August 21, 2012 8:33 am | Tags: Publishers Weekly, Strategies Against Extinction | No Comments
The August 20th issue of Publisher’s Weekly has a review of my collection! This is, obviously, tremendous, and having a reviewer speak so glowingly of my stories is pretty thrilling. Here’s an excerpt:
A sense of loss suffuses the keenly observed stories of Nye’s debut collection … Although characters are often bewildered and bereft, these stories aren’t bleak. Nye holds his characters in sharp focus, and their emotional lives are rigorously yet sympathetically observed.
You can read the fully review here. The book is out October 2nd!
August 9, 2012 1:54 pm | Tags: Strategies Against Extinction, The Re-Creationist | No Comments
One question frequently asked of writers is “Where do your story ideas come from?” Sometimes this has an easy answer, and other times the answer is as mysterious as our existence. With Strategies Against Extinction about to come out, I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about the making of these nine stories. Written over the course of five years (roughly) each story has its own trajectory, but taken as a whole, I can see many of the subjects and ideas that have interested me as a writer. To understand this, I wanted to write about each story individually and discover how all the stories come together as one collection. If, in fact, they do come together as a collection.
“The Re-Creationist” is the most recently written story in my collection and the first story in the book. Set in 1952, it’s the story of Don, a World War II veteran who works as the radio announcer for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He’s the last “re-creationist”: an announcer not at the game, but a person that imagines the game based on the information that comes across the telegraph. From a brief code, Don tells the story of a game he never actually sees. (more…)