\\\ is good news! (But if you’d like, here’re some links!?:)

\\\ Madeline participated in Rob McLennan’s massive and wondrous 12 or 20 questions series. Read her confessions re: writing routines, favored fragrances, and the perilous power of Carolyn Keene’s prose patterns here.

\\\ Listen to Madeline ruminate on an early attempt at fiction writing—and turn the human to whom she owes everything into an object of foolhardy fun!?—on the Sad Me of the Past podcast.

\\\ Madeline recommended six books of fiction (and semi-fiction!) with weird and wonderful structures for Tertulia. Can a book turn to a vibrating orb in your hand!? Find out here.

\\\ Lonesome Ballroom was excerpted in the excellent Cleveland Review of Books. Meet LB’s erudite and eerily cinematic bartender, its resident bro-auteur, and assorted daffily doomed dogs here.

\\\ …Or, if you’re a Lonesome Ballroom completist, check out this ghost of ballrooms past in the late great Storychord, aka a passed-away passage from a late, un-great draft of LB, featuring an early illustration by accomplished artist Esmé Shapiro and a one-song soundtrack by supercool composer Hannis Brown! 👻

Why the side-eye, Paula!? Reading Lonesome Ballroom doesn’t make you crazy! After all…

\\\ Genius Hilary Plum includes Lonesome Ballroom on her current list of ten recommended reads.

\\\ Alex Dabertin puts Lonesome Ballroom Under the Stereoscope, deeming it “an ingenious investigation of ingenue-ity,” and placing it in conversation with Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Becca Rothfeld’s “Ladies in Waiting.”

\\\ At his charming compendium of concise writings and reviews, erudite daydreamer Alvin Lu wonders if Lonesome Ballroom might just be “the best college hijinx novel since the 1980s,” calling it “brainy” and “antic” —- “Tristram Shandy by way of Lorrie Moore.”

\\\ Over at Letters of Rec, Lonesome Ballroom has no less a rhetorical dynamo than Justin St. Germain fumbling for felicitous phrasing: “I need to come up with something smarter to say about [Lonesome Ballroom]…but the short version is that it’s funny and smart and I loved it.”

\\\ Powerhouse of poesy and prose Alina Stefanescu takes to her notebook to call Lonesome Ballroom a “brilliant untelling,” and to locate it in a tradition of “literature that confronts performativity with humor.”

\\\ At Italics Mine, our fave NYT-bestselling novelist Edan Lepucki proclaims that Lonesome Ballroom’s prose is “just terrific,” its structure “complex and unexpected,” its voice “flippant…but nevertheless clutch[ing] at a profound, sacred core of longing.”  Do go on, Edan! …Oh wait, she does!:  “What’s really cool about Lonesome Ballroom is that you can feel your brain bending to its style, ceding to its unique storytelling and viewpoint. I love when a book rearranges my mind like this.”

\\\ Find two great books about 🕳️🕳️ here and here, then sing this 🕳️-y karaoke ballad.

\\\ Come to think of it, are all the best books about portals? Open The 🚪! Or open the 👻🚪!? Please come open the door, dear. Let me in!

\\\ Try reading this genius poem while staring at this genius painting. (Especially if you’re 37.)

\\\ Or read this great concept novel about time, days, and collapsing ends in 20th-century Europe then give this great concept album about time, days, and collapsing ends within a 20th-century man a spin.

\\\ 1992 was a very good year, if only because this 💣 💥. Was 1993 even 💣-er?

\\\ Sometimes good things happen in Swedish, like this and this, or in Sweden, like this.

\\\ Subscribe if you’re able. Once upon a time, a long time ago, Madeline defined sitch, n. 2.

\\\ If you’re in the mood for something soft, go here or here.