Rosamond Purcell, aka my favorite living photographer, has a new book coming out (with an introduction by Bernd Heinrich, no less). The pub date is October, but Amazon’s listing it in stock already. And Egg & Nest sounds divine:

The beauty of the robin’s egg is not lost on the child who discovers the nest, nor on the collector of nature’s marvels. Such instances of wonder find fitting expression in the photographs of Rosamond Purcell, whose work captures the intricacy of nests and the aesthetic perfection of bird eggs. Mining the ornithological treasures of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, Purcell produces pictures as lovely and various as the artifacts she photographs. The dusky blue egg of an emu becomes a planet. A woodpecker’s nest bears an uncanny resemblance to a wooden shoe. A resourceful rock dove weaves together scrap metal and spent fireworks. A dreamscape of dancing monkeys emerges from the calligraphic markings of a murre egg.

Alongside Purcell’s photographs, Linnea Hall and René Corado offer an engaging history of egg collecting, the provenance of the specimens in the photographs, and the biology, conservation, and ecology of the birds that produced them. They highlight the scientific value that eggs and nest hold for understanding and conserving birds in the wild, as well as the aesthetic charge they carry for us.

Purcell will speak and show slides on Oct. 7 at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

No, not here, over at John Crowley’s blog. In the comments section to one of his posts, he responds to a commenter:

I do allow as how the Evanescent Universe actually more easily admits of a creator (or Creator) than the old rocks-and-stones one, though the rocks-and-stones and made-of-mud one is where a lot of believers in a Creator reside. As to the necessity of a creator I am still unconvinced. God remains for me the Name of the Reason Why there is Something and not Nothing, and the rest is silence.

Don’t expect this kind of high level philosophical debate around here, kids.

Jeff VanderMeer has solved this whole "how to write a novel" problem:

Okay, I’ll admit it: work on my new novel, Finch, is going well because every morning my long-suffering yet often amused wife Ann hides the router box and my cell phone. I get up around 7am, I have my breakfast and watch something innocuous like BBC News or Frasier for about half an hour, and then get down to work. Around noon I take a break to get some lunch, then go back to it, usually at that point editing or organizing notes. Around 2:30 I call Ann on our landline and she tells me where the router box and the cell phone are (it has internet access on it) so I can finish up the afternoon with necessary emails and other work, before going to the gym.

Hee.

Ed has done a truly wonderful job of celebrating this fabulous writer, and lamenting the fact that he’s left this planet far too soon. See his own remembrance, and those he collected from others yesterday (including me). (Skip the first entry, or feel your stomach turn, but the others are lovely.)

Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia:

"The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. A first love teaches you how to be with another human being by choice, rather than out of the imperative of blood ties. If we are lucky, our first love shows us how to negotiate the paradox of entering into a union with someone who remains fundamentally unknowable. First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.

"The meeting of author and reader has a similar soul-shaping potential. The author who can make a world for a reader–make him believe that the people, places, and events he describes are, if anything, truer than his real, immediate surroundings–that author is someone with a mighty power indeed. Who can forget the first time they experienced this sensation? Who can doubt that every literary encounter they have afterward must somehow be colored by it? If we weight the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children’s books suddenly turn up very high on the list."