A Very Good Saturday Night

I changed my Tumblr theme (snapshot above, new page and photo credits here.)

And I started a new book, "Everything Beautiful Began After," by Simon Van Booy.

It's a love story, set in Athens, and this is how it starts:

"For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home. Places where lonely people can live in exile of their own lives--far from anything that was ever imagined for them. Athens has long been a place where lonely people go. A city doomed to forever impersonate itself, a city wrapped by cruel bands of road, where the thunder of traffic is a sound so constant it's like silence..."

I'm hooked. Now I want to read everything Van Booy has ever written. Susan Salter Reynolds spotted Van Booy's promise in 2007, after the debut of his first book, "The Secret Lives of People in Love."

She wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "One worries, after reading a debut short-story collection this breathtaking, what Simon Van Booy could possibly do for an encore. Write something longer? Take up haiku? Wander the world like a sadhu for a few decades and send us another book as chillingly beautiful, like postcards from Eden?"

Yes, exactly. A book like a postcard from Eden. This is a very good Saturday night.