Today, the mail brought me my contributor's copies of Lovecraft Unbound, in which matociquala and I appear in the excellent company of Caitlín R. Kiernan, Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates, Laird Barron, Amanda Downum, and many other excellent persons, all under the aegis of Ellen Datlow. Our story, "Mongoose," is set in the same universe as "Boojum" (because that universe is seriously the Best Toy Ever) although it is not a sequel or otherwise related.

Also, I love the book design and its cunning use of fonts.

This is Banned Books Week. Banning books seems to me so self-evidently wrong that I don't actually have anything to say on the subject. Except, hey. Support intellectual freedom. Read a banned book.

Last Drink Bird Head, a collection of flash fiction, the proceeds of which go to ProLiteracy, is available for pre-order. I'm in Last Drink Bird Head, along with a really astonishing plethora of cool people (Gene Wolfe! Peter Straub! the full list of contributors is on the ordering page); my contribution begins as follows:

Their names don’t translate.

We can look at the symbols of their language, and we can identify
them.

Last.

Drink.

Bird.

Head.

We can open the doors with our machines, and we can investigate
what we find: the dust, the bones, the leathery remnants of skin, the
stains of spilled blood.

They were oxygen-breathers, like us.

Today is the release day for Amanda Downum's first novel, The Drowning City. Amanda (stillsostrange) is a friend, so I offer a woo-hoo! and a flailing frog to her. Also, though, I read The Drowning City back in March for blurb purposes, and enjoyed it immensely*, so I commend it to your attention as a book worth picking up.

---
*Here's what I posted then: The Drowning City takes place in an entirely imaginary city, Symir, which is a point of conflict between the Assari Empire (I suspect the echo of "Assyrian" is not accidental) and its reluctant rain-forest vassal state of Sivahra. The plot involves spies and necromancers and ghosts and demons and a volcano; it's fast-moving and a lot of fun, and it's very well-written. In particular, the magic system, with its combination of the esoteric and the absolutely down-to-earth, fills me with utmost delight.

For those of you still trying to find a copy of The Virtu: as of yesterday, Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore had two paperbacks left in stock (along with copies of all my other books). Also as of yesterday, the two paperbacks (and the other books) are signed.

If you're interested, email the store at unclehugo (AT) aol (DOT) com.

Closer to the publication date of Alaya Johnson's novel Moonshine (coming out from Thomas Dunne Books in 2010), I will post a review. For now, I just want to gloat unbecomingly about the fact that I got to read it early.

::gloats::
::unbecomingly::

This post is as much a PSA as anything else: two publishers, Sourcebooks Casablanca and HQN (otherwise known as Harlequin), seem to be in competition to reprint Heyer's books. The funny thing is, it's very difficult to tell one from the other. Trade paperback, similar palettes, similar fonts (the fonts they use for GEORGETTE HEYER are almost indistinguishable), similar choices wrt cover art: oil paintings of Regency people. Sourcebooks is using better quality paper and has eschewed the dodge of "foreword by NYT bestselling author!"--and doesn't have ads for their other books in the back, either, which I confess counts as a win in my estimation. Sourcebooks is also making a serious effort to reprint Heyer's historical novels (i.e., all the ones that aren't category romances) and mysteries, which means that I finally, finally have a copy of The Unfinished Clue that isn't literally falling to pieces in my hands. So, yeah. PSA. If you're looking to complete your Heyer collection, or to replace books in bad condition, now is a really good time.

The Black Moth and Black Sheep are the two Heyer romances I have never previously been able to find. (You may imagine my glee in the dealers' room at Penguicon when I discovered them.) They make an interesting pair, and not only for the color motif in their titles.

The Black Moth is Heyer's first novel, famously written to entertain a convalescent brother when she was seventeen, and if the book as published is what she wrote as a seventeen-year-old, she was magnificently precocious and should possibly be canonized as St. Georgette, patron of teenage writers.

( The Black Moth: spoilers--also discussion of These Old Shades and Devil's Cub )

---

( Black Sheep: spoilers--also discussion of Lady of Quality )

Downum, Amanda [stillsostrange]. The Drowning City. New York: Orbit Books, in press.

Fox, Daniel [moshui]. Dragon in Chains. New York: Del Rey-Ballantine, 2009.

---

These are both books that were sent to me in hopes of getting a blurb, and they're both going to get one. What I wanted to say here--aside from recommending both of them--is a comment about how diverse the possibilities are in the genre of secondary world fantasy. Both of these books take place in imaginary worlds. Both reject default-fantasy-Caucasianism. Both are excellent. But they could not otherwise be more different.

The Drowning City takes place in an entirely imaginary city, Symir, which is a point of conflict between the Assari Empire (I suspect the echo of "Assyrian" is not accidental) and its reluctant rain-forest vassal state of Sivahra. The plot involves spies and necromancers and ghosts and demons and a volcano; it's fast-moving and a lot of fun (apparently, it's easier for me to read mysteries than other kinds of plots), and it's very well-written. In particular, the magic system, with its combination of the esoteric and the absolutely down-to-earth, fills me with utmost delight.

Dragon in Chains takes place mostly on the island of Taishu (which is Taiwan in a deliberately minimal disguise) and has dragons and emperors and all kinds of magic. It is written with intense and exquisite attention to language, so that I spent most of it breathless with admiration. It is very much about the effects of "great events" (in this case a rebellion which has hounded the emperor to Taishu) on ordinary people( very mild spoilers ). It is an elegiac book, and at the bottom of it all waits the dragon.

As I said, these are both excellent books, and aside from the fact that they happen in imaginary places, they could not be more different.

This is my genre. No wonder I love it.

1. Today is the launch day for Catherynne M. Valente's Palimpsest. If you want a taste, the short story from which the book came is here. Also, because Cat is seriously made of awesome, there is a trailer:


2. The vendetta of the universe against black-footed ferrets continues. First it was poisoned prairie-dogs, then plagiarism, and now plague. The ray of hope here is that the giant gerbils of Kazakhstan may help save them.

No, you read that right. The giant gerbils of Kazakhstan.

3. buymeaclue has a beautiful post about what horsemanship is. Hannah's posts regularly make me wish I had the time and the money and the guts for serious equestrianism, and this one is no exception. "There is a crack in everything," Leonard Cohen says. "It's how the light gets in."

4. Yesterday, matociquala induced an epiphany in me re: John Bellairs and The House with a Clock in its Walls.

5. ursulav makes me hurt myself laughing on a regular basis. This entry is an excellent representative sample. Also, it reminds me to hope that these pit bulls are continuing to prosper.

One of the things graduate school did to me was annihilate my ability to read. For quite a while, that meant all I did was reread Dorothy Sayers, Georgette Heyer, Emma Lathen, and M. R. James (and there's a bridge foursome you weren't expecting--fivesome, really, but we'll assume that Emma Lathen would play tag-team bridge). Then I started to be able to read nonfiction again (deeply ironic in and of itself, since previously I'd never been very interested in nonfiction, and now I'm addicted). But the ability to read new fiction has been elusive. It comes back occasionally, in fits and spurts, but it never seems to last. Sometimes I can overcome it to do critiques for friends, but frequently, as several of you know to your exasperation and despair, I just can't. It's not that I don't want to read fiction; stories have been my abiding love since I was but a wee precocious sproglet. But it's felt like asking myself to deliberately whack my thumb with a hammer.*

But I think I've figured out at least part of the reason why.

Right now, I'm trying to read Dragon in Chains by Daniel Fox. It was sent to me in hopes of a blurb, and I want to give it one, because the writing is just jaw-droppingly beautiful, and I love the central conceit. But I've stalled out halfway through.

( I'm going to try not to be too spoilery, but just in case-- )

I want to emphasize that this problem is not a flaw in the book. Because it isn't. The book isn't doing anything wrong here; it may even be doing something deeply right. But I am failing miserably to force myself to keep reading in order to find out.

The problem is that I seem to have gotten stuck on a mezzanine. On one level the story is a story, and you read about things happening to people. On another level, the story is a set of narrative functions and apparatuses, and you read the operations. And I seem to be stuck reading on one level and investing on the other. That is, I invest in the story as if the characters are people, but I'm reading the operations manual, where they are narrative functions. And it becomes too frustrating and too . . . threatening? discomfiting? I don't quite know the word I want--too uncomfortable to keep reading when the narrative functions indicate that something is going to happen to the characters that I don't want to see.

This is unbelievably schizoid. And I'm not sure there's anything to be done about it. But at least I have at least part of a handle on what's going on.

---
*Yes, that infinitive is split for a reason. Putting "deliberately" anywhere else in the sentence throws the emphasis off.

Freud is such a problem.

Partly this is because he was right, and partly it is because he was grossly, irredeemably wrong. Oftentimes in the same essay. And partly it is because his disciples and intellectual descendants have reified his ideas, transforming them from theories into universal truths. (Not that Freud himself did not contribute to that tendency with his pontifical--in fact, patriarchal--stance.)

And any truth Freud has to offer is most assuredly not universal.

But that doesn't mean he isn't thought-provoking and it doesn't mean he can't be illuminating. It just means you have to approach him with caution and an independent mind.

Case in point: I started reading Frederick Karl's biography of Kafka, Franz Kafka: Representative Man: Prague, Germans, Jews, and the Crisis of Modernism and very shortly thereafter posted a plaintive call for better biographies. Happily, perverse_idyll suggested Ernst Pawel's The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. I haven't finished Pawel yet, but I've found an oddly illuminating point of comparison which I think will demonstrate why I found Karl unreadable and Pawel compelling.

First, from Karl:
( this is where I started yelling )

Compare with:
( the analogous opening move from Pawel )

( And then I go on talking for a while )

---
WORKS CITED
Karl, Frederick. Franz Kafka: Representative Man: Prague, Germans, Jews, and the Crisis of Modernism. 1991. New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1993.

Pawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1984.