Seventy-two years ago today, Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan) (Brian Ó Nualláin), wrote in a letter to William Saroyan: “When you get to the end of this book you realise that my hero or main character (he’s a heel and a killer) has been dead throughout the book and that all the queer ghastly things which have been happening to him are happening in a sort of hell which he earned for the killing. . . . I think the idea of a man being dead all the time is pretty new.”

Discussing The Third Policeman in class today, my students and I wondered whether this now familiar twist had in fact been done before 1940, but we couldn’t come up with an example. We also wondered whether certain phrases in the book—in particular “it is a difficult pancake” and “I am nothing but a gawm”—were O’Brien’s inventions, or if they were drawn from the common parlance of the day.

In any case, this novel is the finest of difficult pancakes, and I continue to puzzle over it with pleasure.

Picking those five finalists was no simple matter, and I found many other books deserving of recognition. Here are five more that I personally recommend.

The End of Everything by Megan Abbott is the story of a thirteen-year-old girl whose best friend disappears, apparently kidnapped. It’s a devastating novel that captures perfectly the way a small town can feel both claustrophobic and isolating while in the grips of a traumatic event.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt is a western that pushes the boundaries of genre and form, and is at turns weird, brutal, and very funny. It put me in mind of Samuel Beckett, especially when the hired killer who narrates the story begins to ponder, say, the virtues of various tooth powder flavors. Probably my favorite novel of 2011, if I had to pick one.

Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante, narrated by a woman with dementia, is a book that might have gone terribly wrong in the hands of another writer. There’s a murder mystery, but we come to know it via a fractured lens. As much a study of language and consciousness as a crime thriller, this book loosens our hold on time, identity, and memory it unfolds.

The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen is a long novel, but I read it in one day. Couldn’t put it down, as they say. A literary thriller with a time travel subplot, this book was layered and often surprising. The science fiction element contributes a political angle—one of the main characters is fighting to preserve a future we understand to be a chilling dystopia. But the book is very much about us, here and now.

The Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta takes place in Vienna under the Nazi regime, and most of the action is confined to a single apartment complex. A dog is murdered. People have secrets and try to keep them. The villain of the story is a police detective, and he is completely terrifying. This is a disquieting book, packed with desperate and memorable characters.

Sabina Murray was a professor of mine in my grad school days, so I’m looking forward to reading with her. And I consider myself lucky to be living in an area where the “local novelist” category includes the likes of John Crowley. Fellow fans of Little, Big may appreciate this needlework sampler that Emily stitched for me a while back. Stitched? Needleworked? Sampled? She made it.

The Other City, Michal Ajvaz (translated by Gerald Turner)
Poem Strip, Dino Buzzati (translated by Marina Harss)
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Ursula K. Le Guin
Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien
Motorman, David Ohle
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (selected and translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers)
The Weird, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

The Weird isn’t out in the United States yet, so I’m asking my students to special order it from England. It really is that good.

When they make the board game based on your life, what will the playing pieces look like? Will you roll dice to move around the board? Draw tiles? Play cards with pictures of your friends, your uncles, your pets on them?

Which areas of the board are safe, and which are dangerous? The room that was yours when you were a child. The room you couldn’t bear to step foot in. Maybe: a patch of grass somewhere. Maybe: grandmother’s porch. Maybe: aquarium field trip.

Will you keep score on a pad of paper? Collect sheets of paper money? Count tokens to represent jobs, road trips, arguments, books, loves, food, conversations, births? Mistakes, illnesses, sports events? Drugs, drinks, jogs, degrees? Paintings, sunsets, ceremonies, puppet shows?

How will the board game based on your life represent the board games you’ve played in your life? How long is the timer set for? Is it an hourglass or a ticking clock?

When they make the board game based on your life, they’ll thank you for being a playtester. You’ll get a complimentary copy in the mail. Will you leave it on the shelf with the others? Or will you unwrap it and set it up on the kitchen table, just to see if it looks any good?

Once you understand all the rules, will you play the board game based on your life? Who will be there to play it with you?

This Sunday, I’ll run a 5k. It’s for a good cause: I’m raising money to support Safe Passage, an organization in Northampton, Massachusetts, that provides support to women and children who have experienced domestic abuse. If you’d like to make a donation, you may do so right here.

Or maybe you’d like a running playlist? I just uploaded a sampling of what I’ve been listening to, and that’s available here.

Jill showed me her files on the plays, including Chinese Gossip, Stumbling Christmas, and Heads Will Roll. There were scripts (marked up with notes from the actors and from Gorey), newspaper clippings, and the original programs.

Oh, and the puppets. On her flickr page, Jill has photos of the puppets.

Gorey’s house is now a museum. A rotating selection of original drawings and sketches are on display here, along with some of the curious objects Gorey collected over the course of his life. Oddities abound, including guest checks showing what he ate every day for a month at a local diner, a herd of hand-stitched stuffed elephants, a sofa shredded nearly to death by his many cats, and an impressive set of glass telephone pole insulators.

Part of what I admire about Gorey’s work is the care with which it’s structured—consider the abecedarians of creatures and accidental deaths, or the recurring imagery (umbrellas, dogs, wrought-iron fences) in a book like The Sopping Thursday. But even while Gorey shapes these intricate melancholies, he explodes the very notion of structure and narrative. Ominous threats loom, their exact nature never revealed. Characters’ motives are hidden and stay that way. Important events occur offstage. People wander, swoon, murder, flee, weep, cajole, and often die in circumstances they—and we—don’t entirely understand.

I think of Gorey as a reverent iconoclast. His book The Awdrey-Gore Legacy stands as one of my favorite mystery stories. In it, the elements of a murder case, including suspects, weapons, and the detective’s disguises, are illustrated each in turn, laid out as though from some musty file. It’s a loving homage to the cosy mystery genre, as well as an unraveling of the form. There’s a story here, but we can only infer what happened. The result is a labyrinth without a solution.

My story in Cape Cod Noir, “Twenty-Eight Scenes for Neglected Guests,” is an attempt to evoke something of Gorey’s style and preoccupations. The piece was a pleasure to research, because it meant revisiting his work while also reading up on Gorey himself (a Gorey-like figure appears throughout the tale).

When I began, I knew little about him beyond a handful of peculiar facts: that he was reclusive, that he loved the ballet, that he tended to wear fur coats and tennis shoes. (He eventually abandoned the fur, which he couldn’t square with his love for animals.)

As described by those who knew him, Gorey is a study in contradiction. Though his illustrations and writings seem informed by a Victorian or Edwardian sensibility, he never went abroad, except for a brief trip to Scotland. He believed that filmmaking had been “going downhill steadily since 1918,” but he loved soap operas and television reruns. He was reclusive to the point of sometimes not answering the door when friends knocked, yet he was listed in the Cape Cod phone book. And, almost every summer for about fifteen years, he personally wrote and directed a play to be performed in one of several small theaters on the Cape.

For those interested in reading more about him, I recommend Alexander Theroux’s The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. Theroux knew Gorey personally, and his book offers great insight into the life of an enigmatic artist. It’s just been released in an expanded edition by Fantagraphics Books. Theroux was recently interviewed by NPR about the book.

The Strange Case draws from interviews collected in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, edited by Karen Wilkin. That title, by the way, comes from one of Gorey’s descriptions of his own process: “I just kind of conjured them up out of my subconscious and put them in order of ascending peculiarity.”

And while I do recommend a visit to the Edward Gorey House, there’s an excellent book of photographs of the place by Kevin McDermott, Elephant House, or, The Home of Edward Gorey. McDermott went into the house shortly after Gorey’s death, before any of his belongings were moved. It’s a haunting portrait of a man via his pursuits, his habits, and his absence.

And those curious about my own story, “Twenty-Eight Scenes for Neglected Guests,” will find it in Cape Cod Noir, alongside new work by Ben Greenman, Dana Cameron, Paul Tremblay, Kaylie Jones, and others.

At the Conference on International Opportunities in the Arts, I’ll be on a panel about first books. The other panelists are poet Marisa Crawford (The Haunted House) and artist and author Mira Bartók (The Memory Palace). That’s on Friday, April 8th, at 1:30pm in the Boston Room of the Boston Public Library.

On Saturday, April 9th, at 2pm, I’ll be teaching a multigenre workshop called “New England and the Sea” at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut, along with poet Leslie McGrath and shipwright Bill Taylor. And yes, in this case multigenre means fiction, poetry, and ship building. There will be discussions of craft, close readings of work by Merrill and others, schematics to pore over, and an incredible view of Stonington Harbor. More information is available at Dzanc Books.

On Sunday, April 17th, at 5pm, I’ll give a reading at the Stonington Free Library in Stonigton, Connecticut. It’s likely that this will be the first time I read from my new novel-in-progress (unless you count all those times I’ve read sentences aloud to myself, to make sure they made sense). The reading is free and open to the public.

Finally, I’ll be reading at Jabberywocky Books in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on Saturday, May 7th, at 7pm, as part of the Tannery Reading Series. Also reading is Aine Greaney and Pamela Greenberg.

These and other events will be handily indexed over at my BookTour.com page.

I didn’t have one at hand, so I thought I’d check in with the Greek side of my family, meaning my dad.

Dad, I said, what do we have in the way of family recipes? Nothing written down, it turns out, but he recalled that his grandmother often made leg of lamb with clove sprigs. He also said that she ate little if any meat, and added, “I think it helped her to live to 103, that and the cold coffee which I seem to recall she drank.”

As far as eating meat goes, I take after my Yaya (though I like my coffee hot). So I thought: maybe it’s time to establish some new family recipes.

I’m currently living and working at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut. I’ll have more to say about this extraordinary place in the months ahead, and if you’d like a tour, I recommend previous resident Ivy Pochoda’s piece over at Writers’ Houses. But what you need to know for now is that Merrill spent a lot of time in Athens, and that Greece figures into much of his work (see below). Also, during one of my first days here, I discovered in his bookshelf near the kitchen a little yellow volume of Greek cooking by Robin Howe.

It was published in Britain in 1960, and this copy is inscribed to Jimmy (as he’s referred to in these parts), “So as to be able at Delos,” with a bookmark helpfully left in the section on wines. This is the kind of cookbook that uses the teacup as a unit of measurement, and the writing is full of bold proclamations, starting with the first sentence: “Almost everything Greek is controversial; the country, the politics, and naturally the cooking and wines.”

Naturally, but I was able to choose without too much controversy the components of this feast-to-be. Because I’m here in a little seaside town, where one can actually purchase fish from a self-serve bin down at the docks, I settled on Psari Fournou Spetsiotiko, or “fish as prepared in the island of Spetsai.” And to accompany this: stuffed tomatoes, and spanakopita.

I would have help, luckily. Emily was visiting from Northampton, and we drove together to McQuade’s supermarket in Mystic (a well-stocked if somewhat mystifying store, seemingly laid out with the triangle as its principal geometric feature; an aura of confusion permeates the aisles). We found most of what we needed there, then collected my brother Sean (there’s also an Irish side of the family), and his girlfriend MaryLeigh, who had taken the train from Brooklyn. We would need their help eating, and MaryLeigh would lend her photography talents to the endeavor.

Back in Stonington, Sean shucked oysters, Emily began chopping a pile of spinach, and I got to work on the sauce for the fish (a native cod). One thing I now understand about Greek cooking is that it uses even more olive oil than one might dare to imagine. But instead of the cup and a half called for by the Spetsaians Ms. Howe consulted, I used about 3/4 (controversial?). Next, two tablespoons of tomato purée, a handful of chopped parsley, and plenty of chopped garlic and lemon juice. Also some salt and pepper. Then I let the sauce and the fish get to know each other for a while.

By then we were ready to move on the spanikopita. The chopped spinach—all two pounds of it—was tossed with a generous amount of salt and pepper. We fried two large chopped onions in olive oil, then added the spinach. How much oil, you ask? The recipe calls for a cup, and in this case I do recommend the full amount. Yes, the spinach and onions will be completely drenched, and you will have to pull them dripping from the oil. But this turned out to be the tastiest spanikopita any of us have eaten, and that may have had something to do with it.