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, MA:

if you happen to be in Ptown

NYT Mag story....

I wrote about these guys. Aren't they funny? The guy on the top, right, Adam, is making one of his funny faces.

I Wrote About Brent Musburger

In the November GQ Magazine. It would take too long to explain....

A literary festival in Virginia

October 17th. I'll be wearing my Jewish hat for this event:

Here's Something Beefy

This is a fascinating interview in the DC Examiner, a newspaper of some reknown.

Stony Brook Southampton Writers Conference

is happening this week....

Prepare to have your mind completely blown!

Great Interviews

The Paris Review Writers at Work interviews.

And this is from the P.G. Wodehouse interview, from 1975, which I cracks me up, even though I don't care about the writer too much:

"When I first went to see him, I telephoned P.G. Wodehouse and asked for directions from New York to his house on Long Island. He merely chuckled, as if I had asked him to compare Euclid with Einstein or attempt some other laughably impossible task. “Oh, I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I don’t have a clue.” I learned the route anyway, and my arrival for lunch, only ten minutes late, seemed to astonish him. “You had no trouble? Oh, that is good. That’s wonderful!” His face beaming at having in his house such a certified problem-solver, a junior Jeeves almost, he led me without further to-do to a telephone, which he had been dialing all morning in a futile effort to reach a number in New York. He had, of course, done everything right but dial the area code, an addition to the Bell system that had somehow escaped his attention since he last attempted long distance. He was intensely pleased when New York answered, and I sunned myself in the warm glow of his gratitude for the rest of the day. All of which is by way of saying tht Wodehouse, who lived four months past his ninety-third birthday, had discovered his own secret of long life: He simply ignored what was worrisome, bothersome, or confusing in the world around him."

I have no idea what this means

New French Paperback

The cover art depicts a certain touching scene where two deeply fashionable men wearing chokers take a night train to Budapest!

Part of one alien's experience of living her life

Tuesday baloney

Check out this book if you're interested in good reading.

Waterproof Book Needs Finally Satisfied

It's that time of year again.


Beach Book

The Afterlife

by Donald Antrim

My mother, Louanne Antrim, died on a fine Saturday morning in the month of August, in the year 2000. She was lying in new purple sheets on a hospital-style bed rolled up next to the green oxygen tanks set against a wall in what was more or less the living room of her oddly decorated, dark and claustrophobic house, down near the bottom of a drive that wound like a rut past a muddy construction site and backyards bordered with chain-link fence, coming to an end in the parking lot that served the cheerless duck pond at the center of the town in which she had lived the last five years of her life, Black Mountain, North Carolina.

Buy The Afterlife

Klam Bake

Down in Kentucky they're saying...

Some New Fiction

I have a story in this week's New Yorker (May 15th issue).


Short story: Adina, Astrid, Chipewee, Jasmine

and some commentary on it here

Summer writing workshop

I'm teaching a one week writing workshop this summer, at the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, Mass. August 13-18. It's a great place.

http://www.fawc.org/summer/index.shtm

Hanging with Jim Lehrer

I am pictured here, In Washingtonian Magazine's May issue, hanging out in a relaxed manner with well respected news anchor Jim Lehrer!

I Guess I Broke the Fuck Barrier

I never knew!


From Gawker

‘The New Yorker’ Now Featuring The Old Lady In Dubuque’s Hooters

There was a time when you could be sure of two things about The New Yorker: you weren’t going to understand the cartoons and your delicate sensibilities wouldn’t be offended by common vulgarity. Well, the cartoons may still be hard to understand (as it turns out, they make more sense with no captions at all), but the shocking rush to contemporary mores may leave you feeling a bit disgruntled. It was bad enough when Matt Klam broke the “fuck” barrier with his story “Sam the Cat,” but this week the brainchild of Harold Ross, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker and a host of other famous dead literary types has a whole page full of Playboy centerfolds. Sadly, the pictures are not available on line, but if you’ve got $5, you can buy a copy for yourself and turn directly to page 145. Or, you know, you can get two York Peppermint Patties and the latest issue of Dripping Hot Snatches. This is 2006: naked lady pictures are either cheap or free. Oh, David Remnick, where were you twenty years ago, when we actually could have used this?

Dear Unique Rabbit

Dear Unique Rabbit, You asked if I had any favorite writers who are not so famous. I love a story called, "Summer of Mopeds," by Courtney Eldridge, from her book, Unkempt. "My Life in Heavy Metal," from the book by the same name, by Steve Almond. A new book, Mother of Sorrows, by Richard McCann, is really interesting, solid and powerful. Just check out the first story, "The School of Beauty and Shame." I tend to think more of a specific story, when I think of my favorite stuff, or a single book, from a famous author. Have you read the story "Graduation" by Andre Dubus? It's tewtally awesome. I'm fanatically in love with a book called The Gift, by Pete Hamill. I think it's out of print. My favorite Don Delillo book is End Zone, which is a golden oldie.

Chicken Information on Pedestal Magazine

Nathan Leslie was kind enough to interview me for Pedestal Magazine

Nathan: There must be a traumatic chicken scene in your past. Your characters are always eating

Matt: I probably ate too much chicken at one point in my life, and I really got sick of chicken. Poor chickens. My family had chickens in our backyard. We ate the eggs; we didn’t kill the chickens—although somebody did. If you’ve ever met a chicken, they’re not a good animal. They’re just not. There’s nothing to say that’s good about chickens. They’re stupid. There’s nothing to cuddle. They crap all over themselves. They have no personalities. And then you think: I’m surviving on this thing. I mean, what is a chicken for? That should be the real topic of your investigation here today.

At the urging of my one fan

Apparently there's someone reading this blog other than me. At the urging of my one fan, I'm writing here to say that I'm working on a short story with The New Yorker, which should be out some time in the next couple months. I've also got a few short pieces coming out in GQ Magazine, on subjects as varied as bruised testicles and the pain of rejection from a woman I didn't really want to be with anyway. I've also written about an R&B singer named Jaheim for GQ, a whole 800 words, and Men's Vogue is holding a story I wrote about a horse that farted at a friend's wedding, right in the middle of the ceremony.

I'm going to Portland, Oregon, in a couple of weeks to give a reading at Portland State U. I'll probably buy a Portland State T shirt when I'm there. I taught at U of Michigan last fall and regret not having bought a Michigan T shirt.

I have a crappy website and blog

I've been told my site stinks.

The Southampton College Writers Conference 2005

Preliminary Schedule of Evening Events
Wednesday Frank McCourt
July 20

Thursday David Rakoff and Patty Marx
July 21

Friday Billy Collins
July 22

Saturday Roger Rosenblatt
July 23

Sunday Susan Kinsolving
July 24

Monday Southampton Writers Conference Onstage:
July 25 Marsha Norman


Tuesday Meg Wolitzer
July 26

Wednesday Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise
July 27

Thursday Melissa Bank and Matt Klam
July 28

Friday
July 29 Splendor in the Grass: Gala Reading
Featuring Frank McCourt, Melissa Bank, Billy Collins, Bharati Mukherjee,
Roger Rosenblatt, Marsha Norman, Matt Klam, Susan Kinsolving and
Surprise Guest
6:30 Chancellor’s Hall Lawn
Free and Open to Public: Bring a Lawn Chair or a Blanket

Beach Book

The latest in waterproof books

April 10, 2005

The New York Times

Travel

ARMCHAIR TRAVELER

The Beach Book
Melcher Media, 254 pp., Paper, $16.95

On the theory that people who vacation at the ocean's edge want to read about others in similar circumstances, the editors of this anthology have collected 10 evocative stories that unfold in the watery idylls of the world. As an added enticement for seaside readers, the publisher has even manufactured the pages by a copyrighted process guaranteed to make them waterproof -- the book as rubber beach toy....

The islands of the Caribbean are the locale for many of the fictions here by a stellar group of contributors that includes Robert Stone, Hester Kaplan, Matthew Klam, Frederick Reiken and Roald Dahl. But Anthony Doerr chooses the eastern coast of Africa, Jeffrey Eugenides pretsunami Southeast Asia, and Gabriel Garcia Mrquez a mythical South American fishing village...' RICHARD B. WOODWARD

Okay!

A kid who thought my story stunk used it to win a public speaking contest in Waubonsie, Il. This was from a Chicago newspaper that covers the suburbs.

Waubonsie student wins state prose title
By Beth Sneller Daily Herald Staff Writer
Posted 2/22/2005

Alex Kritselis has been a man on a mission.

Since the beginning of the school year, the Waubonsie Valley High School senior wanted nothing more than to make the state speech team finals.

He reached his goal - and then some.

Kritselis won the state championship in prose reading at the Illinois High School Association state finals over the weekend in Carbondale.

Speech, also called forensics, includes 13 events ranging from prose and verse reading to extemporaneous and special-occasion speaking.

Kritselis, who was the Aurora school's only representative at the state competition, also captured fifth place in dramatic interpretation.

"I worked so hard in both events, and I really had a great season leading up to regionals, sectionals and state," Kritselis said.

For the state final round, Kritselis read "Sam the Cat" by Matthew Klam, a story about a young man who finds himself questioning his sexuality.

"My first read through it, I didn't love it," Kritselis said. "But a few days afterward, I couldn't stop thinking about that story. I wanted to be able to leave my audience with the lasting impression that I got."

At the awards ceremony Saturday night, every state champion was asked to do an encore performance.

Kritselis said the night was all a blur for him from the moment organizers announced he had won first place.

"I honestly don't remember performing at the awards ceremony," he said. "It was all such a rush."

He said he plans on attending Illinois State University and majoring in communication and education. His ultimate goal is to teach high school English or public speaking and work as a speech coach.

"I can't see any other profession which would fit me better," he said. "(Speech) is such a wonderful opportunity for high school students. My coaches have affected my life so much, and I would love to be able to mold other students."