Q: Who runs this site?

A: An unknown person who has adopted the name of Conroy Eaker, the name of the protagonist in Eakins’s autobiographical first novel, The Uncles Ten. I also refer to myself as Jaymes Silk or Canseco Nástinke (an anagram), depending on my mood.

Q: Do you accept submissions?

A: Yes. Please send to conroy@nathanielrich.com.

Q: Is your collection of Eakins’ jacket covers complete?

A: No. If you can supply any cover image of any edition of any Eakins novel, please send it as a jpg file to conroy@nathanielrich.com.

Q: What is this “Nathaniel Rich” in your URL?

A: Any Eakins will understand the reference, or course, to the character of this name in The Slayed.

(A very little) about Constance Eakins:

Q: Which book should I read first?

A: I am shocked and disturbed by the implication of your question, namely that you have never read a book by Constance Eakins. Well, if you weren’t assigned Sacrament in high school, that would be an obvious place to start. (Did you even attend high school, I wonder.) Many consider the Slaughter trilogy his masterpiece, but it’s not really for Eakins novices, or as I like to call them, Eakinfants. Dolman Hardy is as good a way in as any. Also Keftir the Blind and Other Stories.

Q: What is the ‘real’ setting for Better Days Will Haunt You?

A: Eakins lived for some years in Los Angeles, and many of his critics (see J.B. Pickens, Eakins the King, or Abraham Chisholm’s essay, “The Better Days Were the Worst I Ever Seen”) have argued that the rural farming community of Perpafore was a stand-in for the Mojave-desert region of Antelope Valley, in northern Los Angeles County. It’s my conviction, however, that there is no real setting except for the wild interior landscape of Eakins’s image-narrative-thought-machine.

Q: If Eakins is alive, shouldn’t his name be listed on bank accounts somewhere, or in some postal registry? How does he survive without making any money?

A: At the time of his disappearance, Eakins was thought to be the wealthiest writer on the planet. If his first memoir, Gashes, is to be believed, he demanded that he receive all payments from publishing houses and film studios in twenty-dollar bills. He distrusted bank accounts, calling banks “filthy-fingered grifters.”

Q: If he’s alive, where does he live?

A: Somewhere in the mountains of the Carso, outside of Trieste, Italy. This is the most likely place, but the wilds of Siberia, the tribal villages along the southern tail of the Nile, and New York City have been conjectured.

Q: If he’s dead, how did he die?

A: By jumping into the sea from a cliff. This motif is repeated frequently in his work.

Q: What was the last photo of him that was released?

A: The one that appears on the jacket of The Man With Holes in His Cheeks. The photograph was taken in 1965.

Q: From the diary excerpt you run on your website, I can see that Eakins was obsessed with the Triestine dialect. What does it sound like?

A: It unites elements of many other Italian dialects as well as Armenian, English, Spanish, Turkish, Sicilian, Maltese, German, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croation, Czech and Greek. It sounds, in other words, like sludge spoken by a mealy-mouthed wanderer.

Q: What is a “hypogeum”? And why does he use that word as the title of a story [in the Keftir collection] about racecar drivers?

A: It is a subterranean chamber of an ancient building. I refuse to take any questions that quarrel with Eakins’ genius.

—Canseco N.