Do Lado de Cá do Mar, the Portuguese edition of my book on Lisbon, The Moon, Come to Earth, has been kindly received so far in Portugal. Reviews have come in from TimeOut Lisboa, Diário Digital, iOnline, Trend Alert, Baú-dos-Livros, and elsewhere. I’ve had to crack out my Portuguese dictionary on occasion, but mostly it has been a pleasure reading about the Portuguese take on my take on them.

My big fantasy, though, is to visit the Livraria Bertrand in Lisbon’s Chiado neighborhood (a beautiful bookstore on the same site since 1773) and sneak a long glance at my book on display at the front table!

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Once a month the University of Chicago offers one of their books as a free e-book, and the deal for the month of March this year is my collection of dispatches from Lisbon, The Moon, Come to Earth. This offer is good until March 31, 2012, so hurry.

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There has been a healthy spate of books published by some of my former students, and I thought I’d give a proud shout-out to these new authors!

Stephanie Hemphill’s third novel-in-verse, The Wicked Girls, was published in 2010 by HarperCollins and was a finalist for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature, and John Warner’s first novel, The Funny Man, was published this past fall by SoHo Press/Random House. Both were students of mine at the University of Illinois in the 1990′s . . . time flies, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher’s memoir, Descanso For My Father: Fragments of a Life, was published this spring in the University of Nebraska Press’s American Lives Series, edited by Tobias Wolff, and Niya C. Sisk’s short story collection, Bragging Bantering Brawling is just out from Sweet Bee Books. Both authors were my advisees in the early 2000′s at the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program.

And if that ain’t enough, two more former students, both from the University of Illinois, have books about to appear this fall: Ted Sander’s story collection (and winner of the Bakeless Fiction Prize) No Animals We Could Name (Graywolf Press) and William Gillespie’s novel Keyhole Factory (Soft Skull Press).

Congratulations to all!

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I’m very pleased to be one of nine finalists for the 2012 Arts & Literature Prize sponsored by the always excellent 3QuarksDaily website, for my post “What Casablanca Can Teach a Writer.” And what fellow finalists! Gish Jen will choose the three prize winners. A real honor to be considered. You can see the whole list here.

And my congratulations to the winners, Melissa Fisher, Leanne Ogasawara, and Syed Haider Shahbaz. I would have voted for them myself.

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The Portuguese translation of The Moon, Come to Earth has just been published (and on Valentine’s Day!) by Editorial Presença, and it comes with a new title, Do Lado de Cá do Mar (roughly, From This Side of the Sea), and a lovely new cover.

You can read all about it (in Portuguese) on this Editorial Presença page. My many thanks to the translator, Alberto Gomes, for a job well done. It was a pleasure working with him, and also with editor Manuela Cardoso. And a happy shout-out to the writer Rui Zink, who wrote a wonderful introduction (“Portugal é um Espetáculo!”) for the new edition.

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The AWP (Associated Writing Programs) 2012 conference, to be held in Chicago, is fast approaching. I’ll be participating in two events, and if you’re so inclined I’d be happy to see you there.

On Thursday, March 1, I’ll be taking part in the University Creative Writing Program reading, featuring my colleague Alex Shakar reading a selection from his novel Luminarium, and John Warner, an alum of our undergraduate program and my former student, will read from his recent novel, The Funny Man. I’ll read from my forthcoming memoir of Africa (co-written with Alma Gottlieb, Braided Worlds. The reading will take place from 4:30 to 5:45 at the Chicago Hilton, Private Dining Room 2, 3rd Floor. You can hear an advance taste of the reading in this podcast, where Alex and I offer brief excerpts of our work.

I’ll also be part of a panel, Containing Multitudes: Shifting Voices in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, featuring Sue William Silverman, Connie May Fowler, Xu Xi and Robert Vivian. We’ll hold the panel on Friday, March 2, from 4:30 to 5:45, in the Waldorf Room, 3rd Floor of the Chicago Hilton.

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The new Ninth Letter is finally out (vol. 8, #2), and it’s a doozy. It’s perhaps our best-designed issue in quite some time, and that’s saying a lot. The designers seem to be challenging one’s notion of how a literary magazine is supposed to be organized, and a reader enters into these pages through unusual paths. And there are plenty of surprises, including “Distribution of Intelligibility” and “Emotional Rollercoaster” charts.

There are also video supplements to complement your reading experience here.

I can vouch for the prose and poetry inside, particularly the nonfiction, as this issue marks my first stint as the Ninth Letter nonfiction editor. Michele Morano’s “Crushed” expertly balances the innocent/dangerous sturm und drang complexities of a writing instructor’s attraction to her barely adolescent student; Sue William Silverman’s “Prepositioning John Travolta” is a brave—and darkly funny—investigation of language, desire, and a damaged past; Monica Berlin, in “On Beds, Or Where We Sleep,” examines the rectangular landscape that often escapes our careful attention, the place where we conceive our children, the place “where we learned to be most alone”; in the essay “The Waiting Place,” Jacqueline Saint-Pierre takes the reader to a different landscape, where time resonates with uncomfortable clarity as one awaits the results of a crucial medical test; and finally, Eric Dean Wilson’s “Mephisto: Scenes from the End,” gives us a personal portrait through the lens of Memphis, Tennessee (which lies close to the currently dormant New Madrid fault line), in an essay structured like the different stages of measuring earthquake intensity. Excellent and original essays all!

I’m also proud of having had a role in bringing Kyle Minor’s novella, “In a Distant Land,” to the Ninth Letter website. This novella is a series of six letters written by different characters and sent from Haiti during an increasingly chaotic time in that country’s history, six letters that limn the mystery of a young woman whom we never otherwise see directly. We’re offering this intriguing and powerful work as a serial, one letter a week, for the next six weeks, here. Please drop by periodically to take in this unusual publishing event.

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I was delighted to be nominated for the 2012 Above and Beyond Mentor Award, hosted by the Beyond the Margins website. What an honor, to be on a list of nominees that includes (among many others) the estimable Erika Dreifus. My many thanks to former student Jodi Paloni (explore her website here) for nominating me, and my congratulations to the winner, Johanna Harness.

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I was recently interviewed by David Inge, on his radio show Focus 580 on the NPR affiliate WILL, about my recent favorite books. These include The Weather Fifteen Years Ago, by Wolf Haas, Music for Silenced Voices, by Wendy Lesser, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, by Paolo Giordano, The Least Cricket of Evening, by Robert Vivian, The Boys of My Youth, by Jo Ann Beard, and others. If interested, you can listen here.

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I recently appeared as a guest on WEFT’s Rock Geek Chic, joining hosts William Gillespie and Cristy Scoggins in an exploration of Radiohead b-sides and other obscurities, ranging from the pre-Pablo Honey era right up to and beyond King of Limbs. With over 40 worthy songs to play, we had to do two two-hour shows, so if you’re a Radiohead fan and don’t know these songs, you can kill an entire afternoon here.

William and Cristy are quite accomplished “rock scholars,” though for some reason they keep inviting me to their fine show. I’ve done programs on The Byrds, Gene Clark, Procol Harum, John Martyn, and the remarkable Portuguese new-wave band Rádio Macau. If curious, you can listen by clicking on the bold-faced band names above.

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The Knox Writers’ House Recording Project is now online, and I’m honored to be a part of this grand endeavor: recordings of writers from around the country reading from their own work and the work of other writers who have inspired them. So, I somehow find myself in a stellar group that includes Michael Martone, Carl Phillips, Eula Biss, Kellie Wells, James Tate, Tom Franklin, Brian Evanson, Mary Jo Bang, Peter Orner and many, many others. You can find ‘em all here. And you can find the page devoted to me and my work here, where I read from five of my books, as well as the work of James Baldwin and Fernando Pessoa. There’s also a line drawing based on a photo of me flanked by my wife Alma and daughter Hannah. Thank you to whoever darkened my hair to make me look twenty years younger!

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