- Please visit The ED SF Project and sign up to write an appreciation of a story published on SciFiction. More info there or in the post below this one. Meanwhile, Jonathan Strahan makes his own Best of Ellen Online list.
- Gothamist interview with the always fabulous George Saunders. (Via the always fabulous Margo Lanagan.)
- I keep forgetting to say how much I loved Cecil Castellucci‘s new book The Queen of Cool. I am now utterly spoiled and will become tyrannical if I don’t get to read a new book by CC every year. I’ll have more to say about this one closer to its Valentine’s Day release date. For now, I’ll just nudge you again to read Boy Proof if you haven’t.
- New Huruki Murakami story, "The Year of Spaghetti," in the New Yorker. (Via the Rake.)
- Wish list lurking at Tingle Alley.
- Maud Newton has the goods on the letters of response to that big Harper’s essay about experimental fiction. She quotes Sherman Alexie’s:
Does Ben Marcus, educated at NYU and Brown, employed by Columbia, and published by Anchor, Vintage, and Harper’s, truly believe that he is an excluded experimentalist? Does he honestly believe that Jonathan Franzen, educated at Swarthmore, once employed by Harvard, and published by FSG and Harper’s, is somehow more elitist? Or is Franzen the populist? Or is a populist elitist? Is there really much difference between Marcus and Franzen? This East Coast – East Coast Literary Rap War reminds me of the Far Side cartoon in which a lone penguin, suffering in a crowd of millions of exactly similar penguins, rises and shouts, "I just have to be me!"
Sherman Alexie
Seattle, Wash.