Aaron Hamburger

I interviewed Garth Greenwell on the occasion of his new novel Cleanness for Electric Literature. Our conversation covered a range of topics, including the current state of queer lit, writing about sex and sexuality, and the writer’s position in contemporary life and politics. Enjoy!

Hear me reading an excerpt from Nirvana Is Here at Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, courtesy of the Shelf Talking Podcast. Some great sound effects added. Enjoy!

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.