Nick Greer is a writer from Berkeley. He holds an MFA Creative Writing from the University of Arizona.
His chapbook, Glass City, won The Calvino Prize and was published by Salt Hill in 2016. His self-help zine, Bad Year, was published in 2021. In 2023, he launched Lesser Work, an ongoing collection of marginalia on marginalia. His parapolitical giallo, Post Larva / House of the Painted Wolf is forthcoming with Double Negative.
He also publishes two digital literary journals: Territory, a biannual about maps and other flawed representations, and Goodnight, Sweet Prince, a sporadic zine about side characters in movies and other media.
For more, see his curriculum vitae.
Bad Year (20 pages, 5.5 x 5.5 in) is a self-help zine written at the end of 2020 and published at the beginning of 2021. It commemorates and kicks off another year of consumption, anxiety, theater, isolation, whiteness, bewilderment, farce, impotence, fragmentation, tragedy, conspiracy, rationalization, and the other magical thinking we rely on to make more coherent pictures of the simulation. One such picture makes up the art of the zine.
Originally 150 copies were printed and delivered to subjects who were suffering and in need of realignment. If believe you qualify, spin the wheel below and await your fate.
It's going to be okay.
Glass City (2015) is a project documenting the hyperrealities of the modern city. Like the city it documents, Glass City exists in multiple forms.
As a story collection, Glass City won the The Calvino Prize in 2015 and was published in Salt Hill 37. Martin McLaughlin, the judge of The Calvino Prize, had this to say about the collection:
This work took up the major demanding Calvinian theme of the modern (fantasy) city, but it makes the reader think about the problems of the real cities we live in and does so with humour and an often poetic style and rhythm (just like Calvino's own Invisible Cities), echoing his fondness for poetic triads of nouns and verbs, but all done in a new way for the 21st century
Excerpts from the story collection have also been published in Tin House Online, Miracle Monocle, and the Pacifica Literary Review, and you can hear excerpts here.
As a physical object, Glass City is an artist's book that doubles as a three-dimensional model of the city.
To date, two copies have been made. The first lives in the Rare Book Collection at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. The second lives in the Bridwell Art Library at the University of Louisville. The book is printed on transparency paper (14.8 x 21 cm) and bound in two panes of glass (21 x 26 cm).
Additionally copies will be made if certain conditions are met. Inquiries are currently closed.