Aaron Hamburger

Nirvana Is Here is now available as an audio book from Tantor Media, read by Charlie Thurston. Hear a sample and get your copy!

I was thrilled to receive two special mentions, for fiction and for non-fiction in the recent Pushcart Prizes, XLIV. The nods were for my story “Refugees,” published in the Bennington Review, and my creative non-fiction piece “Sweetness Mattered,” in Tin House.

While on book tour in San Francisco, I was delighted to sit down with Wayne Goodman for an interview about my writing and Nirvana Is Here. You can hear the interview via the Queer Words website.

I’m thrilled to announce that the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities has awarded me a 2020 Individual Arts and Humanities Fellowship. The award, which recognizes excellence in the arts, was the result of an application that included chapters from Nirvana Is Here. I’m so grateful to the District for this great honor.

Good news! The audio rights to Nirvana Is Here have been sold. Stay tuned for further info as the audio version of the book becomes available. And no, I won’t be the reader!

Check out this short documentary about me and the novel Nirvana Is Here directed by Ender Emre.

It was a pleasure to be interviewed by Kristopher Jansma for Electric Literature. The interview covered a range of topics, including the #metoo movement, race, and of course the legacy of Kurt Cobain.

This spring, in addition to releasing my novel Nirvana Is Here, I’ve also published a new short story, “Kimono Story” in the Maine Review. I tend to go back and forth between novel-writing and story-writing, which leads me to consider the difference between the two. I once heard author Lorrie Moore say the difference is that the end of a novel looks forward and the end of a story looks backward. I’m still not too sure what she meant by that, but how I interpret that is that a story is a small self-contained unit while a novel because it covers a much broader canvas, suggests the possibility that time might continue in either direction (before or after the novel’s plot ends). As a writer, though I find that both formats take equal levels of work and concentration, somehow I feel like the novel form allows me to relax just a bit more as I’m working. Maybe it’s because I feel less pressure to see the whole thing at once when at work on a novel than when at work on a story. There’s something so magical about a short story that’s just right, like a beautiful, perfect jewel. Whereas in a novel, I’m more willing to overlook a flaw here and there.

As my new novel is now making its way into the world, the literary journal Midwestern Gothic recently published an interview with me about the writing process and some of my thoughts about the book. Some of the topics we covered included the nature of nostalgia, how to write about trauma, race, the #MeToo movement, and faith. One interesting point that we discussed was the idea of sympathy, particularly for characters that at first may not seem so worthy of it. It’s interesting how often writers will talk about this point. Author Breena Clarke describes the tactic of “radical empathy,” while George Saunders says revision means “asking myself what could I know about these characters that would enable me to love them more.” I think that spirit is not only useful for writers but for all of us these days, particularly in our online lives. The next time you feel the urge to call out someone online, maybe try Clarke’s tactic and ask Saunders’s question. What could I know about someone that would enable me to love that person more?

As I’m getting ready for the release of Nirvana Is Here, I’ve been writing several piece of creative non-fiction thinking about the book’s creation from different perspectives. One of these pieces, which is in the Washington Post, deals with the legacy of Kurt Cobain and the band Nirvana, and the way in which their music and their public persona impacted my life. It’s interesting how a certain piece of art will hit you at a time in your life when you’re ready for it, and that combination, like alchemy, is transformative. As I wrote Nirvana Is Here, I found it interesting how while writing fiction inspired in part on things that happened to me in the late 80s and early 90s, the music kept coming up, hence the title of my book. It was an integral part of my experience.