I’m home with some sort of truly nasty crud, currently watching an episode of the A-Team on Sleuth, which bears the following description: "The team works from a pub to stop a loan shark from terrorizing small businesses; guest Wings Hauser." (The commercials they show on this network are terrible, sad and funny.) Next I’ll watch Rosie on The View. A few things:
- Liza Palmer has ended her fabulous personal blog, but will still be posting at The 5 Spot group blog. I linked to Liza as recently as yesterday, so this makes me sad. But let’s hope there’ll be more writing advice and Poet pictures anyway.
- Matt Cheney on why we should all be happy that about Michael Palmer winning the Wallace Stevens award. After reading several of his exceptional poems here, I’m convinced.
- Justine divulges the secretest secrets of how to write a novel.
- Niall Harrison with a whole bunch of links related to Slipstreamy goodness and debates thereof. Meanwhile, Graham Sleight continues Strange Horizons slipstream-themed week of reviews with a look at The Vintage Book of Amnesia, edited by Jonathan Lethem, which came out in 2000. This is one of my favorite anthologies and my only quibble with Sleight’s review is that it doesn’t mention Shirley Jackson’s "Nightmare," one of my favorite stories in the book (and of Jackson’s). (But I’ll grant that it’s far too rich an anthology for every story to get its due; especially when how these stories might speak to definitions of slipstream is the main concern.)
- Take the Fantasy or Football? quiz. (Via Rarely Likable.)
Now I go back to collapsing. Emails I owe you will come soon. Promise.
GREAT link to Justine. Just yesterday I posted about the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten. I had to update my post once I’d read Justine’s secrets! Thank You!
Feel better!
Thanks for the link. Re Jackson, I like that piece too, but I somehow have a slightly shaky sense of her as an author – I’ve read lots of her stories in anthologies, and _The Haunting of Hill House_, but I don’t feel I have an overall handle on what she’s trying to do. Hence me skating past that one.
(That said, if there was ever an archetypal slipstream story, it’s Jackson’s “The Beautiful Stranger”.)
Oooh, yes on “The Beautiful Stranger.” Jackson is one of those few writers who I would unequivocally recommend tracking down everything she wrote. (Not that I’ve read it all yet, but I haven’t been disappointed to date and I’ve read a lot.) She’s just amazing. (I think of her the way a lot of people think of PKD, maybe.) We Have Always Lived in the Castle is one of my favorite novels. I’m still trying to track down a copy of her nonfiction book on witchcraft. And to bring this back around to the original topic, here’s an old review by Lethem when a bunch of her short fiction was published for the first time in the late ’90s.
Sharing the Jackson love. About her nonfiction book: are you talking about this YA one, or something else?
That’s the one; have you read it? I tried to get it from the library here, but it had been stolen and not replaced.
I think I actually read it as a (witchcraft-obsessed) kid, but at the time I had no idea who Shirley Jackson was, and only just now made the connection thanks to your post. Cool.
Brilliant Football/Dune quiz. I got 4/10.