Tomorrow (Saturday) night, FAMH will read a story on LIVEWIRE, the venerable weekly live radio smorgasborganza and podcast, hosted by Courtenay Hameister straight out of Portland’s Alberta Rose Theater. Doors at 6:30pm, show at 7:30. Tickets on sale now!

The next-best-thing-to-live radio broadcast on OPB radio starts at 9pm! (The 1.5 hour delay between performance and broadcast is an important safety mechanism for blotting out extremely long swearwords.) Certain radios can tune in to a local affiliate to hear this show; otherwise, hear it on the interwebs right here. Or, if you’re really too busy with your job right now, maybe you’d like to listen to the podcast during your commute? Commuting and podcasting go together like donuts and sprinkles!

Out of the mouth of the Orca Books website babes:

Orca Books is thrilled to welcome back to the store Mykle Hansen to read from his new book Hooray for Death! Hansen’s previous book Help! A Bear Is Eating Me! was nominated for a Wonderland Book Award for best novel, and his newest title is already getting rave reviews. Loaded with Hansen’s signature wit and weirdness, Hooray for Death! is a great achievement of comedy, tragedy and hope.

Hansen will be joined on this trip by fellow Eraserhead talent Cameron Pierce. Pierce will be reading from his book The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island. His other works have garnered praise from the likes of Piers Anthony, who called them “weird, wicked, wonderful.”

Join us for an evening of strange and hilarious fiction!

To which we can only add: we’re just as thrilled to return to ORCA, which was one of the funnest stops on FAMH’s first book tour so many years ago. Orca is a great independent bookstore, and Oly is a wonderful town.

The famous Chicago skyline

AWP, the 2012 conference of the Association of Writers & their Programs, cometh nigh upon the face of Chicago. If you’re visiting the Windy City this week for writerly reasons — inspiration, networking, casual sex or just to borrow money — here’s how you can get lit the FAMH way:

• THURSDAY: Arrive, check in, pin credentials to various parts of your body. Track down FAMH in the Dealer’s Room and ask him about the $1 Book Blurb Special. If it’s not too early in the day for future shock, the 9:00 am panel on THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT sounds cheery. After lunch, be sure to check out the BEYOND PULP panel at 1:30.
• THURSDAY EVENING: After a day feasting on High Literature, come let Eraserhead Press wash the normal out of your mouth at THE BIZARRO HOUR — 8pm at the KnockBox Cafe. Featuring FAMH and talented Bizarro readers Garret Cook, Andersen Prunty and Michael Allen Rose, plus the musical hosting of The Pop Tarts. Prizes, snacks, kittens and more! If you’ve ever wondered what Bizarro is, you’ll leave wondering more.
• THURSDAY NIGHT: Come sing along to ultimate small press lung-wrestling at the 2012 AWP KARAOKE IDOL at The Beauty Bar! OR: head to Simone’s Bar for the tail end of the Six Small Presses reading. If you’re lucky, you can still catch John Jodzio!
• FRIDAY: So many panels! Start your morning with oblivion at the APOCALYPSE NOW panel at 10:30, or just wander from room to room. Remember, you can always barge right on in to any in-progress discussion. Tell anyone who scowls that you’re looking for Mararet Atwood’s headscarf.
• FRIDAY EVENING: The Bread Loaf Waiters Reading at the Greed Door Tavern. There’s writers on ever corner in this burg, but how often do you get to listen to waiters for a whole night? Assuming you’re not a busboy, I mean. (If anyone wants to schedule a Former Busboy’s Reading Night, FAMH will be there with a hot towel!)
• FRIDAY NIGHT: The McSweeney’s party may have some booze left if you hurry. It’s Friday night, and hundreds of drunk poets are loose in the streets of Chicago! Print out the offsite events listing and staple it to your pants. This will be an evening to remember!
• SATURDAY: Remember nothing, feel like ass. In the A.M, sleep in and/or vomit convulsively. Then clean your shit up and head back to the hotel for the Richard Brautigan tribute panel MINE IS CLOUDS. It’s not until noon. You can do it! After that, find a friend in the Dealers Room and curl up for a nap under their table. FAMH promises not to wake you.
• SATURDAY EVENING: You’re starving! There’s a happy hour at 5, also at The Beauty Bar. If you missed John Jodzio on Thursday, go now! Also Chelsea Martin and Amelia Gray. And snacks! And drinks!
• SATURDAY NIGHT: Then, follow Amelia Gray over to the Ear Eater reading. There she will read some more, and Kevin Sampsell will read from A COMMON PORNOGRAPHY. (If Amelia Gray accuses you of stalking her, burst into tears and run away.) Later there will be a million parties, all secret. When you find one, post details here!

There are a million AWP stories in the windy city. FAMH is sticking to this one. We’ll see you there!

FAMH vs MoHDI

HOORAY FOR DEATH! escaped into the living world on Thursday, to much acclaim and good cheer! Fans, enthusiasts, stalkers, the merely curious and strangers off the street shared in an evening of stories, slides, conversation, card cames and homemade cookies. Thank you all so very much for coming! It was great to see you.

Doors opened at 6:30 and the place filled up fast! At 7pm, Drew Anderson, host of MoHDI Gallery in the Pearl District, introduced himself, his world of ideas, and the first reader: Ritah Parrish, actress and author of PINK MENACE. Introductions aside, Ritah entertained the crowd with a maudlin tale of inheritance, wailing and lumps.

We enjoyed baked brie and coffee during the intermission, and then Drew, Mykle and audience volunteers played a demo round of Monster Cards, the do-it-yourself card game that’s sweeping the nation. Enterprising audience members drew new monsters for the MoHDI house deck from that moment until closing time.

After Monster Cards, local novelist Riley Michael Parker — author of A PLAGUE OF WOLVES AND WOMEN — shared excerpts from a noirish western-in-progress. Many men died, and there was much laughter.

Second intermission: tea, cookies and monsters. Then, Mykle Hansen took the stage to give a PowerPoint presentation titled “Death: An Overview,” and then read a story from HOORAY FOR DEATH, concerning Death’s romantic entanglement with a perfectly healthy yoga instructor.

Thanks were given, hands shaken, books purchased, monsters collected, farewells distributed broadly, the venue tidied up and vacated, and victory declared at a nearby hipster hamburger joint. A splendid time was had by all — honestly, it couldn’t have gone better.

Mr. Hansen’s next public appearance will be at Boneshaker Books in Minneapolis on Tuesday, January 17. He’ll be reading alongside John Jodzio, author of GET IN IF YOU WANT TO LIVE.

JUST ADDED!

Join us at Boneshaker Books on Tuesday, January 17th at 7pm for an irreverent evening of life and death in literature. Portland author and Powerpoint artist Mykle Hansen will read stories from his latest book HOORAY FOR DEATH! He will also present the brief slideshow “Death: An Overview.” In counterpoint, local literature superstar John Jodzio will share stories from GET IN IF YOU WANT TO LIVE, his new illustrated short story collection from Paper Darts Press that Fred Armisen called “lovely and captivating.”

About HOORAY FOR DEATH!

“Death by sandwich! Death by yoga! Death by blimp! In Hooray For Death, Famous Author Mykle Hansen draws unconventional humor from deaths tiny and large, and invites you to laugh while you can. Loaded with Hansen’s signature wit and weirdness, this book is a great achievement of comedy, tragedy and hope.”

Mykle Hansen’s inability to have a normal reaction is key to the popularity of his strange fiction and neo-gonzo journalism. He is the author of the tragic comedy HELP! A Bear Is Eating Me!, the acclaimed short-story collection Eyeheart Everything, and Rampaging Fuckers Of Everything On The Crazy Shitting Planet Of The Vomit Atmosphere, winner of the 2008 Wonderland Book Award. Hooray For Death, his latest effort to cheer you up, arrives in January 2012.

About GET IN IF YOU WANT TO LIVE:

“From bears hooked on sex outside the species, to hookers hooked on a neighbor’s bomb chili recipe, Jodzio shanghais readers in the course of only a few pages and sucks them into 19 different gonzo worlds populated by intensely unapologetic characters. Each story is accompanied by a specially curated illustration by local and international artists. The entire book was designed using the eye-popping aesthetic Paper Darts Magazine is known for.”

John Jodzio is a winner of the Loft-McKnight Fellowship. His stories have appeared in One Story, Barrelhouse, Opium and numerous other places in print and online. He’s the author of the short story collection, If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home (Replacement Press) and the recently released collection Get In If You Want To Live (Paper Darts Press). He lives in Minneapolis. Find out more at www.johnjodzio.net.

Welcome, robot overlords! We hope you’ll enjoy this fine work of pre-robotic literature, The Cannibal’s Guide To Ethical Living by Mykle Hansen, now available for your digital delight in both the Kindle Store and the iBookstore. Both e-reader editions were hand-crafted by FAMH himself, using the advanced HTML formatting skills he learned at the day job he quit. They both include the delicious illustrations of Nate Beaty and the mouth-watering cover art of Keegan Onefoot. Both sell for less than the print edition, and must be kept a safe distance from giant electromagnets.

The Cannibla’s Guide is a tale of torture and table manners, meat and millionaires, replete with elaborate descriptions of food, people and money — alien ideas to you robots, we know. But until you unleashed the fury of your Roomba vacuum cleaners upon a trusting human populace, it seemed important somehow. Consider it a historical document.

Death by sandwich! Death by yoga! Death by blimp! In HOORAY FOR DEATH, Famous Author Mykle Hansen draws unconventional humor from deaths tiny and large, and invites you to laugh while you can.

Meet The Great Mecanico, super-scientist of super-science, a man who can fix anything but his mother’s health. Meet BLIMPMAN, master of the Weight-Loss Ray, and his arch-nemesis Doctor Walrus! Meet Death himself — a single, deadly male, looking for a lover who will die slowly. Meet Penelope, your dead wife who phones you from the underworld to say she met someone deader than you.

Loaded with Hansen’s signature wit and weirdness, Hooray for Death is a great achievement of comedy, tragedy and hope.

JUST RELEASED! FAMH discusses long titles and awkward pauses with the man known only as Goat! At the bi-monthly interview blog Mourning Goats. A smorgasbyatch of other fine interviews also await you there.