Sold NO books.

Gave three “Cheesesteak”s away. One I swapped to Chris Rodell, a journalist/pal from the defunct writers’ forum Red Room, where he was someone I read eagerly, for his self-published “The Last Baby Boomer.” (Check out his blog at eightdaystoamish.blogspot.com.) The second went to the cartoonist Chester Brown, whose work I’ve admired since I profiled him in “The Comics Journal” in 1993. We’d recently re-connected and he’d sent me his mini- “Daphnis & Chloe,” which is about Romantic Love. The third went to Meredith Tax, whose article on the Kurdish women’s movement and revolution recently went up at firstofthemonth.org, to which I also contribute. (See her forthcoming “A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State.” She and I were in the same college class, though in vastly different crowds. (I recall speaking to her during Orientation Week and again at graduation. She does not remember me at all.) But junior year, when the idea I might be a writer hit me out of nowhere, she and I were the only underclassfolk to have short stories in the university literary magazine, an association that was good for my cred and self-belief.

I don’t think of myself as being part of a literary world, and I don’t know whether the range of these connections supports or contradicts this belief.

Anyway, “Cheesesteak: The West Philadelphia Years.” Send $20 to Spruce Hill Press, POB 9492, Berkeley, CA 94709.