- Timmi Duchamp reviews the new Library of America edition of Shirley Jackson's work, edited by Joyce Carol Oates: "U.S. writers of that period often wrote in genre or borrowed genre conventions because genre allowed them to create incisive depictions of their social reality. Rather than moving entirely into genre as, say, Philip K. Dick did, Jackson adopted another strategy—that of using a pallette of genre conventions embedded in the ordinary to address what could not be tackled head-on." (We own this, btw–it's shiny.)
- Speaking of Timmi, her Aqueduct Press was featured on Omnivoracious for hitting its 50-book milestone recently. (Via Jeff VanderMeer.)
- Edan Lepucki profiles Jennifer Egan for the Millions. Egan's latest, A Visit from the Goon Squad, is the next book on my TBR after seeing too many people whose taste I trust swoon for it. Plus, I adored The Keep.
- Nora Jemisin put up a fantastic, don't miss post about inclusive world-building in advance of a Readercon workshop brainstorming session on same. This is one to bookmark: "I don’t want to do all this purely as an intellectual exercise, note. I do think that SFF’s aversion to “soft science” leads to poor worldbuilding, but more specifically I think it leads to exclusionary worldbuilding — SFF that inadvertently supports our own society’s power structure by centering white heterosexual (etc) men and marginalizing everyone else. Remember that “inclusive” part of the workshop title."
- With a lead like this one, you know it's going to be a great news story: "The flashy, champagne-loving British book fancier who walked into the Folger Shakespeare Library two years ago with what turned out to be a rare, valuable — and stolen — volume of Shakespeare's First Folio was cleared of theft but convicted of two related crimes Friday in a British courtroom." (Link via Katharine Beutner, whose blog you should be reading anyway.)
- New study finds domestic dogs are likely descended from Middle Eastern wolves, not European and Asian wolves as previously thought.
- Creatures of The Deep, aka ten more reasons I fear the sea.
- So, why have I never heard of the French secret society known as les UX? The summer issue of Brick features Said the Gramophone's Sean Michaels' piece on it.
- Cherie Priest recommends her favorite places to shop at Etsy.