
"Forgive me, but Greg Boyd is like Kafka and Grimm wrapped up in one, with a better sense of humor."
Stephen Haske, Amazon
Horny: Stories Selected and New, by Greg Boyd
When people ask me, "Who's your favorite writer few others have ever heard of?"-- I say Greg Boyd.
I discovered his work through Harold Jaffe's Fiction International in San Diego in 1992. When I was asked to do the first Best American Erotica series, it was Greg's epic crucifix satire, "Horny" was at the top of my list. —Before Nicholson Baker, Patrick Califia, Samuel Delany, or Anne Rice.
When Simon and Schuster asked me to curate their first series of novellas, I called Mr. Boyd, who created the most original work of the group, two parallel suspended narratives, titled "The Widow".
In my best living room performance art, I held a seance with Greg's "Mark Twain" sequel set in the barrens of the L.A. River: "The Further Adventures of Huck, Tom, and Jim."
Finally, when Audible asked me to make a list of the authors I most wanted to see in audio, again, in my little list, I wrote: Greg Boyd.
With the meticulous collaboration of publisher Jordan Jones at Leaping Dog Press, I'm proud to announce Audible has published Horny: Stories Selected and New.
Greg has a habit of doing things before anyone else even thinks of them, and it prompted me to interview Jordan, one of his early colleagues and publishers. I always wondered how they met.
In 1986, Greg was starting to make a name for himself as an writer of stories and prose poems, a translator, and a guy with an avant garde magazine called "Asylum."
He was teaching at a school I was attending and I was co-editing the school's literary magazine. We invited him to participate in a literary questionnaire we did, which included responses from the likes of May Swenson, Denise Levertov, and Maxine Kumin.
Later, Greg went off to work on printmaking and doing his prose poem/block print books. That eventually led him to his publishing at "Asylum Annuals," beautiful, glossy, surrealist masterpieces.
I had started a press called Leaping Dog Press, and wanted him to be one of my first authors. His book The Double: Döppelangelgänger came out in our second season. It's a novel with a series of interlocking short stories, where the fiction builds on the fiction. It also includes some of his photocollages.
Greg and I were two of the four people (including another writer, Richard Martin, and a film maker, Tony Liano) who worked on The 365 Project, a pre-YouTube invitation for artists to respond to brief non-fictional video snippets on the web.
Years passed, and eventually, I acquired Asylum Arts to add to the Leaping Dog family.
Somewhere in there, Greg wrote the books and board game, and Tony Liano directed the film that were part of the wildly innovative boxed set The Nambuli Papers, a fictional biography, book of poems by the subject (in three languages, including one fictional language), and DVD of the lost reel of a non-existent documentary about the fictional Nambul. ...A consummate disappearing artist.
Greg, like his man Nambuli, has disappeared to a far continent to pursue his art, and sends missives from Ecuador time to time.
I'm very honored to present Greg's first Audible collection— whether you're horny, hungry, or habituated to the cutting edge, this is the man for you.
Horny is narrated by
Christopher Kipiniak, whom many of you will recognize from "The Good Wife" and "Aftershock."