Kyle Seibel — ex-Navy and a local tech copywriter — has written a book. What’s more, he looks like a guy who has written a book: omnipresent jaw-grizzle, hirsute Popeye forearms urging out of pushed-back shirtsleeves, unruly hair that so crowds his scalp it has no choice but to drape into a Yeatsian forelock. Charmingly self-deprecating, rakishly handsome (there, I said it), and given to rumination, Seibel, with his unheralded bursts of staccato, lampshade-tilting laughter, can startle the piss out of you.
None of this is an affect, but instead is the happy confluence of an unsuspecting searcher and his revealed destiny. Not to get all Horatio Alger about it. Per the unyielding etiquette of literary book-titling — Sometimes a Great Notion, The Sun Also Rises — Seibel’s opus goes by Hey You Assholes. The scofflaw absence of a comma in the title says loads.
“The conventional wisdom is to name your collection, especially your first, after one of the stories in it,” Seibel says. “The title, though, comes from a line in a story in the collection. It was suggested to me by Todd Dakin, who is like my creative or writing partner. A best friend is probably more accurate.” One expects a degree of braggadocio from a guy who would title a book Hey You Assholes. Unbuckle that seat belt. “It’s hard to imagine Terry Gross saying ‘Hey You Assholes,’” Seibel says with equanimity. “It had to be this title. It’s not something I can explain.”