William Walsh is the author of The Poets (Erratum Press), Forty-five American Boys (Outpost 19), ON TV, Stephen King Stephen King, Unknown Arts, Ampersand Mass., Pathologies, Questionstruck (all from Keyhole Press) and Without Wax (Casperian Books). His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Always Crashing, Annalemma, Artifice, Caketrain, Hobart, Juked, LIT, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, New York Tyrant, Rosebud, and Quarterly West, as well as anthologies like The &NOW Anthology: Best of Innovative Writing, Dzanc's Best of the Web, and New Micro: Norton Anthology of Exceptionally Short Fiction.
The Poets is a novella in the form of a census. It is a cavalcade of poets real and imagined. We meet young poets taking their first steps into print and finding their voice. We follow the poets through their messy middle years—marrying, making babies, divorcing, winning prizes, losing face. And we witness the poets aging into their doddering years, burnishing their reputations and settling scores as they face their readers’ scrutiny and their own mortality.
"William Walsh has written a collective biography of all the poets in our midst—the famous, the infamous, the obscure, and the quotidian. Sentence by sentence, The Poets reveals the poetic in the prosaic, and the various ways that art reveals the human in both." —Pedro Ponce, author of The Devil and the Dairy Princess
"It's rare to find a genre-defying work that is by turns—and sometimes all at once—absurdly comedic, straight-faced satirical, psychologically insightful, and unexpectedly heartbreaking. William Walsh's refreshing The Poets is such a work, and readers are bound to see—somewhere in its fun-house mirrors—their worlds, their neighbors, themselves." —Joseph Fasano, author of The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing
"The Poets is a stunning river of words, and just as you can’t step into the same river twice, you can’t read William Walsh's book the same way twice. Chock-full of poetic allusions that will make the well-read reader smile, each page brilliantly depicts every pleasure and anxiety a human can feel. To read The Poets is to see your most thrilling conquests and shameful secrets spilling from every sentence, and to realize every time you open this book, it will reveal a different version of yourself." —Sara Pirkle, author of The Disappearing Act
What’s ON TV? A collection of forty-odd poems appropriated from the memoirs of beloved actors, genial hosts, successful producers, respected news and sports anchors, and even a few reality stars. It's an intertextual, parasocial channel-surf across decades of broadcast, cable, and streaming television.
Who’s ON TV? Oprah, Padma, and Shonda. Lumpy, Spock, and Screech. The Lone Ranger and Lorelai Gilmore. A real housewife and a fixer-upper. Nellie Oleson and Danny Partridge. Mankind, Captain Stubing, Bart Simpson, and more.
"ON TV completely reconceptualizes and re-forms our understanding of the celebrity memoir. Playful, polyvocal, purely inspired poetry!" —Molly Gaudry, author of We Take Me Apart
"William Walsh's ON TV is an expert and revealing chorus of celebrity voices. Quoting exclusively from passages in each celebrity's memoir, Walsh's wit—and ironic criticism—emerges from his choices and juxtapositions as well as from the variety of forms on the page, from run-together prose to floating verses, stanzas, line breaks, and use of spaces (and silences)." —DeWitt Henry, author of Foundling
"ON TV is poetics at its finest—shifting and constructing emotions first created by celebrities, William Walsh forms a whole new layer of sensations, a cast molding, perhaps, in which fresh perspectives are given through a unique beam of sunlight. We become spectators, twice over, as we realize how biographical prose can morph into a deeper meaning, sometimes sad—sometimes humorous, but always relatable on multiple levels. The stars are in reach, and Walsh takes reality and bends it through the lens of language and somehow makes it even more real than before. All we can do as readers is sprinkle a little salt on our popcorn and become entranced with Walsh’s magical show." —Shome Dasgupta, author of Iron Oxide
From Washington to Biden, Forty-five American Boys tells the story of each president’s childhood—told through fragments and quotes appropriated from more than 300 sources—children’s books, pop history books, and scholarly biographies. It is a compendium of folklore and facts that serves as a sweeping narrative of boyhood in America. This second edition from Outpost 19 features a new chapter on President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
"In Forty-five American Boys, William Walsh limns a complete series of cabinet portraits that show how tales, memories, and artifacts create the story of a life. But, of course, these are not just any lives. These are about forty-five of the most ambitious men in American history. By witnessing their childhood, Walsh shows when the commonality of boyhood mixes with the seeds of idealism and determination—the early sparks for the eventual combustion that will create something larger than life. Forty-five American Boys is a meticulously crafted collage of myth, legend, and fact that tells us as much about these boys as it tells us about ourselves as individuals and as a culture." — Adam Braver, author of Mr Lincoln’s Wars and November 22, 1963
"It is said that at the heart of every cliché lies a grain of truth. Each line of Forty-five American Boys flickers between cliché and truth, at turns inspiring and insipid, a device that propels a searing political critique. William Walsh demonstrates that, when done well, the selection and arrangement of previously existing texts can result in fabulously original literature." — Kenneth Goldsmith, author of Duchamp is My Lawyer and Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century
Thirty-one short-short stories collected from work that originally appeared in Quick Fiction, The Kenyon Review Blog, BOAAT, Boston Literary Review, Necessary Fiction, The Morning News, and New Micro: Norton Anthology of Exceptionally Short Fiction.
"Kafka's Gregor Samsa doesn't feel lonely and alienated, like an insect among humans. Samsa is an insect. William Walsh takes the same conceptual step, in narratives both dreamy and precise. Playful (though playfully serious) moments spark and catch alight as Walsh bends realism and twists structural forms (letters, lists, acronyms) into something bright and new. A text that examines our zany world, the world of language and of writing--and all the wonderful oddness that happens when they meet." —Sean Lovelace, author of Fog Gorgeous Stag
"'A tall glass of reality with a twist of bizarre, please.' That's how I like my fiction and William Walsh serves it up over and over again with Stephen King Stephen King, a bottomless, never-ending happy hour of playful unexpectedness. Drink it up. All of it. Let someone else drive you home." —xTx, author of Today I Am A Book
Unknown Arts, to use a Joycean coinage, is a thinkling. Walsh offers a series of critical appropriations—poems, stories, and a silent play—drawn from Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, and more. “Enjombyourselves thurily!”
“Art critic Thomas Hess found that the only worthwhile criticism of a work of art is another work of art. William Walsh must feel this too, because he does not merely document and rearrange Joyce’s work here—he makes, with Joyce’s materials, his own music. Each piece is a lovely read, and a reminder not of totemic, hallowed literature, but of how personal and playful the act of reading really is.” —Darcie Dennigan, author Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse
“A mixup, an accumulation; William Walsh faithfully divines James Joyce and his multiflex bodies. Here is a man (two men, I mean, meant to mingle, both) once won of song and slave to rhythm; sum dumb, fully plumbed. Here is a truly prazeful recapitulation! Read.” —Ken Baumann, author of Solip
Ampersand, Mass. is a collection of per se stories from a per se town. These stories carefully examine the constant conflict between the willful and the reluctant. Featuring short stories that originally appeared in New York Tyrant, LIT, Pank, Annalemma, Quarterly West and other journals.
"One of the most original and intelligent writers publishing in the indie lit world today, William Walsh impresses again with this collection of odd/funny/sad/surprising stories about the citizens of Ampersand, Mass. in all their flawed and compelling humanity. Walsh’s stories are both innovative and deeply moving. A rare and brilliant combination." — Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life
"Ampersand, Mass. is a glorious and ripe bruise. Walsh’s stories sneak, peer through curtains – there is a town here, inside of his words, and it is shaking us. Ampersand, Mass. should be ingested whole, deeply. These are characters to haunt us from within." — J. A. Tyler, author of The Zoo, a Going
Collection featuring seventeen short-short fictions that originally appeared in journals like The Crescent Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, No Colony, Kill Author, Rosebud, Suss, Sir, and Sweet Fancy Moses.
"Over and over while reading Pathologies, I had the same reaction. I read a story and thought, 'Ha, that's funny,' and I felt like I'd got the point. Then I finished the story and thought, 'Hang on, that's more than just funny...,' and reread it to enjoy the many layers Walsh packs into each very short piece. These stories read quickly, giving the illusion of easy understanding, but they become more complex and subtle as you read. Most are pared-down portraits of characters, honing in on their strangest quirks not to reduce them to laughingstocks but to make them more nuanced than those quirks at first seem to allow. I was reminded of Gary Lutz' fiction in how powerfully they get to the heart of a character, and have a 'simple' surface that belies the complexity beneath. But rather than the skewed syntax of Lutz, the stories in Pathologies accomplish this by offering precisely the right detail at precisely the right time." —Steve Himmer, author of The Bee-Loud Glade and Fram
"The William Walsh does humor, pop culture and sex as well as anyone in this collection, but one thing I am always struck by regardless of what I'm reading of his, is Walsh's almost restless curiosity, which always seems to pop off the page, all fertile, authentic and vibrant." —Ben Tanzer, author of Upstate and Lucky Man
A Book of Questions…a 170-page book composed entirely of interrogatives (3,883 of them). Questionstruck traces the line of questioning throughout Calvin Trillin’s books, compiling all of Trillin's interrogatives—the rhetorical, the political, and the victual—into one dizzying collection. Echoing Trillin's food and travel books, his field reporting in The New Yorker, and his political verse in The Nation, Questionstruck is an inventive and experimental text that begs to be defined.
"Master recontextualizer William Walsh has pulled off an unlikely feat: he didn't write a word of this book, and yet its twisted pleasures couldn't possibly belong to anyone else. He has managed to transform the collected works of Calvin Trillin into some kind of whacked-out koan, a strangely compelling harangue that will leave you dumbstruck." —J. Robert Lennon, author of Castle and Broken River
"This is actual experimental writing, unlike so much of what claims that tag, and impressively done. Having read much of Walsh's published work, it's interesting to see how much of his intellect and humor and heart I can sense behind these pages. Using selection and arrangement, he's the one creating the new experience of reading these now out-of-context questions, and while the words in Questionstruck were written by Trillin, there's no doubt that the experience is all Walsh, and brilliantly so." —Matt Bell, author of Appleseed and Scrapper
"An audacious debut, Walsh’s documentary novel delivers a formal inventiveness that is remarkable." —Michael Kimball, author of Big Ray and Dear Everybody
"Without Wax is full of the electric, the taboo, the sad bizarre. There's no doubt Walsh knows what he's doing, and that he's willing to go wherever necessary to find and render something new." —Blake Butler, author of Alice Knott and There is No Year
"Walsh patiently ventures into the inner worlds of his strange and compelling characters, knitting together a text that's part pornography exposé, part coming of age story, part love story, part social excavation." —Sherrie Flick, author of Thank Your Lucky Stars and I Call This Flirting
"Walsh’s documentary approach is clever. The method not only explicitly turns us into voyeurs, it also objectifies everyone we meet, with no room for editorial comment." —Bill Rodriguez, in The Boston Phoenix