Hangovers

• Sara Gran (whose Dope I’m really looking forward to reading) has been writing a series of excellent posts telling the circuitous story of her book Come Closer. And, in tandem, much of her career. The first post is here.
• Booksquare hosts Joan Kelly talking about her wild expectations that her first book’s publication might get her laid. Or at least bring back some ghosts of the past. (This is a great post.)
• The Magazine Reader is amusing this week; on killing Cargo and the foibles of the press’ generation fixation.
• Theresa Duncan uncovers some lovely money.
• Another one for the blogroll: BibliOdyssey. (Via Meghan.)
• Good posts over in Justineland. (Pssst… Read the comments.)
• Adam Gopnik on the Gospel of Judas.
• Michelle Richmond on Borges.

Four pieces to write today, a little bit of procrastination beforehand.

• Geoff Ryman on Cambodian writers in the Guardian. (Must get a copy of The King’s Last Song.)
• James Sallis loves Timothy Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile.
• The NYT rounds up some bloggy responses to Naomi Wolf’s "expose" of trashy-sexy YA and Mr. Westerfeld and Ann at Fernham get the royal treatment. Yay!
• The glam-trash story of Pete Doherty. Wow. What a waste of cells (me = hated The Libertines). (Via the fab Theresa Duncan.)
• Solomon vs. Saunders. Yep, Saunders wins.
• Hank Stuever visits a strip of doomed gay clubs in D.C.
• John Klima announces that he’s sold Juliet Ulman at Bantam an anthology of stories based on words that have won spelling bees. The list of contributors he has lined up is fabulosity. Congratulations, JK. (Spelling bees are the new hot thing, it seems. Just ask him.)
• A mismatched sock store. (Via the excellent Literaticat.)

• Why am I inexplicably awake at 3:30 and still at 4:30? Please tell me if you know.
• Justine got Boing-Boing’d.
• Strange Horizons is spending the week reviewing Justina Robson novels. Serendipitously.
• Salman Rushdie writes a new introduction for Midnight’s Children 25 years later; on what happened after it sold: I quit my part-time copywriting job. (I had moved on from Ogilvy & Mather to another agency, Ayer Barker Hegemann.) “Oh,” the creative director said when I tendered my resignation, “you want a rise?” No, I explained, I was just giving notice as required so that I could leave and be a full-time writer. “I see,” he said. “You want a big rise.” (Via Moorish Girl.)
• Cave art = teen boy graffiti? No word on what this means for the first draft of history. (Via Bookninja.)
• Erin comes up with a disaster kit for the rest of us.
• Daniel Olivas interviews Luis Alberto Urrea over at TEV.
• This story just keeps getting weirder.
• Andrea Seigel reads between the lines of the first review of her new book To Feel Stuff.
• Oh dear, the cat’s playing with the light socket. I wonder if he does this every night…

• Curtis Sittenfeld in the NYT on the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia. She had me at Napoleon’s penis.
• A new issue of Lone Star Stories is up, featuring work by Catherynne Valente, Jeff VanderMeer and Sarah Prineas, among others.
• Margo Lanagan on fiction that endures: "I’m sure there are writers who think they are writing for posterity. Well, maybe we all are, but we can’t do anything more than create the archives of the future. And whole archives get burnt at once, you know? Everything, even what we think of as greatness now, is disposable. Just because it’s of high quality doesn’t mean it’s going to last better. If it doesn’t get burnt or shredded, or rot away, people of the future can just decide not to look at it."
• Bookforum piece on Dorothy Parker’s unusual friendship with Lillian Hellman. Via Maud.
• Claire Light on fashionable phrases not to use in your writing.
• WFMU got 150 people to "cover" a poem from Todd Colby’s collection and the results are online. Publishing magnate Richard Nash has the details.
• I am addicted to The Wednesday Chef.

Stuff I (mostly) didn’t get around to linking last week. (And I’m STILL woefully behind on email.)

• Popular Science article on preserving snowflakes, via Jeff Ford, who discusses just how right he was about this in Mrs. Charbuque.
• Oh boy, do I want this book.
• I’ll be linking a few of the exponentially muliplying 10 things I know about writing/publishing/life/misc lists. My favorites: Holly Black’s, Meghan McCarron’s, Justine Larbalestier’s, Greg van Eekhout’s, Rarely Likable’s and Elizabeth Bear’s.
• And Claire Light on simultaneous subs and the vast world of lit journals.
• Celebrity scents eau de surprising in a Slate piece written by Theresa Duncan.
• Also via Ms. Staircase Wit, Wesley Stace, aka John Wesley Harding, names his favorite books for adults about children in the Guardian.
• Two items of note from The Watcher: Veronica Mars moving soon to Tuesdays for rest of the season and special online episodes of The Office planned for summer.
• RIP Stanislaw Lem.
• I love this post by Maud from last week. In a week of a lot of notable posts about writing from many, many quarters, this is my favorite. It’s all about the habit of art.

• The day I friended F&SF.
• Colleen raves about Joe Hill’s collection 20th Century Ghosts, which I’ve heard uniformly fantastic things about (and the one story I have read, I loved for how utterly creepy and clever and insidery it was). Hill just won the William L. Crawford Fantasy Award at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts.
• Matthew Cheney rightly praises the recent fiction published by Strange Horizons.
• Chance Morrison reviews Firebirds Rising and sees a lack of cohesiveness to the anthology, but her takes on the individual stories leave me excited to read it anyway.

• Octavia Butler Clarion Scholarship. Kameron Hurley at Brutal Women has all the details.
• An NPR Science Friday panel held in 2004 featuring Octavia Butler, David Brin and Lawrence Krauss. (VIa Morrow Planet.)
• A lovely miscellaneous post at Liza Palmer’s Conversations with the Fat Girl. More inspiration. (I may just steal that Jack London snippet.)

• You enjoyed her smackdown, now go read Meghan’s new story "The Flying Woman" at Strange Horizons.
• Colin Greenland, novelist and husband of Susanna Clarke, gives Margo Lanagan’s Black Juice an excellent review in the Guardian.
• Colleen Mondor riffs off my new novel soundtrack post with an excellent post about writers and inspiration. (Dan Eldon, yay!)
• Justine recommends two books in my TBR stack.
• Meanwhile, Scott is busy discovering interesting TV on the Internet.
• Elizabeth Bear on not being afraid to own your myths.

Four little hangovers:

• This picture makes me love Astrid Lindgren Award for Literature winner Katherine Paterson. (Via TEV.)
• Jeff Ford‘s new collection The Empire of Ice Cream has apparently started shipping and Jonathan Strahan lists the TOC (I’ve read most of these stories and they’re all fabulous — this and Alan DeNiro‘s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead are THE must-have collections of the year, word).
• Jeff rightly questions why the DVD release of Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus is getting so little attention. Jim White = sure to be interesting. Doubters can go back in time and read Dana’s review from when it was first born.
• Another Christopher Rowe or is someone moonlighting?

• The secret history of the flying carpet. (Scroll down.) (Via the returned from hiatus Jeff Ford.)
• Listmixer, via Bud Parr; I’m not entirely sure I’m organized enough to use something like this, but it’s an interesting idea. Basically, it takes a bunch of things you bookmark to read later and keeps the links for thirty days (or more) and you can browse at leisure.
• Font reveals personality. (Via Bookninja.)
• Toni’s cat is really smart. (Yes, I realize it’s slippery slope linking to other people’s cat stories on the internet, but it’s a funny, funny story.)
• The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. Lots of good stuff here, including a little book called Garner, which you should read, and Karen Fisher’s A Sudden Country, which comes highly recommended by Karen Joy Fowler, she of impeccable taste. The YA list is also full of good stuff, including the top three Printz books and a couple of others from translation that look dead interesting.
• Great pulp, paperback, advertising and pin-up images. (Via Pooks.)
• Lauren on the Roe V. Wade for men debate.
• Hedda Gabler adapted with robots. (Via Maud.)
• Matt Cheney reproduces his nonrealist fiction presentation from AWP.
• Rebranding adult fiction for the YA market. (Via Bookninja again.)
• Newish, fabulous online comic Married to the Sea.