Download "The Dog," free.

"The Dog," a story that might be considered a missing chapter from Finn, is now available on my web site as a free download. It's also a low-priced eBook for Amazon's Kindle, but I wanted to make it available to folks who haven't yet caught up with that particular technology.

Folks like myself, that is...

HUCK has "The Raftsmen's Passage." Now FINN has "The Dog."

Just before Huckleberry Finn went to press, Mark Twain's publisher asked him to remove an episode from near the start of Chapter 16. The deleted pages showed Huck eavesdropping on a group of raftsmen by night, and over time became known to scholars as "The Raftsmen's Passage" or "The Raft Chapter." The material appeared in Life on the Mississippi, and was first restored to Huck in a 1944 edition.

(For more details, along with a million other interesting things about Twain and his world, check out Kent Rasmussen's encyclopedic, two-volume Critical Companion to Mark Twain.)

Now, a missing piece of Finn has surfaced. Its provenance is different from "The Raftsmen's Passage," though; instead of being omitted from the original novel, it arrived afterward.

Readers of Finn know that many events in the novel spring from the memorable moment when Huckleberry Finn found his father's dead body—naked and bloody—in a floating house. Transposed into my book, the peculiar objects in that death room—whiskey bottles, a baby's bottle, men's and women's clothing, two black cloth masks, a wooden leg—appear along the twisted trail of Finn's life.

There was a dog collar in that room, too. And it got me thinking.

The result—"The Dog"—is available now for Amazon's Kindle. It sells for about a dollar, and you can be reading it in a few seconds.

New Novel Coming Soon

Kings of the Earth, my new novel, just sold to Random House.

Here's the run-down...

Impoverished, illiterate, and rooted to the land, the three Proctor brothers have lived and worked together since childhood. When one dies and another is suspected of his murder, the community begins to talk. KINGS OF THE EARTH is a story of life and death and what comes after, on a hardscrabble farm in upstate New York.

An upstate native myself, I don't mind telling you that the wellspring of this novel is the tragedy of the Ward brothers, a case that was the subject of national news coverage and a documentary film, Brother's Keeper, in the 1990's. My father grew up down the road from the Ward brothers, although he—unlike his old neighbors—is still among the living.

No publication date has been set for Kings of the Earth. Watch this space...

Finn Visits Quarry Farm

Every two years, the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College hosts the International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies.

Among the scholars on deck for the 2009 conference is Takuya Kubo, Associate Professor at Japan's Kanazawa University. Professor Kubo specializes in 19th century American Literature, chiefly the work of Mark Twain, and his approach to Twain is an interesting one: He considers Twain's work through the lens of Masculinity Studies. The title of his conference paper is "Turn Us into Real Men: Mark Twain and his Incomplete Masculine Education."

A pdf of the full conference program is here.

All of this is by way of noting that Kubo found Finn an interesting exploration and expansion of Huck's possible masculine roots. And that's by way of explaining the photo seen above: Professor Kubo, reading Finn on the porch at Twain's beloved Quarry Farm, the very location where Huckleberry Finn himself was born.

What a world.

Supporting Purple Day...

...in support of epilepsy research.

Visit PurpleDay.org to find out more.

Good News from the Twain House

You know what they say: Mission Accomplished.

Here's a story from the Hartford Courant on the improved financial state of the Mark Twain House & Museum...

A million thanks to those who've given of their time and funds to help preserve this bit of holy ground. Keep it up!

The Ski Diva Mysteries!

If you've never clicked on the links in the right-hand column, you may not know about my wife's not-so-secret identity.

A couple of years ago Wendy founded The Ski Diva, a site that's become the internet's premiere destination for women who ski. With well over a thousand registered members, and close to thirty thousand unique visitors a month, she's managed to bring together a huge and devoted community of active and enthusiastic women from all around the world. She also blogs, when she's not out on the slopes.

Now she's taken the Ski Diva someplace entirely new. She's recently signed with the Thomas Dunne imprint of St. Martin's Press for two novels—Ski Diva Mysteries—the first of which will appear in January of 2010.

Here's the synopsis:

In DOUBLE BLACK, Boston’s twenty-something Stacey Curtis ditches her cheating fiance and heads for a Vermont ski town. She’s looking for the life she’s always dreamed about, but she stumbles instead into financial intrigue, bitter family warfare, and murder. Populated with quirky characters, loaded with New England atmosphere, and starring a young woman with nerve, spunk, and a sense of humor about it all, DOUBLE BLACK is an exciting run down some treacherous mountain trails.

And here's the first line:

“When Stacey Curtis found the dead man in the bed, she knew it was time to get her own apartment.”

It's a ton of fun, and I'm so proud of her for making it happen. Meanwhile, I can't wait to get my hands on the sequel...