Rejoice! New Brandon Hobson there is.

For real. Desolation of Avenues Untold from the Civil Coping Mechanisms. More here.

This Book Will Change Your Life - Deep Ellum by the Brandon Hobson.

If LeBron James has proven anything this week, it's that you can go home again, even when home has proven to be riven by heartbreak, violence, vitriol, and a sense of filial betrayal worthy of Greek myth. The protagonist in Deep Ellum, the beautiful, nearly poetic, and speedy, both in read and timbre, novel by the Brandon Hobson may not be all-universe, much less all anything. If anything, he is all nothing, no plans, nor center. But he is drawn to home, and once home, he is easily ensared in all of the grime that is his family, and the twisty relationships contained therein. We rarely write about our desire not to spoil anything, and in this case we're not sure which parts would spoil what. It's clear from jump that this is home as fucked-up childhood, damaged siblings, and distant parents. And yet somehow the mood is such throughout the story's dream scape, that we prefer to invite you to jump into its cracked swirls and crusty creases, to saying anything more about said dream scape, beyond this: you can go home again, and so the question is not how is it possible to do so, but should it be so, and even then, knowing what awaits, why do we want it regardless? Some of that is origin, and as LeBron has shown us, we are inevitably drawn from where we sprang forth. But a lot of it, and LeBron knows this as well, is that we can never let go of family. We can avoid it, runf from it, and try to stomp it to death, but we are always of it and connected to it, and this Hobson captures as well as anyone we've recently read who has attempted to do so. So do hit it, and do lose yourself in it, for it will surely change your life as it has ours, if only for a little while at that.

And then there was the time we got to talk Lost in Space in The Believer. Yes, that Believer. And big thanks to the Brandon Hobson for making it so.

Massively big thanks in fact. Excerpt? Word.

BH: You approach issues of fatherhood in the book with humor by also managing to maintain an element of sadness, and you do this so well. Can you talk a little about this process of balancing the line between humor and sadness? Is fiction different from nonfiction?

BT: Those are kind words, and I’m thrilled you asked this. When I write fiction, I always try to balance humor and sadness, but some of those results are based on unconscious decisions. In attacking these essays, however, I consciously focused on looking to balance humor and sadness, whether sentence to sentence in a single essay, or from one essay to the next. Parenting is endlessly frustrating, and for me, filled at times with rage. Parents die. Children get sick. You get older and more scared of things. The world can feel so fucked and wrong. But you can’t just write about all of that. Who would want to read it? No one, so even as I am come off like a whiner nonpareil, I also sought to constantly remind myself that there is good in the world, children bring joy, with age comes wisdom, even with death you can laugh, and that you have to remember to embrace it, all of it, and write about it as well.