It looks like Archipelago Books will publish Kin in the first half of 2021. In the meantime, we are working together on some first serial publication excerpts. I have taken three and contacted two editors I know at lit mags to start, while the folks at Archipelago are working on a handful of others. This ability to excerpt is probably a major publishing virtue of the book, and indeed Miljenko Jergović published many short segments in a variety of venues in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, leading up to the book’s full publication in Croatia in 2013.
If those two editors pass on the excerpts I’ve got, I’ll go to two others, and so on. Depending on how well Jill Schoolman and her people do with theirs, I might take more to send out. All this really ought to happen in the first half of this year since the better lit mags generally are a good year out in terms of the publication schedule (though you can sometimes squeeze something in later if they have space and are interested).
Revisiting excerpts also allows me to revise again, which can of course go on forever until you’re just removing and replacing commas. When I’m at that point, I’ll be very happy.
Happy 2020!
Russell Scott Valentino 