The Yalobusha Review

M-I-C. See you real soon. K-E-Y. Why? Because we love you.

2009-04-28T23:04:00.000-07:00

Hello, readers. My posts have been fairly absent of late. This is due to many things, none of which are the swine flu, Tokyo's self-propelling goo, or Barbara Streisand. Two things to which it is actually due would be those events to which sometimes I refer (and involve my family hopefully not all deciding to die simultaneously), and also this thing here, which is a magnelephant blog started by me in which I plan on discussing everything ever. There will probably be a lot of posts about cats.

In other words (are there any other kind?), this may be my last post here, and it may not, depending on how the moon strikes me. It's been fun and this magazine will have many wonderful people, not me, working for it next year. One of them you can read her stories here and here. If you ask her nicely, maybe she will sometimes post on this blog, or poke someone else into doing it. If she pokes hard enough, that someone else maybe will sometimes be me.

One last/more/erm time, here's a list of things that I more or less found interesting enough to compose into a list, occasionally annotated by my silly serious ruminations:

The Nebula Awards have been announced. LCRW tabluates winners according to gender, which makes sense if you understand the concept of Tiptree-ian momentum.

A person with my name, along with my brain and my fingers and my ankles, has published an article in Strange Horizons called, "Imagining the Perfect Man: Science Fiction and the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin." The pictures are quite nice.

A list by John Crowley in which there are suggested many books for people, especially those with fantasy and sci-fi inclinations [taken, as are most of my ideas, from the man in black who doodles rats and doesn't--yet--have a famous album of him singing in a prison. Though there are reports of him carrying dead women in alleys.]

Happy tomorrow, readers.

ttfn.

Thursday Things

2009-04-16T14:21:00.000-07:00

Hello, readers. As you may know, it's possible that the brief, but fervent, rioting over Amazon's supposedly targeted deranking of GLBT books was a lot of roused rabble over nothing, or that maybe it wasn't.

Here are things you can be sure are worth getting excited about.

A review in the New York Times of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's graphic memoir, A Drifting Life. Tetsumi, born 1935 in Osaka, Japan, came of age during the era of atomic bombs, washing machines, and Coca-Cola. This was also the era of Manga, of "big, dewy eyes; tiny mouths; piles of spiky hair." Tetsumi went a different way, though, being the manifestee of a form called gekiga, a "darker" and "often more violent" graphic style. His memoir covers all of this, the emergent culture and art, in a mere 855 pages. "It’s as if someone had taken a Haruki Murakami novel and drawn, beautifully and comprehensively, in its margins."

Neil Gaiman discusses Sir Clement Freud and Grimble.

Nathan Bransford, literary agent, challenges you to be him.

And finally, once upon a time, in an LA Times article, Seth Grahame-Smith said he had "no plans to build a classic-books-remix career." "I don't know," he said, "if I want to be the guy who writes 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' and then 'Sense and Sensibility and Vampires,' or 'Wuthering Heights Reloaded.' " And, well, he's not that guy. He's the guy who's writing Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Apparently it's a historical horror remix career he's after. Next up, 'Plato versus the Blob.' Followed soon, of course, by a super historical horror remix in which Elizabeth Bennett, Abraham Lincoln, and Plato join forces to battle giant mutant rabbits.

Monday Mobs...

2009-04-13T08:07:00.000-07:00

That logo delights me, not necessarily because it's the prettiest or most clever logoed rage ever made, but because of what it implies concerning the world we live in, namely, that righteous crusaders/mobs/concerned and informed activists, through the interweb (especially now with Twitter and hashtags) have a remarkably easy time gathering together and taking action against perceived and/or actual injustice. This has it's downside, I suppose, as occasionally angry mobs have made mistakes, but still, it's thrilling to see how pitchforks have evolved into google bombs. Amazon Rank.

Amazon's "glitch" in which GLBT books have been deranked is wonderfully discussed here and here and here. Read and become enraged, readers. It's intoxicating.

Happy rioting.

ttfn.

Robot Tuesday

2009-04-07T22:55:00.000-07:00

There's every possibility I'll be unable to post tomorrow, and there were things to important not to mention and arrange pictures about.

For one, Fantagraphics is offering 15% off their roster of Eisner nominated books. These include bits by Kevin Huizenga and John Kerschbaum, collections of Village Voice strips and the WWII cartoons of Bill Mauldin, as well as several editions of The Comics Journal. My favorite, though, based solely on the cover and description would be The Last Musketeer by Jason. "The now centuries-old Athos" panhandles and trades on his old fame until, one day, Martians invade and once again "there is a need for swashes to be buckled..."

For two, I read this past weekend a book called Genesis by Bernard Beckett. If I were to sum it up in a sentence, a perfectly reasonable thing to do, I think, I would say it's a Platonic sci-fi think-piece about what it means to be human in which there are featured: an orangutan robot, occasional laser beams, a shadowy Academy, and one very long and revelatory job interview. Also, it reminded me of a certain movie which I can't mention for fear of ruining certain things. Plus that would involve writing a second sentence about the book.

For three, A Beautiful Revolution, the blog of Andre Jordan. He wrote a book called Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now. Maybe don't visit the blog if you're in the mood for cartoons where people do not cut off their heads with a saw. It's kind of funny, though. And it might just make you smile, readers, and so maybe it's exactly the place you've been looking for all your life.

Mythical Monday

2009-04-07T16:00:00.000-07:00

Hello, readers. I've decided this is the sort of Monday which may not exist. It's unseasonably cold and there's every chance it may rain. It's possible this is a late April Fool's joke. Nature is reliably disorganized about these things.

Here is a list of stuff which probably exists.

Samuel 'Chip' Delaney profiled in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The man truly does have a fine beard. [via LHB]

More news from the future. The interstices of publishing in a world of Kindles and iPhones and gWheezits gets discussed in a New York Times article. Specific topics include: e-books, Gatsby's twitter account, inserting cutscenes within prose similar to Wing Commander III, and the one-day future of interactive electronic narratives (as in, like, interactive fiction? Not really. Video games? Nothing so ambitious. More like snazzy web-pages.)

Learn of the very important, or maybe insignificant, matter of Shakespeare's possibly being a hottie.

To sum up: "Myth isn't about something which never happened, but about something which happens over and over again." Like a certain day of the week, no?

ttfn, readers.

p.s. Yes, it is Tuesday. This only adds evidence to my theory of Monday being a myth, though.

Hello Again

2009-04-04T15:27:00.000-07:00

Hello, readers. Events occurred somewhat separate to the Book Conference which involved me reporting less than I had intended. A summary of fun will come, but for now, here are new things which are happening.

David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlases and Ghostwrittens, as well as a Black Swan Green, will have a new novel out in June 2010. [via Ed]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez reti res.

Last week, Alison Bechdel graphically reviewed Jane Vandenburgh's non-graphic, plain text memoir, A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century. It's beautifully done and made reading the actual book almost seem beside the point, but maybe I just have a thing for predominantly blue comic book panels. In any case, considering the fairly ubiquitous practice of textually reviewing graphic works, it seems high time the tables were turned* on the written word.

In completely unrelated news, here's one more article on the assimilation/acceptance of comic books into the literary establishment. It's actually quite cogent and my somewhat exasperated introduction shouldn't dissuade you from reading it.

The second volume of Interfictions, an anthology of interstitial writing, has a cover and it would be the rising sun swedish congolomeration pictured to your left (unless you're looking at your monitor upside down, in which case, I worry about you). Also, you can go here, and flickr your way through the pool of pictures from which the eventual cover was chosen.

*What if the table's round? Would anyone notice a round table turning? Does it mean to flip someone's table upside down, as in ha-ha, written word, you thought you were going to have a nice spaghetti dinner, but lo, now the table is upside down and your dinner but a flattened memory!

Oxford Conference for the Book

2009-03-26T14:54:00.001-07:00

Quick post, events occurring.

Today marks the beginning of the 2009 Oxford Conference for the Book. Each year, a Mississippian of artistic bent, generally deceased, gets celebrated. Last year it was Zora Neale Hurston. This year it's Walter Ingils Anderson, an author, blockprinter, and children's book illustrator, among other things.

If you're in the area, check the schedule, stop by for some of the events.

On the third floor of the University library, there's an exhibition of Mr. Anderson's watercolors and ink drawings inspired by classic works of literature (Alice in Wonderland, Paradise Lost, Don Quixote, and so forth).

Tomorrow morning (Friday morning), Trenton Lee Stewart author of The Mysterious Benedict Society will be reading and talking with fifth graders. He'll be signing books, as well, along with Jay Asher at Square Books, Jr. at 3pm.

And on Saturday, don't miss Jack Pendarvis doing something Pendarvisian at his reading alongside fellow author folk, Steve Yarborough and John Pritchard.

The whole thing ends Saturday at 6 at Off-Square, where there'll be a marathon book signing/Granta/Square Books party.

Reportage and pictures forthcoming.*

ttfn, readers.

*Unless they don't, but hopefully they will. Depends, mainly, on batteries being properly charged.

Wednesday Whatsits

2009-03-25T21:56:00.000-07:00

The semifinals of the Tournament of Books has begun. First up, 2666 vs. City of Refuge. Second up, A Mercy vs. Shadow Country. After that comes the zombies.

Philosophy is cool again.

Matthew Cheney discusses the links between Philip K. Dick and poet Jack Spicer at Strange Horizons. Included: a brief scene of strong sexual content, "Beatrice/Shimmering in infinite space," and an imagined goodbye.

The first volume of Samuel Beckett's letters discussed by Nicholas Lezard at the Guardian and Anthony Lane at the New Yorker.

Over at a mysterious place called The Stranger, there's a write-up of a showdown "to determine, once and for all, which popular young-adult fantasy series--Harry Potter or Twilight--is the best." The showdown consisted of a debate between two teams of three girls apiece. The whole thing reminds me of another great battle, that of David and Goliath, except in this case David is a "stereotypically weak girl" with "low self-esteem" and Goliath is an orphan with a chip on his shoulder and a lightning bolt on his forehead. Also, in this case, Goliath wins. [via Omnivoracious]

And in MacArthur Park, tamales and books have joined forces to survive in the face of economic woefulness.

Ada Lovelace Day

2009-03-24T14:05:00.000-07:00

Hello, readers. Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Ms. Lovelace, besides having a name* nicely suited to a Victorian burlesque act, is generally considered to be the world's first computer programmer. She was a friend of Charles Babbage, imaginer of the Difference Machine, and she wrote of possible programs for his imaginary machine. She also articulated the concept of symbolic manipulation that foresaw the capabilities of computers to be more than mere "number-crunchers."

As part of Ada Lovelace Day, some thousand and more bloggers have pledged to write about a woman in technology they admire. Examples would be here, and here, and here. And also of course, here, which would be the place you are now and which will shortly discuss the work of one Shelley Jackson.

Shelley Jackson has illustrated Kelly L ink's books. She has also written her own books, such as the short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy and Half Life, a novel about conjoined twins, Nora and Blanche, which won the Tiptree Award. What is unusually spectacular about Shelley Jackson, though, is her forays into unconventional manners of storytelling.

Electronic literature is a literary genre consisting of works that originate within digital environments. In other words, a Google scan of A Tale of Two Cities does not a piece of electronic literature make. Examples of actual electronic literature would include SMS (text message) novels, as well as interactive fiction and hypertext fiction. It happens that perhaps the best and most well known piece of hypertext fiction was written by Shelley Jackson. It's called Patchwork Girl. It was published in the old times, when Prodigy and Compuserve roamed the Interweb. 1995 to be exact.

Patchwork Girl is the story of Frankenstein's second monster, the companion for monster number one. If you are remembering that in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein this second monster was destroyed, you are remembering correctly. Shelley Jackson's story imagines a different thing, that Mary Shelley herself completed work on this second monster, who subsequently falls in love with her creator and then travels to America. Readers read the hypertext by clicking links and images that one further into the story's world. It's immersive and cool and an experience difficult to replicate with a normal book, seeing as how it's made of paper and impervious to clicking.

But what matters my opinion. Listen to noted critic Richard Coover:

"Perhaps the true paradigmatic work of the era, Shelley Jackson's elegantly designed, beautifully composed Patchwork Girl offers the patient reader, if there are any left in the world, just such an experience of losing oneself to a text, for as one plunges deeper and deeper into one's own personal exploration of the relations here of creator to created and of body to text, one never fails to be rewarded and so is drawn ever deeper, until clicking the mouse is as unconscious an act as turning a page, and much less constraining, more compelling."

So, readers, knowing you are the patient sort, go forth and travel back to a time before twit-lit. Partake in the history of literary electronica. Celebrate women, technology, and stitching.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day.

ttfn.

*Technically, her given name would be, Augusta Ada King, and she happened to be the Countess of Lovelace.

Goodbyes, Realizations, and A Thing Somewhat Unrelated to the First Two Things

2009-03-20T21:57:00.000-07:00

Hello, readers. Today I said goodbye to many dear friends: human, robot, and otherwise. There was wine, some tears, and a few questions as to the groovyness of jiving automatons. I'm speaking, of course, of the final episode of Battlestar Galactica, which reminded me, at different points, of Ulysses, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Out of Africa. It was that kind of show. And one day it may be nominated for a Hugo, as was this year's mid-season finale, "Revelations."

Other things nominated for a Hugo this year: (nominations being announced yesterday)

Best Novel:

Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Morrow; Atlantic UK)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen; HarperVoyager UK)
Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi (Tor)

A very interesting list. Several Brits, a couple of young adult books, and a single pair of homonyms.

Best Novellette (All available online):

“Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” by Mike Resnick (Asimov’s Jan 2008)
“The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2)
“Pride and Prometheus” by John Kessel (F&SF Jan 2008)
“The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner (Asimov’s Feb 2008)
“Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s Mar 2008)

Little to say here except that this category may feature my favorite title ever. I'll leave it to your imagination as to which, though. I'm having trouble picking between the two of them.

Check out SF Signal for the rest of the categories and nominees, including links to those which are online and free. Also, for further discussion of said nominees, generally considered to be a talented bunch, check out Wired, as well as John Scalzi himself on what it feels like to be nominated among such illustrious foes.

Happy Friday, readers. Remember: Instead of saying all of your goodbyes, let them know you realize that life goes fast. It's hard to make the good things last. You realize that the sun doesn't go down. It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round.

ttfn.

In Between Times

2009-03-19T15:27:00.001-07:00

Hello, readers. I planned on posting a thing about the present future of internet fiction and poetry. A sort of round-up of the online world as pertains to literariness. As perhaps should have been suspected, this post seems to be ever-expanding, very much like our universe, except that so far I've avoided any major cosmic accidents. If all goes well, we will avoid the inevitable collapse, though, and the post will eventually exist in an actual way.

Here's things to bide your time with:

Maud Newton judging 2666 vs A Partisan's Daughter. She calls Bolano's work a "brilliant, far-ranging, occasionally trying, meditation on art, life, and the relationship between the two." For Mr. Bernières, she says, "The story is lean, the prose straightforward, the unreliability of the lust object’s narrative almost, but not wholly, plausible." I'll leave the verdict a surprise.

Still more prizes for Joe Hill's ever-expanding Love Your Indie Contest. Originally, it seemed we would all be winners in the sense that we would be supporting local and independently owned bookstores. Now it seems we might all be winners in that the number of prizes is asymptotically approaching the number of entrants.

In case you missed it: Peter S. Beagle has a new book out, a collection of stories called, We Never Talk About My Brother.

Also, in case you missed it: People died this week. At least two of them writers. James Purdy and Millard Kaufman.

Happy Thursdsay, readers.

ttfn.

Little Green Men, Also the Many Mysterious Varieties of Edwin Droodism:

2009-03-17T22:37:00.000-07:00

Ah, St. Patrick's Day, the day of greeniness and a sudden uptick in sales of Guiness and Baileys. It's also a day where if aliens did invade, and they were, in fact, little green men, a great majority of people wouldn't take much notice. It would be like if werewolves and zombies and vampires and ghosts ever teamed up for a Halloween rampage. Except that would never happen, of course. Everyone knows that demons take Halloween off. It's gotten too commercial.*

The Mystery of Edwin Drood, so far as we know, wasn't about vampires. It chiefly concerned the mystery surrounding the possible murder of a man named Edwin Drood. Charles Dickens died half-way through writing it, though, so there's been a long-running debate as to who actually killed Edwin, and if he was murdered at all. A mock trial was held by the Dickens Fellowship, featuring G.K. Chesterton as judge and George Bernard Shaw as foreman. No definite conclusions were reached. So, it's always possible Dickens had a Sixth Sense-esque twist planned. Edwin Drood was undead all along, sort of thing. Probably not. But the Wall Street Journal has a cool article up about two writers, Dan Simmons and Matthew Pearl, who have somewhat concurrently published two novels exploring Dickens and his unfinished novel.

Dan Simmons, a hardboiled sci-fi horror writer, enters the discussion with Drood. He takes the perspective of Wilkie Collins, a Dickens rivalish contemporary who wrote such books as The Woman in White (which influenced greatly a friend's love and suspicion of mice) and The Moonstone (which some consider the first great detective novel). The two of them are riding a train one night. It crashes. They barely escape with their life. It is on that fateful night, though, while attempting to rescue fellow passengers, that Dickens encounters a phantom named Drood, "who had apparently been traveling in a coffin."** Charlie and Wilkie team-up buddy cop style at this point and follow the, perhaps, undead Drood into the "nightmarish" world of the London underground. These adventures, a la Shakespeare/George Lucas in Love, provide the inspiration for Dickens eventual unfinished novel.

Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow, has titled his Drooish take, The Last Dickens. In it, he takes us to a world just after Dickens death, when pages from Dickens' last novel are being carried along by a clerk who naturally gets run over by an omnibus. The pages are lost. The publisher sets off to England to discover how Dickens intended his novel to end. And as such, the game is afoot.

Kirkus names these books as inhabiting the alternative literary history genre. Which is a fine enough name. I'm just excited to see if Simmons somehow introduces mice into either of his two protagonist's pockets.

Oh, and lastly, there exists a Mystery of Edwin Drood musical named, as with Simmons' novel, Drood. Thought you should know, readers.

ttfn.

*Bad writers imitate, good writers steal. In this case, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

**My vampire theory sounds less crazy now, no?

Monday Quickies

2009-03-16T14:38:00.000-07:00

Alan Moore interviewed and profiled in the Guardian.

More prizes added to Joe Hill's Love-Your-Indie contest, this time from PS Publishing.

Twilight drives up sales of Wuthering Heights in France.

Neil Gaiman is on The Colbert Report tonight. Set your expectations to fantastic.

ttfn, readers.

Sunday Square Finds

2009-03-15T22:36:00.000-07:00

Hello, readers. Your blogger spent his Sunday walking around the Oxford Square, perusing the shelves of our local booksellers. And he found things, some of them interesting, a few of them he'll share with you here. Pictures included where appropriate.

In the Believer, there is a list of the Fifty Greatest Things That Just Popped into Jack Pendarvis' Head. Included are such things as windows, curtains (because sometimes windows are too good to be true), and also, erm, something else representative and humorous but which I can't think of at the moment. For more of Jack, a person/thing which is great and often pops into my head unannounced in a hilarious manner similar to that of Kramer from Seinfeld, visit here, which is the place where Jack Pendarvis has a blog.

At Square Books, Jr., John Green's Looking for Alaska called out to me, but he will be read later. As well, perhaps, as will something called The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, a series concerning the geography of imaginary places. What truly stuck out to me, though, was the great number of books concerning the awkward and occasionally tragic experiences of attending high school with zombies, or as they're called in Generation Dead, the living impaired, or differently biotic. It seems zombies are not quite the brainless moaners of yesteryear. They listen to music. They ride the bus. They hope you will sit with them in the cafeteria, but they know you won't because they smell funny. In You Are So Undead to Me, they receive counseling from a fifteen-year-old girl named Megan Berry. She's a zombie settler. It's her job to help the recently undead adjust to being no longer dead. Perhaps that all sounds a bit hokey, and rather--excuse the mixed monster punnage--defanging to the zombie mythos, but such premises appeal to me, at least in theory, because of their implicit and empathetic message that monsters are people, too. Frankenstein could have used an understanding listener like Megan. Perhaps he wouldn't have ended up quite so homicidal or alone.

Finally, but not leastly, a book called Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialetical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses surprised me by existing and the more so by containing many amazingly schizophrenic and insightful rants into pop culture's milieu. Howard Hampton is the author. He's like Quentin Tarantino if Quentin Tarantino went back in time and ate Lester Bangs' brain so as to take his powers of criticism and hyphenation. Topics for Howard include a dissection of the beflanneled songstresses of the "weirdo republic"--Cat Power, Lora Logica, and Enid Coleslaw, plus a wonderfully long-winded and overly hypenated discussion of Lester Bangs himself. As someone once said, "knee-jerk intellectuals may find it easy to lampoon someone who takes pop this seriously, but Hampton is a writer--possibly the only one--who can analyze Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the context of D. H. Lawrence ("American Daemons") and make it work."

Until next time, dear readers, happy Monday, and if you see a zombie, take a moment to not run and really listen to what they're trying to say. If after a few minutes, it seems to only be "Grr...Argh," or the like, and also if they try to bite your shoulder, then probably you should go back to Plan A and start running.

Rainy Friday Goodness

2009-03-13T13:30:00.000-07:00

Hello, readers. It's Friday and it's raining, but there's much to sing and dance in puddles about.

Joe Hill, blogger, twitterer, writer of heartfelt horror (20th Century Ghosts, Heart-Shaped Box) has decided there should be a contest in recognition of March being love-your-indie-bookstore month. He's giving away a signed, slipcased copy of his novella, Gunpowder. Subterranean Press, so taken by Joe's contest coolness, has decided to offer up ten prizes of their own, including a limited edition of Neil Gaiman's Newberry Award winning, The Graveyard Book.

A lengthy interview with Lynda Barry has popped up over at the Chicago Tribune. Read it to learn about her spaceship in the middle of a farm and her supernatural ability to sit still. Also, there's some kind of narrative concerning her rise and fade and current resurrection as far as being the hero of underground comics. Chris Ware says she taught comic book writers how to "write from the inside-out." Ivan Brunetti says, "it's becoming increasingly known she moved the medium [comics] closer to real literature."

Also, Dave McKean is interviewed by Seven Impossible Things. An absurd amount of cool, dark, yearning sort of art abounds. Seriously, there's a lot of pictures. But also some words. And occasional evil laughter.

Have a shiny weekend, readers.

Michael Chabon, Saturday Morning Villains, Hope.

2009-03-12T00:05:00.000-07:00

Hello, readers. Happy day-that-you-are-reading-this.

Michael Chabon (complete with nifty hat accessory) appeared at Wondercon with Matt Fraction. io9 did a nice write-up of the event, although, frankly, they were not nearly suspicious enough of Mr. Fraction. Truly, it is a name worthy of Saturday Morning villainy, or at the very least, Electric Company chicanery. Questions should have been raised as to his plots (erm, plans) concerning the Kingdom of Rational Numbers.

But in more topical matters, the content of the panel focused mainly on Chabon's blooming nerdom, the resurrection of his childhood passions in his more recent adult work. See The Fantastic Four references and Lovecraft doppleganger in Wonder Boys, the comic-centric opus, Kavalier and Clay, and his more recent full-fledged forays into genre like the fantasy novel, Gentleman of the Road, or the alternate history Jewish noir, The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Chabon's narrative was placed "within a larger story of a kind of nerd cultural insurgency by which the literary and artistic worlds are gradually being made safe for geekdom." io9 cites writers like Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, and Susanna Clarke, who have taken the fairy tales and ray guns of their childhood and crafted awesomeness. This sort of embrace and defiance of genre is near and dear to Chabon's heart. For his own take, check out his collection of essays, Maps & Legends, in which he praises and defends the importance of ray guns, along with mythology, detective novels, comics, and the sometimes frowned upon idea of providing entertainment to the reader.

Chabon's more speculative tendencies were frowned upon while getting his MFA at Irvine, which is what led to his more realistic turn in Mysteries of Pittsburgh. That book is now a movie with Peter Saarsgard and an abundance of dramatic lighting. I hope the Cloud Factory makes an appearance, too. That was a good bit.

Kevin Brockmeier Interview : The Online Version

2009-03-06T20:39:00.000-08:00

Hello, readers. Several months ago, I had the shiny fortune to interview writer Kevin Brockmeier for the latest issue of The Yalobusha Review. Due to the finiteness of our print journal, over 2,000 words had to be cut. Please find below those excised words, including: "suicide," "the," and "listkeeping," among others.

CK: I guess I’m sort of just curious where you are? Are you in your house?

KB: I'm in my office, at my desk.

CK: Is that where you usually write?

KB: Yes, yes.

CK: Are there, is there a window you can look out?

KB: Well, there is, yes. There’s a sliding glass door that looks out onto my back patio, but, you know, there’s not much [laughing] excitement to be seen out there. I have a garden of six foot tall weeds.

CK: Is that on purpose?

KB: I suppose it is. The space was there when I moved in and I just wanted to see what would happen to it if I left it alone, so it’s wild and kind of lovely.

CK: Do you walk out into it?

KB: Well, I could if I wanted to. It’s not that big really. I’ve never troubled to measure it, but it’s probably about eight feet by eight feet or something like that---that’s a guess. I’m looking out on it right now. It's a raised bed of weeds and vines and small trees, at this point. It's deep enough that I have trouble seeing into the interior. Yesterday, I frightened a cat out of it.

CK: Are there things you do in your office or in your house when you want to decompress from writing?

KB: Well, I do spend an awful lot of time pacing, so there is that. I spend a lot of time reading. I would spend a lot of time reading whether or not I was writing, but that’s usually part of my working day, interrupting myself to read a passage here and there when I happen to get stuck. I might take a break to listen to a song or a CD. I might step out to get lunch or dinner with a friend. It’s quiet sorts of things like that.

CK: Are there specific books you go to, some old friend you pull down to read a passage from?

KB: Well it depends on what sort of dilemma I’ve gotten myself into. I feel like my writing day is filled with dilemmas, one sentence after another, and if I’m reading a new book, which I usually am, then that’s where I’ll turn. But it’s never been unusual for me to pull down an older book from the shelves---any number of older books---just to return to a passage that I think might somehow give me the solution to whatever muddle I’ve gotten myself into. If you’re asking for specific authors I love I could give you a long, long list.

CK: [laughing] Yeah I’ve seen the list of fifty books.

...

CK: You talked earlier about what you liked about writing for children, is that a downside? That you can’t be as complex?

KB: There are definitely things you can’t allow yourself to do with the voice, big words or complex structures that you can't allow yourself to use. And I’ve noticed with the children’s books I’ve published so far that my editors seem to be much more concerned than the editors of my adult books are with any element of the story that steps beyond the pale in some way. You know, the audience for children’s books might be the children themselves, but that’s not the market for children’s books. The market, the people who buy most of the books, are the parents, and the teachers, and the librarians, and you have to find a way of approaching the children through the window---and it's a pretty narrow window sometimes---of the adults. My editors have worried about various little things that adults might find inappropriate for an audience of children.

To give you a tiny example, in my first children’s book, City of Names, there’s a moment in which the the kids are in a restaurant, and they decide to drink a “suicide,” mixing all the different sodas together in a single cup. Maybe my editor hadn't heard the term before, but she was worried about using the word “suicide” in the context of a children’s book. Which seemed very, very strange to me, because we mixed those drinks all the time when I was a kid, and that's just what they were called.

CK: Yeah, I remember drinking them after little league games.

KB: Yeah.

CK: I don’t think we really thought about the name all that much.

KB: Yeah, no, neither did we [laughing].

CK: Is that something you have to navigate when you’re writing, children’s or adult fiction, that pull between what as a writer you feel like you ought to do and what as a writer you feel like your responsibility is to the readers?

KB: I like to imagine that the readers for my books are basically people who have the same sort of taste I do, so that if I’m writing the story in a way that I find pleasing, then whoever my readers might be will find it pleasing, too. With the children’s books, I’m trying to please ten, or eleven, or twelve year olds like the one who is still lingering somewhere in the back of my own mind. If I write the kind of book I would’ve enjoyed at that age, I figure I’m doing justice to the story I’m telling.

CK: Do you think about providing entertainment for the reader?

KB: Well, entertainment isn’t necessarily the first word I would use, but I do think of myself as providing interest to the readers, and interest is a form of entertainment.

CK: What are you trying to interest? What do you hope to engage with the readers?

KB: Number one, their aesthetic sense and their pleasure in the way a piece of writing is put together, and number two, their sense of what it is to be human, the truth of the experience on the page.

CK: Why are you a writer? What joy do you get out of it?

KB: Maybe the richest joy in my life is reading. I feel the impulse to participate in conversation with the writers I love and to, I hope, offer the same sort of pleasure to other people that the books I love have brought to me.

CK: In one of your stories, I think the Rube Goldberg story, you have a character talking about how every virtue has its corresponding vice…

KB: And that character is trying to remember where he or she read that idea, and it’s actually from a C.S. Lewis book called Mere Christianity. That was the most interesting notion in that book to me.

CK: That something I wanted to ask about your writing, what you felt your virtues as a writer were and what you’re corresponding vices might be?

KB: That’s one of that I might have to puzzle over, but just to kind of gesture vaguely in the direction of the question, I would say that, among my virtues as a writer—god, it’s almost embarrassing to talk this way—let me say that the virtues I’m striving for as a writer, at least, are clarity of vision, depth of feeling, and maybe an excitement or a tension inside the story that’s produced by the effort to see and understand things properly. As for my vices as a writer, I don’t know. I’m sure there are things I don't do very well. I’ve probably figured out ways of working around most of my weaknesses, but off the top of my head it’s not easy for me to tell you what they are.

CK: Is there a reason why you chose Coke as the instrument for distributing the virus? (ed. In The Brief History of the Dead, a virus gets into a coca-cola bottling plant and from there spreads death to all corners of our world)

KB: I wanted to find a vector of distribution that seemed plausible to me, or at least possible to me, and that also seemed fairly unique, something I hadn’t seen done before. It struck me that a consumer product might be the solution. Initially, I tried to work around the brand name: either not mention at all---but I couldn’t find a way to do that---or just invent a brand name. Every time I did, though, it just sounded ridiculous to me. This phony name in the middle of all these sentences---it would tear them apart from the inside. So eventually I just resorted to Coke, which was what I’d been thinking about to begin with. I don’t where you grew up, but here in Little Rock you can walk into a restaurant, and they’ll ask you what you want to drink, and you say, "I’d like a Coke," and they’ll say, "Okay, would you like a Coke, a Dr. Pepper, a Sprite, a root beer?" Coke is the term of choice for all these different beverages. The word is so widely used that it almost has a generic quality about it, so it seemed to nestle in more neatly with the sentences than a less widely used brand name might.
I certainly got a lot of questions about it. It never occurred to me when I was working on the book that the folks at Coca-Cola might be unhappy [laughing] with the use I had made of their product, but then the book was published and everybody started asking me about whether I had heard from Coca-Cola. I haven’t. The Brief History of the Dead has been published in a number of other languages, though. Some of the countries have libel laws that are very different from our own, so in certain editions of the book you might find elaborate disclaimers on the copyright page about how (obviously) Coca-Cola did not engage in any of the activities they are alleged to have engaged in, in this book, it’s entirely a work of fiction and not meant to disparage the Coca-Cola product, etc.

CK: What are you working on now?

KB: I’m working on a novel now. I’m approaching the middle of the book, but I never talk much about it during the process.

CK: Is that a matter of saving the energy, or keeping sort of the writing in the writing world?

KB: It’s both of those. Partly it's a desire to keep the story’s energy centered on itself, but also I feel that if I talk too much about it, I’ll make it concrete in a way that I feel obligated to live up to, rather than simply letting the story slowly reveal itself to me. And then there's simple superstition.

CK: I wanted to ask, you know Bradbury had that collection, Medicine for Melancholy…

KB: Yes, I haven’t read that book, but I’ve probably read a lot of the stories in it. He tends to repurpose his stories. A couple years ago he had a big thick compendium of what he considered his best work, and I bet portions of Medicine for Melancholy are in that.

CK: I just wondered, just taking that phrase, if there were medicines you turn to when you’re frustrated with writing, or with life, places you go when you feel melancholy?

KB: I turn to the books I love all the time, but, you know, some of the books I love are as likely to cultivate melancholy [laughing] as they are to rid me of it. I’ve got friendships that are very important to me. I’m a moviegoer, so at least once a week I’ll go to the movies. And I’m a music lover, so I listen to my CD collection.

CK: Is there a movie or a particular CD that you’ve discovered recently that you loved?

KB: Sure, I’ll give you one of each. Like my fifty favorite books list, which came up earlier, I’ve got a fifty favorite movies list and a fifty favorite albums list. I’m always reconsidering and updating these things. It’s a silly way to spend my time, but that itself ---listkeeping---might be something I return to as a way of addressing any anxiety or melancholy I might feel. It gives me a lot of pleasure to work on these things. In any case, the last movie to work it’s way onto my list was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which I thought was profound and beautiful and experimental in a way that felt completely natural to the story being told and not at all pretentious. And then, maybe not the last album to make it onto this fifty favorite albums list, but the last album I fell head over heels for is an album called Melody Mountain by Susanna and the Magical Orchestra.

CK: What a name…

KB: It's a Norwegian band, only two members actually. Susanna Karolina Wallumrod, who does all the singing, and a guy named Morten Qvenild, who does all the instrumentation. This particular album is an album of slow, delicate, gorgeous, sorrowful cover songs. Some of them are by the usual candidates, like Leonard Cohen or Prince or Bob Dylan, but some of them are very unexpected, by bands like Depeche Mode or AC/DC. It’s a stunner. That’s my most exciting musical discovery of the past few years.

CK: There was a Norwegian singer named Sondra Lerche that I got into for a while. I don’t know what it is about Norway, maybe it’s just the weather, but Norwegian music always sounds cold or…

KB: I don’t know what it is either, but I’ve been listening to a lot of Norwegian music, viewing a lot of Norwegian movies, and reading a lot of Norwegian books the past few years.

Kevin Brockmeier on Fairy Tales

2009-03-06T00:50:00.000-08:00

All week, we've been running excerpts from our interview with Kevin Brockmeier which appears in the latest issue of The Yalobusha Review. Today, being Thursday, is part of this week, and so here's another bit of Brockmeier goodness in which he discusses why he loves fairy tales.

CK: To switch back to something you were talking about earlier, trying to translate stories you loved as a child for an adult audience, there’s the epigraph at the beginning of Things That Fall From the Sky from G.K. Chesterton about fairy tales. A lot of people when they think of fairy tales, they just think of them as a sort of children’s literature you grow out of, but it’s something you acknowledge and seem to draw inspiration from. I wondered what you loved about them, why they inspire you, and how they influence you?

KB: I suppose it’s just, well, two things: one, is that they always seem to be driven forward by a very strong storytelling voice, one that welcomes you into the narrative. I find that compelling. Aside from that, as a reader I’m simply attracted to stories that have an element of fantasy about them. Not all of my own writing does, but some of it does. Probably the writing that’s gotten the most attention does. That element of fantasy is an important part of the fairy tales I loved when I was growing up, and then the fairy tales I’ve discovered as an adult as well. Italo Calvino is one of my favorite writers, and I slowly read through his body of work over the past ten or fifteen years. The last of his books I got around to was his edition of Italian Folktales, which is a set of retellings, maybe an 800 page volume. It contains many, many traditional Italian folk and fairy tales. I resisted reading it for a long time because it didn’t feel like one of Calvino's books really, since none of the stories were original to him, he didn't produce them out of his own imagination. And yet I found myself completely immersed in it when I did read it, and the fables in the new collection were generated out of a desire on my part to write the kind of stories that might fit naturally into a collection like that.

Tune in tomorrow for those portions of our interview with Mr. Brockmeier that due to space didn't make it into the magazine.

The Kindly Ones, Trashy Holocaust Novel?

2009-03-05T23:22:00.000-08:00

Happy Thursday, readers. The Ides of March approach. Do you know where your betrayer is?

The Kindly Ones is a novel by Jonathan Littell which fits nicely in the old man recollects his life genre. People seem worked up about the whole thing, though. Perhaps because the old man is a once upon a time Nazi who sometimes slept with his sister and also spends a the majority of the book describing, in apparently great detail, the bodily horror he, and others, inflicted on fellow human beings during the Holocaust. Yet still he asks, if not for forgiveness, then at least for sympathy from the reader--an understanding that in a similar situation perhaps you would've done the same or worse (except for maybe the part where he slept with his sister).

The press seems divided as to whether the novel bravely explores the Holocaust from a fresh, albeit slightly evil perspective, or if the whole thing is a l0w-brow "sex n' fashion horror comic" themed bit of cynicism and vulgarity. Sarah Nelson, writing in the Wall Street Journal, believes the novel "gimmicky", that it "leans towards prurience," and that American publishers are banking on "the seemingly bottomless...appetite for scandalous attitudes and behavior." Michael Korda called it "brilliant" and counts it in the same league as Crime and Punishment and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Canadian Press wonders if the novel might be an example of "Nazi Porn."

Here's my haven't-read-the-book-yet take. Littell is an American Frenchman who lives in Barcelona, Spain. His father was the American mystery writer, Roger Littell. Littell's first book, as discussed at Omnivoracious, was a mass market science fiction novel called Bad Voltage. Here was a tale of a "riot-torn future Paris", of simboots and violence and terror, of revolutionary youths and their unfortunate tendency to fall for uptown girls, throwing a wrench in their revolutionary plans. In light of this, it got me wondering if maybe there's not another way to view The Kindly Ones and it's gimmickry, violence, incest, and sexual shenanigans. Pulp Holocaust, perhaps?

Then again, I'm reading Lolita, at the moment, and it's nothing if not trashy and vile and also about a monstrous narrator asking us dear readers to please, please, don't overlook the fact that though we may see his acts as horrible, he is still, in the end, the same as us, a human being at the mercy of fate and his own mysterious desires. So, who's to say that no matter how graphic and disgusting The Kindly Ones may be, no matter how pretentious, it may still be great.

But it probably won't have wrist lasers, though, and that's a shame. Maybe in the sequel.

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Pullman, Pinkwater, and Beer (Not necessarily in that order)

2009-03-04T23:24:00.000-08:00

Hello, readers. This used to be Wednesday, but that's all gone now. In our last post, we excerpted a bit of our Kevin Brockmeier interview (see it in print by buying our latest swanky issue), in which he discussed those things he loved reading as a kid. One of those things were the books of a man named Daniel Pinkwater. It just so happens there's an interview/paen of Mr. Pinkwater at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Go there to learn of Daniel's days "living on the slopes of Kilimanjaro", the name of his dog (rhymes with Zuzu), and his childhood dream of growing up to be a liar and criminal.

Speaking of honor, Philip Pullman gave the keynote address at the Modern Liberty Convention. He manages to avoid too much talk of daemons, or the godlessness of the universe, and yet still manages to be erudite and inspirational when it comes to the morality of a nation or individual. "Joy does not flourish in the garden of anxiety."

Oh, and one more thing. Small Beer Press has uploaded their backlist of books to something called Scribd. This means that such wonders as short stories by Kelly Link or John Kessel or Benjamin Rosenbaum, plus novels by Geoff Ryman, Elizabeth Hand, and so forth, are all free and digital. Occasionally the future is a neat place, no?

Oh, and one more one more thing. We made a promise to excerpt a bit of our Brockmeier interview in which he discussed further favorite authors, mysterious gardens, and/or the apocalypse. And we are bloggers of our word. Except for the mysterious garden bit. That will come later.

CK: How did you feel in that book [The Brief History of the Dead] about eradicating pretty much the entire human population?

KB: I was happy to do it [laughing]. You know, honestly, my hand kind of seemed forced. I wanted to tell a story about how the end of our own world brought this other world to an end, and also about the way that people continue to exist in our memories even after they had fallen out of our lives. It seemed to me that the best approach to the story was to narrow the personalities in our world down to one, so that’s what I ended up doing. But I can also say that I’ve read and appreciated a fair amount of post-apocalyptic fiction. Above and beyond anything else, I’m talking about the short stories of J.G. Ballard. All of his early stories and novels were these beautiful, crystalline attempts at world ending. And also people like Thomas Disch, and John Wyndham and, George R. Stewart. A lot of the classic science fiction novels about the end of the world engaged my imagination.

CK: Have you ever thought about why the end of the world appeals to you so much? Have you ever worried about it?

KB: You know, I’m not realy sure. I think it might be that those themes came to appeal to me simply because the books I had discovered that dealt with them were so very well done, and I sought out other books of the same type. Ballard is just a genius at making sentences. After I read his Complete Stories, I felt like the rhythms of his sentences and the way he approached the world remained in my head for a long, long time.

Happy Wednesday that was, readers.

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Tuesday Things

2009-03-03T22:10:00.000-08:00

Thing One: The first round of the Tournament of Books, as mentioned here, begins on March 9th. First round highlight: Shadow Country vs. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks judged by Anthony Doerr. Every battle has it's own judge. Later judges include John Hodgman and last year's winner, Juno Diaz. Bets can be placed here, and for a good cause, too.

Thing Two: Monday was Dr. Seuss's birthday. Him being the man what introduced us all to those indelibly and abstractly named creatures of chaos, Thing One and Thing Two. His books have influenced a lot of people but had very little affect on me.

Thing Three: Kevin Brockmeier on things he loved to read growing up.

More than anything else, I read comic books. And I read a lot of them. And I spent almost all of my allowance money on them. I’m talking just the superhero stuff, the typical Marvel and DC comics. If you’re talking about text, rather than text and picture, my favorite writer when I was a kid was Daniel Pinkwater. He’s still one of my favorites today. He wrote a book called Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, that I fell in love with when I was about ten years old, and then any number of other great books as well: Lizard Music, The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, basically these funny little fantasies involving average kids in very strange situations. I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure series when I was a kid, too. I’ve got a story in tribute to those books in my latest collection. And then I grew up in the era of Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary and writers like that. All of my classmates were reading them and I was reading them too. But on my own, aside from comic books, I gravitated to the children’s fiction that had elements of science fiction and fantasy to it, and then, when I got a little bit older, to actual science fiction and fantasy.

Tune in tomorrow, readers, for additional things, including more from Kevin Brockmeier on his favorite authors, the mysterious garden in his backyard, and/or the apocalypse.

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Well, hello. How are you?

2009-02-27T21:09:00.001-08:00

I'm fine. Thank you. Except for some things, but then, there are always things and hidden amidst the things are sometimes gnomes or rhinoceroses which liven things up a bit.

And in other news...

March 1-7 is Will Eisner week. He's the creator of The Spirit, among other things. He's a big name in the comics world. So big they named an award after him. So far as I know, he's not related to Michael Eisner, but I've never actually checked.

Yiddish Literature is online and free. If I knew more Yiddish there would be a pun or other funny kvetchy line here.

There's a new Ted Chiang short story, and it too is online and free, in podcast form. Ted's stories are like comets, coming by once every long while or so, sometimes flying backwards, but always wondrous and worth taking a moment to look at. He's also won awards.

Here's an excerpt from The Yalobusha Review's interview with Kevin Brockmeier.

CK: There are some stories like “The Lady with the Pet Tribble” that’s sort of set in a fictional universe, and then something like The Brief History of the Dead, which is the real world, but added on there’s this fantastic element. Are they distinct modes you go into when you’re writing, realistic or fantastic?

KB: I don’t know that they are. Sometimes I’m aware I’m writing a story that won’t permit an element of fantasy, and sometimes I’m aware I’m writing a story that seems to be set in a wholly fictional universe, but oftentimes I’m writing in some weird sort of netherworld between the two, and even with the most realistic stories I write, you know I feel as if in the act of trying to observe the world clearly, it somehow turns into fantasy, anyway. It’s almost unavoidable for me.

CK: Why do you think observing the world clearly leads you toward fantasy?

KB: I’m not quite sure, but I can tell you that the books that I’ve enjoyed reading the most, which is to say the realistic writers I’ve enjoyed reading the most, are often people---oh just, some names like Marilynne Robinson, Louis de Bernieres, William Maxwell, Bohumil Hrabal---who seem to see the world through such a sharp lens that it suddenly becomes strange again in your eyes as you’re reading.

CK: Is that something you strive for when you write, to make the world new again or strange?

KB: New again, definitely; strange, perhaps by accident. It’s often a great effort to make each sentence approach the world with that sort of clarity. So it’s not as if the world is necessarily blossoming open before me in this new way as I’m writing. I'm slowly working to transfigure it in my own eyes.

More excerpts to come (every day next week in fact), including the bits that wouldn't fit within the finite limits of our paper universe. These will be free and online, like so many things these days.*

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*For the full print interview, though, it will mean shelling over ten bucks. Mail check or money to the address at right and you'll get spiffyness in your mailbox.

Jane Austen and Zombies

2009-02-05T13:13:00.000-08:00

Hello, readers. Recently my world seemed drab and without hope. And by this I mean that Elizabeth Bennett seemed destined to never cleave a zombie's head from its shoulders.

But thankfully that's all been taken care of now, courtesy of Seth Grahame-Smith.

Yes, in the midst of the current crazy for all things zombie (Zombies vs Unicorns, Nazi Snow Zombies, and the growing canon of Zombie Survival Literature ) someone has decided that Pride and Prejudice, for all it's wit and romance, was lacking something, and that something was rampaging hordes of the undead. According to the publishers, they're keeping the original text and adding "all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action." I'm not sure how this will work, but then again, I'm not completely sure how velcro works either. Maybe this will be as snappy and magical as velcro. Maybe it will be as noisy and annoying. We'll see.

Charles J. Brown suggests titles for other classics to be Zombie-fied, including Portnoy's Complaint about Zombies, which adds evidence to my theory that Philip Roth is, in secret, waging a never-ending struggle against the undead. Some other possible titles:

The Great Gatsby Zombie
Lolita and Other Zombies
A Little Zombie Princess
As I Lay Dying, which doesn't really need a name change and is sort of about a zombie anyway. Addie Bundren lives!

See also: The Times and The Guardian.

Thanks to a shiny girl for the tip.

Happy Thursday, readers.

What News, Wednesday?

2009-02-04T15:27:00.000-08:00

Once there was a man who was Thursday. He battled shady shades and hot-air balloons. That sort of thing is for tomorrow, though, so for now, let's see what's happening in more sensical today-like matters.

David Galef, former Ole Miss faculty member and occasional lender of James Tiptree, Jr. stories, has won the Dzanc Contest for Short Story Collections.

Mary Gaitskill talks with The Believer about Buffy, wives, and blue bird romances. [via LHB]

Stephen King on Twilight, and the safety of it's sex.

A blogger attempts the impossible task of aggregating links concerning Neil Gaiman's recent flurry of interviews (brought about by his winning the Newberry Medal for The Graveyard Book).

And finally, for teenagers of a pictorial proclivity, the ALA has released a list of their favorite graphic novels for Teens.

Happy Wednesday, readers. I will try, in the future, to not be absent for so long as I have been. Also, if you see a hot air balloon following you, don't try to understand it. Just run faster.

Thursday Things

2009-01-22T10:00:00.000-08:00

Hello, readers. It's been a while. A few things have happened. There's a new president, for one. People seem to think he'll be great, or possibly fail, but most hope he succeeds. Except for this guy. Also, it's possible that life, the universe, and everything, including you, reader, is just one big hologram.

Three other things, then, from our holographic universe:

Thing 1) Haruki Murakami wins the Jerusale m award, which is given to those authors, like Arthur Miller or Simone de Beauvoir, whose work deals with "human freedom, society, politics, and government."

Thing 2) The Louvre opens an exhibition of original plates by comic book artists, which makes sense considering the French love of Tin Tin and Asterix and other les bandes dessinees. "Just like comics are not only fun or for entertainment," curator Fabrice Douar says, "the Louvre equally is not dusty and boring." [via Rhea Cote Robbins, photo AP/Thimault Camus]

Thing 3) TIME talks the evolution of publishing, relating our current time of economic and technological transformation to the fluxy turn of the 18th century when new fangled things like capitalism and printing technology brought about the "novel" as we know it today. Things like fan-fiction, wikipedia, and YouTube, according to TIME, have lessened the freakiness of self-publishing and pushed copyright to its limits, and may lead to a form of fiction "ravenously referential and intertextual." The article ultimately posits a future dichotomy between Old Publishing ( "stately, quality controled, and relatively expensive" ) versus a New Publishing ("cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money, or institutional taste"). [photo Getty/Chris Jackson]

Happy Thursday, readers.

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Literary Thursday

2009-01-15T21:09:00.000-08:00

Hello, readers. I'm not sure at what point these posts began having particular subjects for particular days, but that seems to be what's happening so I will go along with it.

Two Ursula K. Le Guin interviews appeared before me tonight, one by Guernica from February of 2008, and one by Vice from more nowish. In them, you'll learn the importance (or unimportance) of being literary, as well as what Ms. Le Guin believes essential to art (hint: passion, patience, obsession). [via LCRW].

A new issue of Ninth Letter came out today.

The Rooster 2009 tournament matches 2008's literary hot-shots against each other in a sort of March Madness-esque Thunderdome throwdown. 16 books enter...

The literature of Lost as discussed on NPR.

And finally, some good news, it would appear the reports of the death of the reader have been greatly exaggerated. The NEA says fiction reading among adults is on the rise.

Have a happy Friday, readers. I know I will.*

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*As much as anyone can know anything of course. It's quite possible, I suppose, that a day spent watching fourteen hours of Battlestar Galactica might lead to unhappiness. But I have a mind to do it, and so it will be done. So say we all.

Illustrated Wednesday

2009-01-14T15:13:00.000-08:00

Good evening, readers. As has been discussed before on this blog, literature isn't always about words. Sometimes it's about pictures. Sometimes, too, it's about girls deflowered by swans, but we'll leave that for some future mythical Monday.

Edward Gorey wrote and illustrated many a whimsically ominous book. Many of them were popular with children. A great deal of them were set or drawn in a decidedly Edwardian or Victorian style (I was never that good at telling the two styles apart). He was not, though, particularly fond of children. Nor was he particularly British, despite the fact that I thought he might be when first I saw his work. He actually came from Chicago. Reading bookslut, I came across scans from a Gorey book called, The Recently Deflowered Girl: The Right Thing To Say On Every Dubious Occasion. It's a parody of etiquette books and includes advice on such various and likely situations as deflowerment by proxy or deflowerment by a chinese detective. No word on what to do if an Australian illustrator takes your flower, though.

Speaking of Australian illustrators (by which I mean, of course, illustrators who live in Australia and not the sort of people who spend their time illustrating continents), there's an interview with Shau n Tan over at The Walrus. His 2007 book, The Arrival, won book of the year in Australia. In the same year, he also received the World Fantasy award for best artist. Tales from Outer Suburbia, his latest work due out in the States in February, is a collection of fifteen stories exploring the strange things that sometimes happen in our ordinary world, such as a little girl asking directions from a giant water buffalo.

Happy Wednesday.

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Tuesday Things

2009-01-13T22:47:00.000-08:00

Thing 1, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror anthology is no more. Though it may be resurrected in some new form, thereby upholding the tradition that no monster worth its salt dies the first time you kill it. In fact, Ellen Datlow already has a deal with Night Shade books for two volumes of a year's best horror. This I learned from the article's comments which you should read to understand how much this anthology meant to a great many people.

Thing 2, Secret New Year's resolutions from fictional detectives. Example: "I will steal my mother's clown pants."

Thing 3, J.G. Ballard talks nudie surreal paintings, the importance of living next to a movie studio, and the poison wrapped gifts of modern life.

Thing 4, Christian Science Monitor initiates book podcasts.

Fare well, readers.

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Magical Monday

2009-01-12T13:30:00.000-08:00

Hello, readers. Welcome to a new week. Here are magical things.

It's Haruki Murakami's birthday today. Or at least, it was. I'm fairly certain it's already tomorrow in Japan. In any case, Murakami's a magical sort of man. He believes in trances. He writes scary, weird, and wonderful books, like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, in which unicorn skulls have dreams. His latest book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, talks of his passion for long-distance running. Check out Laura Miller's interview with him, here, and a more recent one about the relationship between marathons and writing, here.

Speaking of Laura Miller (who may or may not eat cheerios while watching Battlestar), To the Best of our Knowledge talked with her yesterday as part of their program on "Magical Thinking." She discussed, among other things, how she learned to be both a skeptic of, and believer in, Narnia. Other guests included, Robert Price, who discussed "pop mysticism" and The Secret. As well, Mark Barrowcliffe, author of The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons, and Growing Up Strange, and Holly Black, author of The Spiderwick Chronicles, both stopped by to talk about the value of alternate realities.

Finally, McSweeney's has published a children's illustrated guide to cold fusion. One suspects there may be some kind of chicanery afoot.

So long, gentle readers. Remember, the magic was inside you all along.

Challenges To Be Met in 2009

2009-01-09T14:41:00.000-08:00

Hello, readers.

Yesterday, this blogger promised to list his resolutions and/or challenges in which he intended to participate. Being a man of my word, just like the Joker but with slightly less eye make-up, here are some resolutions and challenges with which I plan to challenge myself.

Resolutions

1) Publish three to five stories.
2) Get paid for a review and/or an interview.
3) Celebrate next New Year's in a foreign country.
4) Fail spectacularly at something*.
5) Surprise myself and others. Bonus points if done simultaneously.
6) Continue saying yes to life, as taught by Joseph Campbell, improv artists, and at least one Jim Carrey movie.
7) Be awesome.
8) Have an adventure or two.
9) Get new glasses.

As for reading challenges, I've decided rather than limit myself to two or three, I'll go ahead and commit to many too many. I did resolve to fail at something spectacularly, after all.

1) 50 books challenge, in which I read 50 novels. This will not seem so crazy when one understands that books read for other challenges count.
2) Graphic Novel Challenge, in which I read 18 graphic novels.
3) Read n'Review, in which I plan on reviewing, to some extent, every book I read in 2009. Should help with the getting paid for a review resolution.
4) The Dream King Challenge, in which I become a devotee, or possibly a zealot.
5) The Baker Street Challenge, in which I rediscover a childhood love of elementary deduction.
6) Serial Readers Challenge, in which I read every book in a series.
7) Childhood Favourites Reading Challenge, in which I re-read books I loved as a child, such as A Cricket in Times Square or The Last Unicorn.
8) 2009 Young Adult Book Challenge, in which I act on my rediscovery of love for things of a young adult nature.

Good luck on the new year, readers. Dream big. Fail better. Surprise yourself. Try again.

ttfn.

The Year Ahead, In Which There Are Many Challenges, A Licked Moon, And Zombies

2009-01-08T14:18:00.000-08:00

Hello, readers. Have you made resolutions for the New Year? Plan on Wii-ing your way to a better body? Or finally getting started on that poem about licking the moon and eating bras (Alas, someone beat you to that one.)

Maybe you plan on taking part in one of the numerous literary challenges that abound around the internet. There's the livejournal 50bookchallenge where you and others can join in the noble goal of reading 50 books a year. Perhaps you've got a stack of books waiting to be read? There's a challenge for you, too, at avidbookreader's TBR challenge. For a site to browse various challenges for the one that inspires you, try the novel challenges blog. They've got a list of active challenges around the web, including, among others, a "Graphic Novel" challenge and a "Get Inspired" challenge, the latter being a challenge to pick a self-improvement work to read in the first part of the year, and then act on for the remaining months. Very helpful, perhaps, for those with resolutions.

If you need inspiration for new books to read in 2009, check out the anticipatory lists of forthcoming great reads, graphic and otherwise, at The Millions and Comic Book Resources. Writers to look forward to in 2009 include Zadie Smith, Jonathan Lethem, and Philip Roth--who somehow still manages to put out a book a year despite his never-ending struggle against the zombie hordes which threaten our world.

Tune in tomorrow wherein this blogger will list some resolutions and/or/maybe some challenges he'll be taking part in.

Happy it's-already-almost-Friday. ttfn.

Tuesday Things

2009-01-06T15:31:00.000-08:00

Hello, readers. There isn't much time. Events are happening. Here's a clickable list of wonders.

Vote for your favorite literature blog.

Paula Kinkaid yearns to be historicized. Also, she talks science fiction novels, about their being about now, and as examples, she looks at two novels, Of Wind and Sand and The Quiet War, which seem to be reactions to the current Iraq War.

Reviewers at Strange Horizons review 2008.

The Costa book award winners. Once upon a time these were called the Whitbreads.

Must attend to events now, readers. ttfn.

On Snark and Men Named Thursday, Plus More...

2009-01-05T01:37:00.000-08:00

One should probably be asleep at this hour, and yet there are so many wonderful things to watch and read that sleep seems a rather frivolous way to spend one's time.

Unless you're having extravagantly weird, or dark, or glorious dreams. In which case you might enjoy this little slice of Neil Gaiman history from a Canadian television show called, Prisoners of Gravity.

This is exactly the sort of show I would've watched as a young boy, delighting in the tinfoilness of the set and the very small television set on which Neil's face appears. It's also the kind of show I would watch now, if such shows still existed.

Speaking of things which may or may not exist, there's a sort of ongoing war over Snark, which as Clive James points out, was originally a nonsense monster created by Lewis Carroll, but has, in recent years, come to mean a bit of snidely delivered sarcasm, or sarcastically delivered snide. The current debate began with David Denby's new book, Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation. Adam Sternberg wrote a not exactly snarky rebuttal in the New York Magazine Book Review in which he didn't quite label the book an EPIC FAIL. And now, the good folks at the Elegant Variation have put up a link to a 2003 article by Clive James which more or less anticipates and puts a lid on this particular debate.

And because I promised a man named Thursday, go read this Wall Street Journal article on the aphoristically gifted G.K. Chesteron who said such marvelous things as:

"The business of the Progressives is to go on making mistakes, while the business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance."

"He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head."

"The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce."

And that is enough of that.

Happy beginning of the week, readers.

Half The Time You're Gone But You Don't Know Where, Or A Blogger's Rumination on Young Adult Literature

2009-01-02T23:13:00.000-08:00

An evening stroll around the Oxford Square resulted in my wandering into Square Books, Jr. Perusing the shelves of young adult fiction, I came across, among other things, a handful of Tender Morsels and Spectacular Nows, as well as a couple of Terry Pratchets, a lonely Swan Maiden, and a boy caught up in the process of becoming invisible. It's only recently reoccurred to me how much I enjoy reading books purportedly written for children. I think, besides wonderful titles like The Cabinet of Wonders, my enjoyment comes somewhat from the sparseness and directness of the language, which at once leaves far more room for a reader's imagination to flit about and decorate rooms and moonscapes as they see fit, but also, on occasion, snaps the world, or a character's essence, into a sharp, painful focus without fear of "telling" the reader too much. Sometimes a simple "He loved her, and she was gone," is all that needs to be said*.

It's possible my resurrected love of children's literature comes from currently reading, A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It's a tale of a little girl orphaned in a boarding school, as so many young adult books seem to be, but it is also a story about stories and the necessity of invention--the power of pretending to help us bear what otherwise couldn't be beared**. Joss Whedon lists it as one of his five desert island books, and I, to state it directly, am in love with it.

It's also dawned on me, though, that many of the "adult" writers I love, people like Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman, E.B. White or Kurt Vonnegut, all tend to write in the same concise and deceptively simple phrasings as some might associate with young adult literature. They also tend to leave large gaps for a reader's imagination to fill in. And they all have written, at one time or another, children's or young adult books.

Baudelaire said, "Genius is childhood discovered at will." So, if you get the chance today, readers, close your eyes and pretend you're something you're not, maybe a a three-footed wallaby on Mars or a glowing fish swimming deep in a dark sea. Maybe just that you're eight years old again, alone in your father's Brooklyn apartment, your nose pressed against a window and your heart full of wonder at the thought of a zombie apocalypse, of finding yourself in the enviable and perhaps terrifying position of being the only living boy in New York.

Let your honesty shine, shine, shine, readers.

ttfn.

*Well, not really. That would be a disappointing story, indeed, that consisted only of this one sentence.

**Which reminds me of this clip I ran across over at Ed's Rants in which Will Smith, in Gods and Monsters, finishes his speech about Catcher in the Rye by saying "that the imagination is God's gift to make the act of self-examination bearable."

Happy New Year and Things

2009-01-01T21:59:00.000-08:00

Hello, readers, welcome to the future. It's 2009. Only one year left until we're in a whole new decade. I celebrated last night with music, free champagne, and occasional dancing. Other things happened on New Year's though, besides my kickin about, two things in fact. Two things and no more.

Thing One: Terry Pratchett, author of Discworld and proponent of mildly homicidal luggage which doubles as a bodyguard for its carrier, must now and forevermore be referred to as Sir Terry Pratchett. Apparently, the Queen is the kind of frood that really knows where her towel is, if you know what I mean.*

Thing Two: io9 published their list of the best science fiction novels of 2008. Making the cut, among others, include Anathem by Neal Stephenson, Sly Mongoose by Tobias S. Buckell, and Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery. Also here you'll find brief interviews with some of the authors, including Ekaterina Sedia, author of Alchemy of Stone, who talks of the "myth of superpowered machines," as well as her next book, which tells the story of a girl and her salamander.

Thing Three: People lie. Trust suffers.

ttfn.

*In case you don't.

A Meme

2008-12-21T20:59:00.000-08:00

From Shaken & Stirred, I've learned of an end of the year meme--memes being questionnaires or activities (or other units of cultural transmission) passed along from blog to blog--in which a blog reprints the first sentences from the first posts of each month.

Welcome to the Yalobusha Review blog, a place to check back for YR updates, literary oddities, and the occasional rant, or song of praise, from the editors about whatever it is that editors get excited about. What a day yesterday. The World Fantasy Awards have been announced over at Science Fiction Awards Watch. Hello, readers, it has been far too long.

It is a short paragraph of first sentences this year, this year being the first year in which this blog existed. Next year, hopefully, will see many more sentences. Sentences are such lovely things, after all, quite capable of being as alluring and terrifying as any Cylon female*.

Happy Sunday-That-Was, readers.

*Battlestar Galactica's last ten episodes begin airing January 16th, and at the moment, I'm experiencing the peculiar sort of anticipation and dread which accompanies the ends of most of my favorite stories. As such, the occasional frak or Adama reference, may filter into this blog over the coming weeks. So say we all.

Home for the Holidays

2008-12-19T23:03:00.000-08:00

Hello, readers. It's December 20th, and this little blogger has gone whee, whee, whee, all the way home. The wonderful thing about home is that there's cookies. The sad thing is that there's no broadband. As such, posts may be scarce, but they will still be heartfelt.

For example, my heart longs sometimes for Dickens, and at the BBC, there's a game called the "Dickens Game," in which players can pick pockets and dodge urchins. I've not actually played the game myself, due to the dial-up situation, but in my imagination it's delightfully Dickensian.

The Wall Street Journal has a list of books on the evolution of Christmas and it's traditions. Topping their list, The Man Who Invented Christmas, which is about Dickens and the ways in which his life informed The Christmas Carol. Also, there's a book or two about the legend of Santa Claus and how a drunken holiday got tamed into a quiet family affair.

Goodnight from the slow lane, readers. I'm going to eat a cookie.

Have a happy weekend.

Monday Links, or This Is Where We Live

2008-12-15T21:08:00.000-08:00

Hello, readers. Here are things you can read about on the internet.

Annie Leibowitz lists the 15 photography books that most influenced her.

Maud Newton also lists things, in this case her favorite readings of the past year. She hopes you'll buy them as a means of bailing out troubled bookstores.

Speaking of trouble, the publishing industry is having problems with not firing people, serious problems.

NPR has a small bit on some of the best volumes of collected correspondence written by literary types. Some of these correspondences are actual, such as Words in Air, the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, and some are not, such as Dear American Airlines, which is a work of fiction written in the epistolary style.

The Lady's Murder is a sexy, cool graphic short story written and illustrated by Eliza Frye. It reminded me, for some odd reason, of Aeon Flux. It is perhaps NSFW, being as there's some silhouetted murder and occasional nudity. You can read it at Narrative Magazine, though, if you sign up for a free account and are okay with that sort of thing.

Christopher Barzak has a new book with fox maidens and suicides clubs. It's called The Love We Share Without Knowing. Here's a review.

Ever wondered what a city made out of book covers would look like? Wonder no more. Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins, has produced this stop-motion walk through a town of Corrections, Diving Bells, and Butterflies. It's slightly whimsical, a touch sublime, and wholly awesome.

Also, Mr. T has a comic book.

ttfn.

There Was No Way I Wasn't Going to Post This

2008-12-12T23:10:00.001-08:00

But in other more serious news, there's a new literary magazine being born and it is called Kitty Snacks.

Also, here's a discussion of David Foster Wallace's unpublished undergrad thesis in which he deconstructs Fatalism, at least Fatalism as proposed by one Richard Taylor (not WETA Richard Taylor mind you, but a fatalistic Richard Taylor with far more bees and far less ability to conjure Orcs and Oliphaunts). It turns out that fatalist Richard Taylor was an internationally known bee collector.

Listen and watch an audio slide-show of writers' rooms.

Read about James Wood's angled modifiers( such as "royal fatalism"), his unfortunate bias towards realism, and why it'd be nice if critics sometimes criticized in the old ways of Edmund Wilson or Elizabeth Hardwick, i.e., thought about the worldly and human context of literature instead of "treat[ing] the novelistic canon like one giant Keatsian urn, a self-sufficient aesthetic artifact removed from commerce with the dirty, human world."

If you ever wondered what would happen if Buffy Summers met Edward from Twilight, now you can find out. [via Shaken & Stirred]

Have a sparkly weekend, readers.

Writerly Reading Habits

2008-12-11T14:11:00.000-08:00

Generally, successful writers make reading a part of their routines. Several blogs and websites have lists of what books writers have enjoyed this past year. Here are two:

The Millions updates each day with a new list from a writer. So far, Charles D'Ambrosio has raved about Jonathan Ames' somewhat autobiographical graphic novel, The Alcoholic. Nam Lee re-realized how awesome Beloved is. And writer of horror, Peter Straub, wondered, When Will There Be Good News?

SF Signa l has writers discussing their favorite genre discoveries. Here you'll find Jokers and Wastelands, Fables and Peanuts, a few Well-Built Cities, and the occasionally tragic Ghost in Love.

Happy Thursday, readers and writers. Be well. Do good work. Try to make a routine of it. It really does help.

Writerly Routines

2008-12-11T13:08:00.000-08:00

The Schedule of One Benjamin Franklin
Are you a writer? Do you have a routine? Benjamin Franklin and the government of Oceania both advocated that slavery and freedom were not so oxymoronic as one might suspect. I myself have found that a rather absurd level of self-imposed discipline broken up by occasional bouts of whimsy works best, which is to say that generally I wake and write and read during the same times each day unless something remarkable happens like an Arrested Development marathon on G4*.

io9 has posted the routines of science fiction writers. Kingsley Amis discusses pajamas and nicotine and drinking tea until the bars open up at 6. He finds afternoons to be a dreadful time to do anything. Haruki Murakami believes that his routine is perhaps as important as the writing itself. Repetition mesmerizes him into a deeper state of mind.

For more writerly routines, make a habit (oh, humor, you rascal) of visiting daily routines, a repository of how people more famous than you organize their days.

*This isn't entirely true. It's a complete lie in fact. I only ever watch Arrested Development marathons on holidays, such as this past Thanksgiving. Or the Christmas before that. Or the Thanksgiving before that. You might call it a rou--(oh, enough of that already).

The Strange and Sometimes Wonderful World

2008-12-10T18:05:00.000-08:00

In the wonderful news department, in my searching of web content related to the previously mentioned contest finalists, I ran across, "Creative Writing for Extraterrestrials." At the University of Wyoming, it seems, there's a class in which students ponder different ways of introducing humanity to extraterrestrials. It's called Interstellar Message Composition. The cosmically inclined Professor, a man named Lockwood, drives his students to come up with new ways of expressing what it means to be human. One student sculpted an alien cellphone. Another, a four word poem about birth. Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela, Barry Hannah Contest finalist, summed up the experience saying, "Birth came up a lot, death came up a lot. We found out what's left when you take away all the minor stuff."

In other strange, but perhaps less wonderful news, an Australian judge has ruled that possession of an illicit Simpsons illustration--in which some creative ne'er-do-well has depicted Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, knowing each other in the biblical sense--is equivalent to possession of child pornography. The article quotes the Judge as saying, "If the persons were real, such depictions could never be permitted. Their creation would constitute crimes at the very highest end of the criminal calendar." He goes on to say that "the mere fact that they were not realistic representations of human beings did not mean that they could not be considered people."

So, erm, does this mean that Homer Simpson has the right to vote in Australia?

If you're thinking that sounds rather silly and makes the kind of sense that doesn't, then you'll probably agree with Neil Gaiman, who said, "The ability to distinguish between fiction and reality is, I think, an important indicator of sanity, perhaps the most important. And it looks like the Australian legal system has failed on that score."

Barry Hannah and Yellowwood Contest Results

2008-12-09T13:42:00.000-08:00

What with the 2009 issue going off to the print people today, it seemed a good time to take a moment and congratulate the winners and finalists for the 2009 Barry Hannah Fiction and Yellowwood Poetry contests.

Here are those lucky talented writers:

Barry Hannah Contest
Judge: Padgett Powell

Winner

"Ars Poetica" by Jim Wyatt

Finalists

"When the Boys Came Out to Play" by Gerry Canavan
"Bootstrapping" by Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela
“Claude vs. the City of Miami” by Jarrett Haley
“Incantations” by Rasma Haidri

Yellowwood Contest
Judge: Ann Fisher-Wirth

Winner

"Revenant" by Mark Wagenaar

Finalists

"Late" by Heather Cousins
"Lines for a Thirtieth Birthday" by Mark Wagenaar
"Step-Brother" by David A. Moody
"The Agency of Trust" by Katrin Talbot
"Something Happens to a Place" by Raegen Pietrucha
"Autumn" by Sara Fetherolf-Lier
"Hearing the Listeners" by Terri McCord

Congratulations to all, and thank you to everyone who submitted. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for profiles of some of the contributors who will be featured in the upcoming issue, which should hit reality in February 2009.

On Magazines and Presses

2008-12-08T17:20:00.000-08:00

Hello, readers. It's Monday and there's a small rabbit next to my monitor who's whispering secrets. I would tell you what he's saying, but it's a secret.

It has to do with turnips and velcro.

Also, for those of you interested in the world of literary magazines and small presses, here's a couple of cool links.

Gavin J. Grant, editor at Small Beer Press and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and also a co-editor of the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, talks at length with Bibliophile about matters of editing and publishing, including the money to love ratio of small presses and the impact of internet things like podcasting and the creative commons license. Chocolate gets a brief mention as well. Gavin loves the Maya Gold from Green and Black.

Elsewhere, a tweet from largeheartedboy led me to Perpetual Folly and their 2009 Puschart Prize Rankings. The site is run by one Clifford Garstang, who every year scores literary magazines based on the number of Pushcarts or Special Mentions in Fiction they have received since 2000.

Here's the top 5 (hit the link for the rest).

1) Ploughshares 118
2) Zoetrope: All Story 75
3) Conjunctions 71
4) Paris Review 67
4) Southern Review 67

Laura Miller: Lover of Narnia, Culler of Libraries, Possible Eater of Cheerios

2008-12-06T15:27:00.000-08:00

Laura Miller writes for Salon, among other places, about television and books and such. She came to my attention as an early supporter of Buffy and it's importance to the universe. I've also run across her blurbs on books by Kelly Link. But I've never really had any idea about her. In my mind, I suppose, she has always seemed like a fairly young woman who might wear hip, but not trendy glasses and who might also eat cheerios from the box while reading Charles Dickens and watching Battlestar Galactica. I suppose I have a fairly high opinion of her abilities.

Today, I ran across two Laura Miller things. Thing one was this excerpt in the Wall Street Journal from her new book, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia. It's a memoir/literary critique/treatise on reading and wonder and childhood and what happens when you grow up. It revolves around Ms. Miller's encounters with C.S. Lewis and Narnia.

The excerpt from the first chapter tells of a Wilanne Belden who loved The Hobbit as a child, of how thirty years later she placed the first chronicle of Narnia in the hands of a young and impressionable Laura Miller, and of how much that book, and that series, has meant to her and countless others. She cites Neil Gaiman (who seems to keep popping up in this blog, perhaps because I'm reading Sandman) as saying that, "I would read other books, of course, but in my heart I knew that I read them only because there wasn't an infinite number of Narnia books." In thinking of young Wilanne's passion for Middle Earth, Ms. Miller questions whether "children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?"

It's wonderful reading and it reminded me of being in my own school library. I'm not sure of my librarian's name, though Mrs. Brown comes to mind, but I remember her directing me to Madeleine L'Engle and Jean Craig-Head George, and eventually and with much glee, to Douglas Adams. And I remember believing in those stories as true. Not true in any sort of metaphorical sense, but true on some deeper level. As though they were, as Gaiman describes Narnia, "reports from a real place."

There is something special about those first worlds we disappear into as children. And maybe there's something unique about those of us who crave stories of worlds entirely different from our own. I don't know. It's quite possible that children who read books about the real world experience a similar visceral thrill, or maybe it's just that those children are given the wrong books. In any case, I hope that some amount of that wonder and surrender which I experienced as a child will remain with me. I hope that every book I read might be the book that changes my life.

I said there were two things, and this was true. In an essay on the New York Times website, Ms. Miller writes of culling her library--of figuring out, in the great number of books she has collected over the years which are the ones she needs to cling to, and which are the ones she can do without. It's a topic near and dear to my heart. I've experienced very recently someone going through the same process, and I myself, will be going through it once I move from Oxford to points abroad. Books are heavy things and they do not travel easily. Except, of course, for the ones that exist securely and intangibly within your imagination. In which case, perhaps, it's not all that necessary to carry their glue-bound pages with you.

Forgive the contemplative tone, readers. It's Saturday and we all know how Saturdays are. I realize I haven't really ever answered the question of who Laura Miller actually is. Does she, in fact, even like Cheerios? I began this blog post with the idea that I would, here at the end, insert some warm and funny truths which I had discovered about Ms. Miller. But now it seems much more appropriate to leave her, and her eating and watching habits, to the imagination. At least, that is, until one reads The Magician's Book.

Holiday Gift Ideas

2008-12-05T14:06:00.000-08:00

It's the holiday season, and this means that many, many websites will be bombarding you with gift suggestions on which you can spend all the money that you had previously been saving for frivolous things such as gas or food for the kids.

Here's a few:

Bookpassage breaks books into nine or so categories, including the somewhat indecisively constructed "Art, Architecture, Photogarphy, Fashion, & Travel" category.

Borders Wonderland of Perfect Gifts, which besides breaking gifts into a number of categories slightly less than infinity, also plays music while you browse.

Comic Books Resources is the place to go for people who like books with pictures. According to them, "Watchmen...is the best, ultimate, and most achingly brilliant gift one human could possibly bestow unto another during this most festive of seasons."

The Barnes and Noble Book Review, in a matter not entirely related, but somewhat so, has asked many famous writers, like Neil Gaiman and Jamie Lee Curtis, to name their three favorite books and write a sentence or two about them. It's possible they do this in other months besides December, but this still seems a pretty foolproof place from which to steal gift ideas. After all, if your young son loves Anne Rice, for example, you could get him a book from Anne Rice's favorites and if he didn't like it, you could say. "Well, it's what Anne Rice likes. Are you saying that your favorite writer Anne Rice doesn't know a good book when she sees one?"

Happy reading, readers. Remember that the very best gift you can give to a friend or loved one this season is a hug. Or possibly a time machine so that they can go to the future and get January's winning powerball numbers.

On Books, Lists of Books, and Also John Hodgman

2008-12-04T15:00:00.000-08:00

There's been another salvo fired in the war over whether books as we know them are dying. In an Op-Ed column for the New York Times, James Gleick writes about why he sees the physical book as surviving the coming digitization of everything. "As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete... It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover." [Via Shaken & Stirred]

Also, if you love lists, especially end of year best books lists, then largeheartedboy has just the thing to fill your time this holiday season. In an impressive bit of scouring, he's compiled a collection of dozens upon dozens of end of year best lists, ranging from such obvious stalwarts as Amazon.com or the New York Times, to the St. John's Telegram list of "best Canadian cookbooks."

And in more information than you require news , check out this interview at the New Yorker with John Hodgman about, among other things, his new book, More Information Than You Require.

We're Back And Sillier Than Ever

2008-12-02T14:06:00.001-08:00

Hello, readers, it has been far too long. How have you been? Things have been busy here, what with visiting home for Thanksgiving and wrapping up our new issue of the YR, plus, you know, the normal end of year school stuff. It's become clear, though, that the more or less every other dailyness of collating and commenting on interweb materials is a rather rewarding activity. One to be abandoned at much risk. Which is to say that when you find something you love doing, don't stop doing it, unless what you love doing is sprinkling dead people's ashes at the Jane Austen Museum, in which case, the museum curators politely ask that you please refrain from said activity.

Apparently, in the same manner that sailing enthusiasts might want their remains scattered off Puget Sound, it turns out that die-hard Jane Austen enthusiasts often ask to have their ashes dumped in the garden of the Jane Austen Museum. More and more of late, mounds of human ash have been discovered about the grounds by staff and gardeners, as well as some visitors, who have been known to remark, "Verily, I was much disconcerted." The staff themselves, though, seem to take a more practical stance towards the bits of dead people left on their garden, saying "[i]f it enriched the soil we wouldn't mind so much but the ashes have no nutrients at all." [via Maud]

In other somewhat absurd news, Shaken & Stirred put up a link today to a weird little add-on for Firefox. It's called Tumbarumba and it proposes to insert sentences from stories into your web pages as you view them. If you discover the sentence and click on it, then a whole story will spring to life in your browser. I've yet to try it, mainly because I'm on a public computer at the moment, but the whole thing sounds a little strange and pointless and therefore wonderful.

Things, Also More Things

2008-11-22T00:14:00.000-08:00

Thing Number One: Chinua Achebe, author of the generally considered masterpiece, Things Fall Part, stops by Harvard and proceeds to be wise and funny and name drop Queen Elizabeth II.

Thing Number Two: Proof that, however awesome you thought Nathan Fillion was, you underestimated. He took part in an all-star read-a-thon celebrating the release of Andrew Porter's The Theory of Light and Matter.

Thing Number Three: J onathan Lethem reads from Whitman and The Fortress of Solitude, then does some Q&A. All part of his being the inaugural speaker for the Walt Whitman series at St. Francis College.

Thing Number Four: Somewhat depressing quotes from high schoolers discussing the non-literatureness of graphic novels.

Thing Number Last: Over at the New Scientist they've got an article on the old: is science fiction dying/dead/evolved into a bird from it's previous dinosaur incarnation question. It's a tiresome question, true, one equivalent to asking if romance is dead, but the article includes good stuff about the nature of science and fiction in the past two centuries, and it puts the question itself in perspective by bringing up Lord Kelvin's bold, if somewhat ill-considered, statement in 1900 that, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."

Zombies Versus Unicorns, Part Deux

2008-11-19T23:47:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post, we reported on the ongoing feud between zombies and unicorns, but recently things have gotten out of hand. What was once a small skirmish restrained within the civilized and intangible discourse of blog posts and YouTube videos, has now escalated into book form with the announcement of the upcoming anthology, Zombies Versus Unicorns, edited by Justine Larbalestier (pro-zombie) and Holly Black (pro-unicorn). The collection will be published in 2010 and feature about half zombie stories and half unicorn stories, plus one story in which the supernatural competitors battle it out AVP style***. According to Ms. Larbalestier, the line-up of writers is composed of "more best-sellers, award winners, and all-round geniuses than you can poke a stick at."

It's all enough to make one wonder if, perhaps, this long-running feud on the interweb wasn't a very clever bit of advertising. But then again, it's not all that hard to imagine such arguments taking place as I know my friends and I have argued over similar matters, such as the great Ninja Vs. Robot feud of '98 which resulted in the loss of a good friend's ear. In any case, I'm excited about this anthology. Despite i09's concerns over the difficulty of "keep[ing] zombies fresh" (oh, the beauty of unintentional puns) or the lack of unicorns in contemporary science fiction or urban fantasy, it seems to me that there are plenty of cool metaphorical and narrative possibilities out there for aspiring writers. Nazi snow zombies in Norway, anyone?

***Two things of note. One, I've never actually seen AVP. Two, I have no idea if such a story exists, or will ever exist. But wouldn't it be cool?

National Book Awards Announced

2008-11-19T22:44:00.000-08:00

I've been busy, the blog's been somewhat abandoned, but now that's all behind us, and we can celebrate by reporting that the winners have been announced for the National Book Award.

Fiction: Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

Nonfiction: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed

Poetry: Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems by Mark Doty

Young People's Literature: What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell

If by some chance you missed the ceremony, you can wait for the videos to be uploaded here, or you can read the National Book Award's twitter feed and use your imagination.

Hello Weekend

2008-11-14T23:00:00.000-08:00

How was your week, readers? Mine was fine except for that brief moment where I was terrified that my life had no purpose. I should know better than to watch Heroes after midnight.

Here's things:

The always enlightening and entertaining Sarah Vowell, possible imp and definite author of such books as Assasination Vacation and The Wordy Shipmates, has written a wonderful introduction for Nick Hornby's latest and last collection of Believer essays. Everyone who doesn't hate laughing should read it.

Smart advice for writers from Mathew Cheney. Included: the secret that there is no secret plus several good quotes, including, "Read. Find out what you truly believe. Distance yourself from the familiar."

Seth and Chester Brown have sent an open letter to the Governor General's Literary Award regarding the shortlisting of the graphic novel Skim by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. While happy to see the work on the list, Seth and Chester wonder why only the writer, Mariko Tamaki, is recognized, considering that one of the defining characteristics of graphic novels is that the "words and pictures together are the TEXT."

Finally, in one of the more inspired bits of literary lunacy I've seen in a long while, Stephen Colbert mashes up Jane Austen and baseball in his latest segment of Tip of the Hat/Wag of the Finger (Austen shenanigans begin around the 1:40 mark). Be advised, though, this video contains strong punnage.

Of China Rabbits and Adventurous Chickens...

2008-11-12T22:13:00.000-08:00

Kate DiCamillo writes children's books, and she writes them well. For example, The Tale of Desperaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread, not only has an unstoppably whimsical title, but it also won for DiCamillo the 2004 Newberry Medal. Other of her books include Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tiger Rising, and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, which as it turns out, from my experience anyway, just so happens to be one of the very best presents you can give to someone if you desire them to spend an entire Saturday in bed, crying. Her latest is Louise, The Adventures of a Chicken, and the Canadian Press has a very nice article about Kate and the "terrible dark decade" of her twenties, relocating to Florida from Minneapolis, and the importance of simple, yet profound language.

Poetry Instead

2008-11-10T20:51:00.000-08:00

Readers, the deadline for us Yalobushers to go to press approaches. November 20th. Ten days, and then it's out of our hands, quite literally. Funny how close literally comes to literarily. Almost makes one want to check the epistemology, but we'll leave such matters to another time.

Yesterday, on To the Best of Our Knowledge, many poets who write poems, along with at least one who, along with poeting, spends a great deal of time writing about poetry, stopped by. Guests included Patricia Smith, author of Blood Dazzler, nominee for the 2008 National Book Award. She read a poem or two, one of which took on the persona of a skinhead and did dazzle with it's brutal sort of empathy. She's a four-time champion of the National Poetry Slam, and there's something of the way she becomes the skinhead as she reads that's unsettling in the best of ways. And by the power of YouTube, you can watch her perform "Skinhead" live. Be warned, there be offensive language here.

The second guest, Jay Parini, is a poet who sometimes is a scholar that publishes books like, Why Poetry Matters. In his segment, he paraphrased, I believe, Robert Frost as saying that if you don't know how to live in a metaphor, then you're not prepared for life. Chew on that one for a while, readers. Let it stick between your teeth. Be surprised when a few days later, after you've forgotten about it, something bitter and true pops out on your tongue. But seriously, such a sentiment struck a deep chord for me, one who tends to believe in metaphors the way some people believe in Tuesday.

Les Murray rounded out the guests yesterday. An Australian considered by many critics to be the greatest living English poet. In the interview, he talks about writing through depression and reads many of his poems with one of those voices that sounds like what you think a bear would sound like if it could talk and also had an Australian accent.

See you next time, true believers.

For the Weekend

2008-11-07T14:22:00.001-08:00

Dear readers, it's Friday and it's a new world, but people still seem to die a lot.

Here's some stuff to look at this weekend.

John Leonard: editor, critic, sentence exploder, and person I've never read but may now become obsessed with, has died. Matthew Cheney at the Mumpsimus, along with Edward Champion and Salon, have written wonderful tributes.

In the young adult world, few feuds engender more passion and lost friendships than the one between zombies and unicorns. John Green has more.

Amazon has announced it's Best Books of 2008, which is funny considering, you know, there's still a couple months left, but I guess the "best of" year is kind of like the "fiscal" year in that it ends somewhere around October. Top ten lists include: Fiction and Literature, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Comic Books and Graphic Novels, Mysteries and Thrillers, and Romance, among others. It occurred to me to comment on the fact that there's one category called, "Fiction and Literature," and then a bunch of other categories, a demarcation that seems to imply that the other categories are neither fiction nor literature, but then I got lazy and decided just to comment on the thought of commenting.

Sometimes women writers choose, or are asked, to hide the fact that they don't have man parts. It's a topic this blog mentioned once before. Io9 has a list of "Women Who Pretended to be Men to Publish SciFi Books", a list which includes the likes of JK Rowling and the ever-present James Tiptree, JR. who, as it turned out, was neither a James, a Tiptree, or a Jr.

Enjoy the weekend. Say hello to a squirrel.

The Book is Always Better

2008-11-06T00:45:00.000-08:00

My sister and I read a lot growing up, and sometimes those books got made into movies, or sometimes we read the books after we saw the movies. Things like Neverending Story. Princess Bride. Dune. No matter the order in which we encountered a story, though, we had an axiom that never seemed to fail.

The book is always better.

Even if the movie adaptation has Robin Wright or Sting. Even if it's directed by Steven Spielberg, as was the case for Jurassic Park, one of those movies that gets watched almost every time I stumble across it. And yet I remember, after seeing the movie in theaters, my sister and I finishing the book by Michael Crichton, fascinated by the fractal designs at the start of each chapter and the story's discussion of the science of chaos. Our conclusion was, as always, that the book was better.

Michael Crichton died Tuesday at the age of 66. He wrote many sorts of books: historical adventures, like The Great Train Robbery or Eaters of the Dead, international thrillers, like Rising Sun, and of course, many science-y type novels in which the science inevitably seems to go awry. Books like Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, or Sphere (talk about a book being better than the movie). Sometimes people wondered a bit at the accuracy of the science in his fiction. He wrote a book in 2004, for example, called State of Fear, in which a group of eco-terrorists attempt to create a state of fear in order to advance their agenda regarding global warming. Scientists took offense at this for some reason.

Many of Crichton's novels very often got adapted into movies, sometimes with Crichton himself directing, such as on The Great Train Robbery, and many more where he didn't. Occasionally, he directed movies he didn't write, things like Coma or Runaway, or wrote movies he didn't direct, like Twister. During Jurassic Park, on which he was a producer, he dreamed up ER with Steven Spielberg, so if you're a fan of George Clooney being awesome, you owe Mr. Crichton a thank you.

I'll start. Thank you Michael Crichton, and I promise if I ever discover the secret to reanimating the dead or cloning myself into ever-more cool iterations, I'll stop and wonder about whether maybe sometimes just because you can do something, doesn't mean that you should.

A Not Totally Depressing Thing Concerning Politics

2008-11-03T19:30:00.000-08:00

So tomorrow we do the thing where we elect a president and nobody knows what's going to happen. Will it be Obama? McCain? Alien invasion? Rogue Palin and the Alaskan revolution? For these, and other more unlikely but somewhat possible scenarios, check out Five Dials No. 4, in which writers imagine what happens on the day after the U.S. presidential electio n. Imagineers include, among others, Michael Martone, Lydia Millet, and Kevin Brockmeier--who puts his money on, of all people, Tom Hanks. [via Guardian]

World Fantasy Award Winners

2008-11-02T22:16:00.000-08:00

The World Fantasy Awards have been announced over at Science Fiction Awards Watch. Winners are as follows:

Novel: Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada/Penguin Roc)
Novella: Illyria, Elizabeth Hand (PS Publishing)
Short Story: “Singing of Mount Abora”, Theodora Goss (Logorrhea, Bantam Spectra)
Anthology: Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Ellen Datlow, Editor (Tor)
Collection: Tiny Deaths, Robert Shearman (Comma Press)
Artist: Edward Miller
Special Award—Professional: Peter Crowther for PS Publishing
Special Award—Non-professional: Midori Snyder and Terri Windling for Endicott Studios Website

Random notes about some of the winners: Robert Shearman has written for Dr. Who and penned the surprisingly touching and reinventy episode, "Dalek," in which we got to see what sort of creature lives inside a Dalek's metal casing. Guy Gavriel Kay is Canadian. And Elizabeth Hand, winner of Best Novella, will be teaching at Clarion this summe r--Clarion being a six-week science fiction and fantasy writer's workshop/boot camp that has been known to change people's lives and sometimes even their anatomies.

Check out Adventures in Reading for some commentary and thoughts on the winners and other nominees.

Novelists Writing Comic Books

2008-10-30T19:51:00.000-07:00

In the latest Onion A.V. comics pane l, there's a brief review of the new hard cover collection of Jonathan Lethem's 10-issue revival of Marvel's Omega the Unknown, a 70s comic that focused not so much on the caped Omega, as on an unusually mature twelve year old boy named James-Michael Starling. The Onion gives Lethem's take a B+ and calls it "winningly peculiar." Back in the middle of last year, Newsarama interviewed Lethem about translating his skills as a language loving novelist to the predominantly visual form of comics. One of Lethem's more important realizations? Comic book panels don't hold all that many words.

If you're wondering if other novelists and literary types have swung their way into comic books, the answer is yes they have, and their number is many. Some you might expect, like Michael Chabon, writer of the very pulpy and comic-centric, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, and some you might not, like Ian Rankin, the Scottish crime writer best known for his Inspector Rebus novels. His debut graphic novel, a Hellblazer story, Dark Entries, hits next year. For more examples and discussion, check out these articles from the New York Times, Newsday, and the London Times.

Monday Links

2008-10-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

Hello, dear readers. It's Monday and suddenly very cold everywhere. Here's a few things to look at and play with during this Halloween week.

The Global Network of Dreams: More evidence of the impending, "technological singularity," that point at which Sky Net goes online and Linda Hamilton becomes an action-star, this website, acronymed "gnod"--which comes suspiciously close to "god"--is a self-adapting system that allows you to map your favorite authors and movies. For example, go here, type in G.K. Chesteron, and whole constellations of authors will explode from his name and you'll see that Louise de Wohl hangs near Chesterton's corner of the literary sky. It's a nifty way to find other authors you might like, plus it's just cool to watch.

If you're in need of something to scare the kiddies, never fear, there's not one, but two new articles of "macabre" and "spine-tingling" book recommendations for children and young adults. From across the pond, there's Amanda Craig writing in The Times about such writers as Vivian French and Korky Paul, and closer to home, in The Seattle Times, there's Stephanie Dunnewind writing about Kevin Emerson and Rosemary Clement-Moore, among others. Both articles make mention of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, which, if I haven't mentioned it before, you can watch Gaiman read at the Mouse Circus.

And finally, a battle with wizards, goblins, and a sprinkle of fairy dust on the one side, and atheist extraordinaire Richard Dawkins on the other. Apparently, our Mr. Dawkins wonders of the negative effect of "anti-scientific" fairy tales. Perhaps he's never heard of that mathematical story of Jack and the Beanstalk, which, if I remember correctly, taught children about the relative economic scales of magic beans and cows.

Remembering Ted Hughes

2008-10-25T10:44:00.001-07:00

My familiarity with Ted Hughes springs mainly from his having written in 1968 the children's story The Iron Man, upon which Andrew Bird's brilliant 1999 animated film, The Iron Giant, was based. But the man, of course, did many other things throughout his life, including writing the sort of poetry that garnered him a place among the best poets of his generation, serving as the British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death, writing many other children's books, and also being married to Sylvia Plath.

He died of heart failure on October 28th, 1998. In West Yorkshire this week, the Elmet Trust celebrates his life with the Ted Hughes Festival, an annual event held in Hughes' possibly made-up hometown of Mytholmroyd. This year's festival will see the debut of, Dreaming of Foxes, a play based on Ted Hughes' childhood. Other events around the UK include readings of his work in London by Seamus Heaney, Alice Oswald, and Simon Armitage, and on November 6, the University of Exeter hosts "The Artist and the Poet", a sound recording, set to images, of Hughes' 1988 conversation with the artist Leonard Baskin.

If, like me, you don't happen to be currently residing in Britain, there's always YouTube tributes like this one--which includes interview excerpts, discussion amongst critics, and a reading from The Iron Man--to get you in the spirit.

In Praise of Interviews...

2008-10-24T01:52:00.000-07:00

Remember in Catcher in the Rye when Holden said a really good book made you wish that as soon as you had finished it that you could call up the author and chat with them? Well, that's sort of what authors interviews are like except generally you aren't the one asking the questions or having that charge of personal connection. Still, there's always the chance of feeling that muted charge of indirect connection upon recognizing yourself in an author as they talk about their loves and hates and general feelings concerning the world and how best to live in it.

Several options exist on the internet for your Q&A needs, you have your print kind, your podcast kind, your video kind, and your overheard at an event kind, which can be sometimes read, listened to, and/or watched.

Falling in the overheard category, over at Elegant Variation, they've posted the highlights of Marilynne Robinson's appearance at the Los Angeles Public Library's ALOUD program. The author of Housekeeping (that would be the book, not the magazine), Gilead, and Home, talks about her love of sermons and her lesser love for plots and James Joyce.

Meanwhile Hannah Tinti talks with Maud Newton about her new book, The Good Thief, and her appreciation for plot and things happening in stories, and Kelly Link, resident of Northampton, MA, talks with the New England journal , Meeting Houses, about her book, Pretty Monsters, and having faith that one day you'll discover your superpower. The topic of burial grounds come up in both.

If you like your interviews of a more auditory nature, check out the Bat Segundo show and their archives of podcast interviews with authors from all over the literary map, from Andre Dubus III to Thomas Disch. Their most recent interview just happens to be with Marilynne Robinson. Other cool places to go for podcastic interviews: Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing, for, well, you can probably guess, or listen to the amazing archive of Don Swaim interviews at Wired for Books, which aren't really podcasts, but they are of the listenable sort.

For video interviews, there's the Google, and their Authors@Google series featuring presidential candidates, neurologists, and rocket scientists alongside Salman Rushdies, Elizabeth Gilberts, and Leslie Changs. If Google's not your style, there's bookwrapcentral, and their own rather staggering list of present and past interviews to watch and awe at.

New Fiction Tuesday

2008-10-21T15:27:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's nice to pause and look around at what's hitting the bookshelves, so, in a completely arbitrary and slightly whimsical manner, here's some books that look interesting:

First up, a new novel from Geoff Ryman, writer of fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, and the occasional Wizard of Oz-ical fiction. His new book, The King's Last Song, is a historical novel set in Cambodia. In my experience, Ryman's writing possessess a certain humane ruthlessness, a trait I would imagine well-suited to the subject of this book. It's gotten some rather ecstatic press from The Boston Globe.

Recently reviewed in The New York Times Books Review, but actually not all that recently released, are outings from Los Bros. Hernandez, better known as graphic novelists, Jamie and Gilbert Hernandez. Jamie's graphic novel, The Education of Hopey Glass, continues in his particular brand of compassionate cynicism, the sort of book that has a forty-year old aging punk rocker, the titular Hopey, trying on glasses for the first time, along with a bit of hopeless love and murder on the side. Also, last month saw the release of a new collection of the brothers work in the Love and Rockets series. Rolling Stone calls the comics "American fiction's best kept secret."

Also, a new edition of the first Twilight book will be, erm, resurrected, on October 28th. I can't say as I've ever read these books, but I did at one time have the book on a shelf in my apartment before lending it to an interested friend (pssst. our resident managing editor has a taste for the pop-lit). But, what I have read is this list of Some things Twilight says are awesome but they are not awesome at all, which I found by way of Shaken and Stirred. It's awesome.

Philip Pullman's Birthday

2008-10-19T15:23:00.000-07:00

Philip Pullman, scholar, humanist, supposed killer of God, a deep admirer of polar bears, and the author of the sometimes controversial, but deeply considered and spiritual, His Dark Materials trilogy, (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) was born on this day in 1946.

Here's what he says about things:

"We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts. We need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but once upon a time lives forever."

Strange Mash-ups of the Literary Sort

2008-10-17T13:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes strange combinations set our brain on fire. Take for example, the new book by Leonard Cassuto, Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Fiction. Cassuto makes the argument here that the oh so manly cynical gumshoes of the past hundred years or so--Marlowe, Spade, Archer--can be traced back to the oh so quiet but angry women of the nineteenth century sentimental novel. Both, it seems, are in search of home and domesticity in a society that's failed them. Sarah Weinman has a nice look at the book over at the LA Times.

And in a very direct bit of hard-boiled sentimentality, check out an excerpt from "The Pooh Also Rises," by Alan Coren, a brilliant and, sadly deceased, humorist for the Times. As you might guess from the name, it's a mash-up of sorts between A.A. Milne's Pooh characters and the prose stylings of Ernest Hemingway.

‘Do you hear the guns?' said Pooh.

‘Yes,' said Piglet. ‘I hear the guns.'

Is your brain burning, yet?

National Book Awards, plus a thing or two about Civil War Generals and Science Fiction

2008-10-16T21:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning, the National Book Award finalists were announced. If you need another reminder of how sad everything is all the time, check out the non-fiction category which features such uplifting entrants as This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War and The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order.

Speaking of the Civil War, November 26th sees the release of a graphic novel about a Civil War general from Arkansas named Patrick Cleburne, named simply enough, Cleburne: A Graphic Novel. The tag line: "some stories have yet to be told." Interesting story not told about Mr. Cleburne, he wanted to free the slaves to fight for the Confederacy.

Fantasy and Science Fiction has a pretty cool article up about the role of gender in science fiction, both in terms of readers and writers. Did you know that in 1969 Playboy attributed an Ursula K. LeGuin story to a U.K. LeGuin? It's common practice for some women to use their initials to avoid the supposed marketing dangers of being recognized as a woman, but for a magazine to do it of it's own accord? Good brain firing stuff here, especially the responses to a questionnaire on gender and sci-fi sent to fifteen or so women working in the business. Also, if you've never heard of The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, now's a good time to listen.

Dennis Lehane Reading

2008-10-14T21:05:00.000-07:00

Last night, Dennis Lehane, author of such moral tangle boxes as Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone, stopped by Off-Square Books to sign and read from his latest novel, The Given Day. Born and raised in Boston, Lehane's made his mark exploring that city's people and politics with a wicked good ear for dialogue and a compassionate sort of ruthlessness that doesn't flinch from ethical impossibilities that twist a reader's gut. The Given Day follows in that tradition, telling a story of social and political upheaval set, for the most part, in Boston at the end of the first World War: a time when the Spanish flu raged and the police in Boston went on strike, a time Lehane described at the reading as a moment when "power and fear" joined together and resulted in a police state, as that combination always does.

The chapter he read focused on a character named Luther, a character that Lehane felt overlooked in many reviews, and one he thought deserved a little more exposure considering he appeared in about half the book. Here we see Luther in Tulsa, before coming to Boston, as he learns to run numbers for Deacon, a wheelchair bound gangster with a surprisingly good singing voice. Luther's introduction to the world of lawlessness, of that little bit of crime that lets you feel the law doesn't own you, becomes our introduction as readers to the world and it's people. The chapter had a rollicking feel, Luther hitting the streets and poolhalls, other characters flashing by, speaking themselves to life and fading, as Luther gets immersed in the culture and learns that some people skim a bit for themselves, who's gonna know? God? The Deacon ain't god...

As outstanding as Lehane's reading was--and it's pretty cool to watch an author's face take on the personality of his characters--his Q&A managed to be outstanding-er. Highlights include:

When asked if he liked historical writing, he said that he'd noticed in his last two books he keeps going back further and further to the past. "When I try to write in the present right now," he said, "I just freeze. Feels like if I wrote a present day novel it'd be 600 pages of 'Indict, Dick Cheney,' 'Indict Dick Cheney,' and that'd be boring to write and boring. It'd be a polemic. I'm a oblique writer," he said. "I don't write autobiographical stuff."

A story about the first time he heard the letter 'r' pronounced--a cah accident on his street which he and a buddy visited and so overheard a blonde woman talking about what happened to her car. That stuck with them all day. They kept saying it to themselves, "car?", "car?", in a sophisticated sort of accent, "Did you come by car?", "Is that your car sir?"

The admission that despite his doubts over whether one could really fall in love with research, it was in fact very possible, and he had found himself near the end of a solid year of reading about 1919, asking himself if he really needed another book about Woodrow Wilson. "If there's a Trivial Pursuit game about 1919 I'd get all the little triangles and make it to the center first."

Worst part of writing about 1919? No evidence of a certain beloved curse word until 1955 or so.

The toughest question though concerned baseball. Upon being asked who he was rooting for in the Boston/Tampa playoff series--Lehane's been living in St. Petersburg for the last several years--he displayed a sort of sports fan schizophrenia, acknowledging that as of late he'd been a closet Rays fan, and now in the playoff series he found himself cheering both on, quietly. "Boston has a thing for David and Goliath stories," he said, "It's who we are, and now we're Goliath and I don't know what to do, I just don't."

What It Is: Lynda Barry Interview

2008-10-12T13:12:00.000-07:00

Happy news, readers! Cartoonist, novelist, playwright, and friend to collages everywhere, Lynda Barry, has agreed to an interview for the forthcoming issue of The Yalobusha Review. She's the creator behind dozens and dozens of comic strips which, in the eighties, gained her a cult following and led to the occasional appearance on "Late Night With David Letterman." Strips of her syndicated comic, Ernie Pook's Comeek, have appeared on Salon and been collected in, The Freddy Stories and The Greatest of Marlys. She's also the author of several sorts of books. The kind with pictures, like Cruddy, named one of the top ten books of the year by EW in 2000, or The Good Times Are Killing Me, winner of the Washington Governor's Writing Award, and the kind with more pictures, the "autobifictionalographic" One Hundred Demons, for example, or the combination memoir/activity book/storytelling manual/all-around paen to images, What It Is.

Lynda Barry allows her characters and drawings to be squiggly and frantic and vulnerable. Her stories are silly and serious, funny and resonant. But you don't have to take my word for it, listen to what these people say:

EW called her "America’s leading cartoon artist of childhood angst." From the San Francisco Chronicle: "Barry is not just a storyteller, she’s an evangelist who urges people to pick up a pen—or a brush . . . and look at their own lives with fresh, forgiving eyes.” And Dave Eggers, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said, "Lynda Barry has no peer," and in discussing her work, "we're approaching a word not commonly employed when talking of cartoons, oeuvre." Cartoonist as auteur, indeed.

Check out other reviews and examples of Lynda's work at Salon. Head over to myspace and learn about Lynda's traveling workshop, Writing the Unthinkable. Learn how to draw. Have fun.

A Long, Strange Week In Which The Best American Short Stories Came Out, Among Other Things

2008-10-10T21:16:00.000-07:00

This will be a week long remembered. It has seen the deadline come and go for the Barry Hannah and Yellowwood Poetry contests, and it will soon see the end of many sleepless nights spent combing through manuscripts for those finalists to send on to the judges.

Also, the latest edition of The Best American Short Stories rolled out on October 8th, which seemed strange to me, as I remember seeing it in bookstores a month ago. Perhaps somebody cheated, or perhaps the space-time continuum experienced a brief tear. That might explain why everybody's acting of late like the world's about to end. Contributors this year include T.C. Boyle, Karen Russell, and Kevin Brockmeier, among others. A few reviews have already popped up. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch writes of "how good Rushdie was at assembling this anthology: a variety of writers, famous to first-timers, sifted from major magazines and little reviews, grand and little worlds." Kirkus called it "bleak but brilliant." Also, check out Adventures in Reading and their on-going series of blog posts in which they look at each story in turn.

Others things happened this week, I'm sure. Continuing collapses of one kind or another. A debate or two. And then there was the big fundraiser for The Yalobusha Review thrown on the Oxford square at Southside Gallery. Pictures and gratuitous self-congratulation forthcoming.

The Next Generation of Storytelling: Podcast Novelists, Cellphone Stylists, and the "Twiller"

2008-10-07T15:10:00.000-07:00

It's the future, ladies and gentleman, has been for several years now, and if more proof was needed, then Shaun Farrell writing over at Strange Horizons has offered it to us in the form of podcasting novelists. "Hundreds of authors have entered the podosphere," Shaun, a podcaster himself, writes, "as an avenue to an audience and perhaps professional publication. Their audio productions feature pro-level recording quality, tantalizing vocal performances, music, sound effects, and, in some cases, accompanying PDFs, images, and videos." Listenership is in the thousands for these novels, 4,000 in fact, tuned in for the initial installment of Mur Lafferty's, Playing for Keeps. For comparison sakes, in 2004, of the nearly million books tracked by Nielson Bookscan, only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. Publishers have taken an interest, of course, in authors with such built-in audiences, and whether or not podcast novelists can become successful in the print market, is the major question of Shaun's article. It's fascinating stuff, full of fun new words like podiobooks and cool acronyms like ARG (Alternate Reality Games). Check it out.

Reading Shaun's article, got me to thinking about how technology changes the way we tell stories. In Japan, for instance, cellphone novels, called "keitai shousetsu," continue to rack up big sales. Originally texted in chapters of around 70 characters or less, these novels, republished in book form, accounted for 5 of the top ten bestselling books in Japan in 2007. Twitter, a microblogging application, of which yes I'm a part, has also become a distribution format for fiction. While readwriteweb wrote an article earlier in September saying they weren't, as of yet, big success stories, they still acknowledged that considering the success of such textual endeavors in Japan, and the growing popularity of Twitter, it's possible such fictional forms may catch on here. Something Matt Richtel must be counting on, considering he's twittering his latest thriller in real time: a twiller, as it were.

Welcome to the future, readers.

American Melancholy

2008-10-04T20:00:00.000-07:00

America's been taking it on the chin of late. There's the ~~impending~~ possible collapse of the economy and it's contribution to an already plummeting opinion of the U.S. in the world. And if that's not bad enough, a few days ago the permanent secretary head of the Nobel prize committee, Horace Engdahl, called the literature of the U.S., "insular" and "isolated". He went on to say, in a completely non-insular way, that "Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world, not the United States." Enghdal has since reiterated that an author's nationality factors not at all into the Nobel panel's decision. Sigh. For a nice commentary on the literary awards season, check out Elizabeth Renzetti's article, wherein novelists, publishers, and literary judges are compared to weasels and thin-skinned tomatoes.

In despairingly related news, io9 recently published an article, "America: It Had to End Sometime," which offers up some of the best American apocalypse stories, whether it be alien invasion, economic catastrophe, or Rothian alternate history. The goal being to help us prepare for the aftermath of the coming American apocalypse. Hmm, American writers writing about the end of America, maybe Engdahl had a point...

Kelly Link Interview

2008-10-02T12:51:00.000-07:00

What a day yesterday. Cubs lost, felt sad. Read at Broken English, felt happy. Came home and found out that Kelly Link had agreed to an interview with us for the upcoming issue, felt absolutely scrumtrilescent.

If you've been paying attention, readers, you may have already noticed Kelly Link's name popping up in this blog before: here and here, for example. She's the author of a new collection of short stories for young adults, Pretty Monsters, as well as two previous short story collections, Stranger Things Happen (a Salon Book of the Year and Village Voice favorite) and Magic for Beginners (winner of the 2006 Locus for Best Short Story Collection). Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories. They've won the World Fantasy award, the James Tiptree, Jr. award, a Hugo, and three Nebulas. Salon described her writing as "an alchemical mixture of Borges, Raymond Chandler, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Michael Chabon said her books were evidence the world was worth saving. Neil Gaiman offered up the suggestion she be protected at all times by a cadre of marines.

In her spare time, Kelly co-edits Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, edited an original anthology, Trampoline, and co-founded Small Beer Press.

Go here to watch her appearance with Karen Joy Fowler in the Authors@Google series. Check out The Boston Phoenix's just published profile of Kelly here. And also, you know, read her stories if you haven't before. Many of them are online, and so are you. Get to work.

Books to Read, Poetry to Peruse, and Monsters to Fear, but Ultimately Love

2008-09-30T14:29:00.000-07:00

A plethora of links today, including a Kelly (It's funny cause her last name is Link, see?)

Via Bookslut: Check out two new poems from Sherman Alexie, "How to Create an Agnostic" and "Mystery Train," at failbetter.com. While you're there check out their interview with Susan Choi and learn about irrepressible urges, tight plots, and anxieties over the pantheons of Russian and Jewish literarure.

Every week, the good folks at the Onion A.V. Club throw out a question for discussion among their staff and readers. This week they have an article asking, "What one book would you most like to make the rest of the world read?" Picks range from the pilgrims of Chaucer to the endogged stars of Dianne Wynne Jones. Be sure and stay for the credits, too. As always with these sorts of articles, some of the most erudite, and erm, colorful commentary can be found in the comments section.

And finally, from the invisible world of radio, head over to those uncertain folk at, To The Best of Our Knowledge (TTBOOK as the kids call it) for a discussion of horror, including conversations with Andrew Davidson and Kelly Link about their books, Gargoyle and Pretty Monsters, respectively.

2008-09-29T19:10:00.001-07:00

On the first Wednesday of every month, the English Department at Ole Miss, plus whoever else stumbles in or we wrangle along, convene at Jubilee on the square to celebrate the work of a fiction writer and a poet from our program. We call this Broken English. There's a shiny MC, a podium of many autographs, and a lot of very supportive, not too drunk, people. It's one of the cooler things about matriculating in Oxford, actually.

Here's what our shiny MC says...

"This Wednesday's reading features the soaring prose of fiction writer, Chris 'Don't Make Me Show You My Superpowers' Kammerud, and the lyrical phraseology of poet, Alicia 'Obama Mama' Casey."

Drinking begins at 8, the spoken word at 8:30. Stop by if you're in the neighborhood and say hello. I'll be the guy in a cape*.

*A superhero cape, not a Dracula cape. Probably I'll just wear a t-shirt.

Banned Books Week

2008-09-28T11:30:00.000-07:00

Reading Neil Gaiman's journal, one learns many interesting things about cats and Maddys and graveyards, plus the occasional interesting thing about books, such as that this week is Banned Books Week. Every year the ALA celebrates our freedom to read by reminding us of those small pockets of resistance still carrying on in their noble, hopefully futile, quest to rid the world of children's books with too many wizards, adult books with too many racisms, or books of any sort with homosexual penguins.

The ten most frequently challenged authors of 2007 according to the ALA:

1) Robert Cormier
2) Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
3) Mark Twain
4) Toni Morrison
5) Philip Pullman
6) Kevin Henkes
7) Lois Lowry
8) Chris Crutcher
9) Lauren Myracle
10) Joann Sfar

Do your part readers, go to your local library or bookstore and pick up a book THEY don't want you to read. Do it for your country, for your soul, and for that little devil on your shoulder that looks remarkably like a young Mark Twain.

Cartoonist as Auteur

2008-09-26T09:42:00.001-07:00

In honor of The Yalobusha Review opening it's doors, er, pages, to short graphic stories (graphic here meaning pictures, not naked lawyer mud wrestling, although...), here's a couple of links from the world of narrative art.

First, check out those hip geeks at The Wall Street Journal and their article about the life-changing work going on in graphic novels from Europe. Here you'll discover cool phrases like bandes dessinées, and learn that while we yanks have been slow in embracing comic books as a medium for more than the adventures of radioactive men and women, places like France and Belgium have celebrated the many possibilities of the artform for decades: see Tintin or Asterix.

When you're done feeling sophisticated and worldly, head over to Amazon's Omnivoracious and their Graphic Novel Fridays post about the throwback to early sci-fi pulp and wonder that is Fear Agent by writer Rick Remender and artist Tony Moore (Walking Dead). Who doesn't love space suits and tentacle monsters, right?

Mostly Harmless and Another Thing...

2008-09-22T14:56:00.000-07:00

A couple of pan-galactic and large-hearted links for you today, readers:

From the "I never could get the hang of Thursdays" department, Eoin Colfer will write the sixth volume of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy and will also, almost certainly, be unfairly maligned by readers for being named Eoin Colfer and not Douglas Adams, but that's not really his fault is it? Let's put the blame where it really belongs people, on Eoin's parents.

That said, Largehearted boy has blogged Esquire's 75 books Every Man Should Read, a list that has neither Eoin Colfer or Douglas Adams on it. You will find such manly luminaries as Roth, Cheever, London, and Saunders on it, though. Even foreign men like Murakami make an appearance. Not too many women, though. One, to be exact. Flannery O'Connnor, who Barry Hannah has admitted he thought to be a man for many years. Head here, for the whole thing in slideshow-style.

Final Country

2008-09-20T09:24:00.000-07:00

Opening lines of James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss:
"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonora, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

From Crumley's The Final Country:
"It's done. This may not be my final country. I can still taste the bear in the back of my throat, bitter with the blood of the innocent, and somewhere in my old heart I can still remember the taste of love. Perhaps this is just a resting place. A warm place to drink cold beer. But wherever my final country is, my ashes will go back to Montana when I die. Maybe I've stopped looking for love. Maybe not. Maybe I will go to Paris. Who knows? But I'll sure as hell never go back to Texas again."

James Crumley, author of the hard-boiled classic The Last Good Kiss, died on Wednesday afternoon at the age of 68. George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, and Michael Connelly are among the authors that counted Crumley as a major influence. Crumley was born in Three Rivers, Texas, grew up in south Texas, and spent three years in the U.S. Army. His Vietnam novel One Count to Cadence was his thesis at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Struggling to follow it up, he was introduced to the work of Raymond Chandler and wrote The Wrong Case, a landmark crime novel. With The Last Good Kiss, his third book, Crumley changed the face of contemporary crime fiction. Crumley was also the author of The Mexican Tree Duck, Bordersnakes, Dancing Bear, The Final Country, and The Right Madness. Over the years, he taught at the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Montana. He died in Missoula, Montana.

A 2006 interview with Crumley:
The Right Madness

An Indignant Philip Roth Battles Zombies

2008-09-17T12:57:00.000-07:00

Wouldn't it be pretty if it were so, dear readers? But no, as of yet, Philip Roth has not joined in the fight against the undead. He has, however, published a new novel by the name of Indignation, which the Washington Post says "ought to be handed out on college campuses along with condoms and tetanus shots." I hadn't realized Roth had resorted to writing about sex with rusty robots, but considering his growing fascination with zombies, who can keep up these days.

In related news, Kelly Link's short story, "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" is now available for free online as part of John Joseph Adams anthology, The Living Dead, which collects zombie stories from the likes of Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and others.

Everything Is Green

2008-09-14T13:19:00.000-07:00

This is what it means to start a blog: when someone famous dies, you feel sad, and then you think, I know what my next post will be.

This is what it means to be a writer, too. A teacher told me a story once, of a drunken, sobbing friend calling him on the phone from a bar. He told my teacher he and his wife were getting a divorce, that his kids would stay with her, that he kept forgetting to breathe. And then his tears stopped, and he said, "I'm getting a lot of great material for writing, though."

I don't know why so many great writers kill themselves. I'm not even sure so many really do, or if that's just the way it feels right now. I don't think any of this is supposed to make sense. That's why we have stories.

Here's the end of one written by David Foster Wallace:

Everything is green she is saying. She is whispering it and the whisper is not to me no more I know.

I chuck my smoke and turn hard from the morning outside with the taste of something true in my mouth. I turn hard toward her in the light on the sofa lounger.

She is looking outside, from where she is sitting, and I look at her, and there is something in me that can not close up in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name.

The World Boogie is Coming

2008-09-12T12:19:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Thacker Mountain Radio, last night authors Monique Truong and Bich Mihn Nguyen stopped by, along with musical guests James 'Super Chikan' Johnson and Ariel Jade. Since, technically, this isn't a music blog I'll leave discussion of Ms. Jade's fourteen-year-old prodigyness and Super Chikan's innovative ideas on recycling (guitars made of gas cans, cigar boxes, pool cues, and ceiling fans) for another time and place.

The readings last night focused primarily on food. Ms. Truong read from Book of Salt, her 2003 novel about a Vietnamese cook working for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Before she could begin, though, host Jim Dees inquired into her opinion on the food in Oxford. "The best thing about the veggie plate at Ajax," she said,"is that you can't find any vegetables on it. I don't really think fried okra counts."

Ms. Truong has the sort of glittery laugh that one attributes to innocent children or pyromaniacs. And, a certain evil glee did flash in her eyes as she prompted her listeners to guess the 'bad habit' hinted at by the cook in the section she was about to read. She also asked us to think about the food we ate, and who prepared it. We, the audience laughed sportingly, if suspiciously. We groaned at the first mention of human secretions, ducked our heads as she read of chefs sticking a tasting finger in each pot. One woman covered her ears. And Ms. Truong read on with a smile, enjoying every minute of our suffering.

Ms. Nguyen read from Stealing Buddha's Dinner, her 2007 memoir, now in paperback, about growing up a Mondale supporting Vietnamese-American in the All-American Reagan town of Grand Rapids, Michigan. On Oxford's fine dining, she expressed one desire above all else. "I'm looking forward to chicken-on-a-stick*." And to our disbelieving snickers, she replied. "It's chicken. On a stick. How can you say no?"

The passage she read to us concerned her fast friendship with a girl her age named, Holly, a girl that unfortunately also supported Mondale, and so wasn't that helpful in getting the young Ms. Nguyen accepted by the in-crowd.

If you're in town next Thursday, or any Thursday, swing by Off-Square around 6 and catch a show. Next week it's Clyde Edgerton and Clint Jordan. How can you say no?

*For those non-Oxfordians, chicken-on-a-stick is the culinary speciality of a corner Chevron located just past the south end of the town square.

A Literary Oddity Named John Hodgman

2008-09-11T17:51:00.000-07:00

Reader folk,

Go here: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/

Scroll down to: "Welcoming Remarks Made at a Literary Reading, 9/25/01" by John Hodgman

Read until the end.

And you thought this guy could only be funny. If you don't know who John Hodgman is, he's the PC in those PC vs. Mac commercials (See photo). He does other stuff too.

He's coming to Oxford November 20th to read and promote some of that other stuff at Thacker Mountain Radio, a local shindig composed of equal parts music and literature. Yay :)

If you're reading this after 9/11/08 and not, by chance, on 9/11/09, then you may have to google your way to the article.

That is all.

Kevin Brockmeier Interview

2008-09-09T14:28:00.000-07:00

Great news, readers! An interview with Kevin Brockmeier, author of such fantastic fiction as, The Truth About Celia, The Brief History of the Dead, and the new collection of stories, The View from the Seventh Layer, will be appearing in our next issue.

Kevin's stories weave in and out and between literary and other genres, sampling from such traditions as science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and choose your own adventure. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Fantasy, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and he's received the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), and an NEA grant. As well, he's been chosen to the be the next guest editor for the third installment of Best American Fantasy.

Check out the first chapter of Brief History of the Dead as it appeared in The New Yorker. Read his bio from the Encyclopaedia of Arkansas. Peruse reviews from the Guardian, Strange Horizons, and BookReporter.

Don't resist your obsessive tendencies.

Salutations and introductions

2008-09-09T12:40:00.000-07:00

Dear readers,

Welcome to the Yalobusha Review blog, a place to check back for YR updates, literary oddities, and the occassional rant, or song of praise, from the editors about whatevever it is that editors get excited about. Also there may be contests involving postcards or some other silly, cool thing. Stay tuned.