November 2011
28 posts
forthcoming Angela Carter bio →
omg. so excited.
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Ivy Compton-Burnett
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Present and the Past by Ivy Compton-Burnett. I’ve been a sentence fetishist since I was young, and I never imagined sentences could be both crabbed and spectacular until I discovered Compton-Burnett via this book, which is still my favorite of hers. Her prose was a major discovery for me, and I wish I could relive that first rush of...
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an adventure
The other day I wanted to make Facebook tell that Andrew and I are engaged, so I went and changed my stuff to that on Facebook, and then something terrible happened. Apparently it checks with the other person? He’s supposed to confirm it? Like it’s any of his business? So I waited a minute and thought he’d confirm instantly, but meanwhile this status update went out that said...
“One of the ways I can tell that Patti Smith was born to be a writer is that even the saddest memories seem to fill her with joy. She talks about how after her brother died, all of his best qualities seemed to be transferred directly into her—his affable warmth, his openness. She became his walking elegy. This is not nostalgia. It is the mark of someone who understands that beauty has...
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I finished Survivors! Such a weird show.
Reading cast interviews. From Carolyn Seymour, who played Abby:
”I thought that Survivors was the perfect time to start introducing real feminism. I think we desperately needed a strong woman. She was indeed strong on many levels just because of what she was doing but there were other areas where she was always deferring to the men and I...
Catherynne Valente news
From her blog: “I have an essay collection coming out (sometime) in 2012 (probably) from Mad Norwegian Press (the kids who brought you Chicks Dig Time Lords)! … The collection will be called Six-Gun Snow White, and will contain blog material as well as talks and essays I’ve done for various projects and events. Some new pieces, too. Folklore, fairy tales, science fiction and...
BOOK CELLAR BLOGCELLAR: E-Reader Demo at The Book... →
bookcellar:
Confused about your new Ipad? Nook? Sony Reader? Kobo? Pandigital Novel? Whatever device you own please join us at The Book Cellar as we conduct an e-reader workshop and discussion! Bring your e-reader and leave empowered with knowledge!
Please do not bring your Kindle. The Kindle is a…
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free stories, nerds
You can read two stories online from Maureen McHugh’s awesome collection After the Apocalypse: The Naturalist and The Kingdom of the Blind.
If Tolkien were black →
Salon article on black writers of high fantasy. I haven’t read either of these writers, but I’m pretty interested in reading N. K. Jemisin (Tish read her first book in the series and was really into it). She was the writer guest of honor at the ThinkGalactic con, and in one discussion I attended on the politics of fantasy she was really likeable and smart and funny.
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Kelly Link on Joan Aiken
“There’s such a variety of approach, of genre,” Link writes. “She’s a generous writer—her stories are always spilling over with other stories, bits of liveliness and mess—and she’s also bloody minded. That’s a great model.”
Aiken might be hard to categorize—not exactly fantasy, not exactly Gothic, not exactly literary. Which makes her a good fit for Small Beer, as they are...
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Hanne Blank
“Women and fat people, and fat women specifically, are browbeaten literally from toddlerhood with the threat that if their bodies and appearances are not “good” then they will not be sexually desirable, valuable, loved—a whole spectrum of things that have been constructed as things that validate human, and especially female, worth.
The supposed erotic worthlessness and...
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Racialicious has a list of SF web series with POC... →
WatchWhen I saw the headline about Bil Keane, my heart broke for Lynda Barry. The way she talked about his comic made me see it a whole new way.
thenearsightedmonkey:
I was a kid growing up in a troubled household. We didn’t have books in the house but we did have the daily paper and I remember picking out Family Circus before I could really read.
There was something about the life on the other...
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