Hangovers

• Your email’s next, as soon as I finish up reading a friend’s fabulous novel draft and getting her feedback. Pinky swear!
• A gift from the universe: Chris McLaren’s Special Rice.
• Lacy doubts the true existence of "insomnia."
• The LA Times best of list is the, ahem, best I’ve seen so far, with lots of books that probably won’t make it on many others. And I’m not just saying that because I’ve read some of them.
• Michelle Richmond and Dan Wickett are on the Robert Clark Young case; he wrote the New York Press hatchet piece on Brad Vice.
• A September Publishers Weekly article on the potential differences between publishing books as YA and adult. (I stick by my recommendation of Looking for Alaska instead of Prep.)
• The 2006 Bodhisattva Big Board of books, definitely worth perusing and jotting down a good portion of for your own reading list. (Thanks, Christopher!)

• Books picked up at the library: 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley (which I picked up on a blog rec, but I can’t remember whose), Mister Boots by Carol Emshwiller, and Birdwing by Rafe Martin. I won’t even get into my pre-existing TBR stack; suffice to say it is mighty. Maybe I’ll do a list this weekend. SO much good stuff I want to be reading right now RIGHT NOW. The book I am reading right now is pretty wonderful and definitely science fiction, but it’s also an LBC candidate so no talking about it yet…
• Jennifer Weiner with a very moving entry about her dog’s worsening condition. While reading, I held my breath the entire time. I’ll spoil you: for once, this has a happy ending. He makes it. (Or a bittersweet one, anyway, since he’s still sick.)
• Rick Moody responds to Tito’s account of a public event where he and David Foster Wallace interviewed each other (or something like that). I found his comment charming and honest.
• Cynsations with some excellent thoughts on critiquing first drafts.
• O.G. Octavia Butler* on the Bat Segundo Show. Find out why she hates Survivor.
• Matthew Cheney on reading and his reaction to Dave Marusek’s Counting Heads (which, frankly, I can’t wait to read). Check out the comments as well.
• The impeccably tasteful Lauren Cerand points to a pair of delicious shoes and immediately inspires a desire for them. (Size 9, good samaritans.)
• I covet Coffee and Ink’s thing number three: My ultimate goal is world domination through book recommendations.
• David Moles condenses the reaction to Ted’s magic vs. science post.
• Bigfoot? Via BoingBoing.
• Have a great weekend.

*Original Genius

• Real posts again someday soon,as soon as I put this book to rest.
• Borders recently announced their Original Voices picks for the year. The YA category in particular has a couple of titles I highly recommend: Andrew Auseon’s Funny Little Monkey and John Green’s Looking for Alaska. (Via GalleyCat.)
• Go download the new version of Firefox.
• Jimmy Beck boils the bad sex nominees down to their essences (magically rendering them even funnier in the process). "Yo. Watch where you point that thing." Kills.
• Susan Orlean is the first writer up in Powell’s new project to have authors guest blog for a week. (Via Pinky’s Paperhaus.) Pinky points out that Orlean’s first post is, charmingly, about every writer’s favorite sin procrastination.
• The Lannan Foundation awarded writer Gilbert Sorrentino its Lifetime Achievement Award yesterday. The fabulous Coffee House Press has brought out several of his recent books.
• The end of year issue of BoldType is out and looks full of good stuff.

• MetaxuCafe is a new litblogging network created by Bud Parr of Chekhov’s Mistress. Looks like a neat resource for keeping up with the lit world and all the fabulous new litblogs created every other day. Plus, it has a lovely design.
• Cecil Castellucci and Jen Sincero will perform their show Spinster at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn on Tuesday, December 6. See details here.
• Le Cineclub with Lauren and Emma on Walk the Line, which they give three peonies. (I’m still thinking about the movie, which I enjoyed a GREAT deal, and I think one of the things I like most about it is how Southern a version of the Johnny and June story it is — it seems to me a sort of cleaned up, "oh, we were so wild back then" version of a much messier story in just the sort of way that the family history of your wild child great aunt or uncle gets tidied and embellished at the same time in Southern families. No matter how fucked up anyone or any situation was, it’s always redeemable as anecdote with a spit shine and a happy ending. And, of course, everyone looks fabulous and the music, well, that goes without saying.)
• Maud Newton on the Jefferson Market Branch Library’s history. She also posts a short piece about not writing Southern by Robb Forman Dew (whose The Truth of the Matter is very close to the top of the TBR and was recommended highly by a friend with impeccable taste).
• Tod Goldberg requests your best of lists, best of whatever you want.
• Mea culpa: I’m shamefully behind on email. Really, it’s hard to even apologize with a straight face at this point. It’s not personal, it’s being personally overwhelmed with Stuff to Do. I’ll get to your message soon. Promise.

• Margaret Cannon at the Globe and Mail names the best mysteries of the year according to her and includes the utterly wonderful The Girl in the Glass by Jeff Ford and The Power of Three by Laura Lippman which has been in my TBR stack for ages now.
• Writers name their faves of the year in the Guardian. (Via Colleen.)
• Didi calls attention to a discussion about the Hugos and fantasy.
• The buyer for the hometown bookseller gets quoted in the USA Today article about growth in SF and F book sales (with the emphasis on the F) that’s making the rounds. (Via the Mumpsimus.)
• Jennifer Crusie on writing a synopsis. (Via Patrick.)
• Pinky’s Paperhaus takes on the Goldberg Brothers.

• Jeff Ford puts up his story "Bright Morning" about a writer cursed to be "Kafkaesque": If there’s one thing that distinguishes my books from those of others, it’s the fact that in the review blurbs that fill the back cover and the page that precedes the title inside, the name of Kafka appears no less than eight times. Kafka, Kafkaesque, Kafka-like, in the tradition of Kafka. Certainly more Kafka than one man deserves — a veritable embarrassment of Kafka riches. My novels are fantasy/adventure stories with a modicum of metaphysical whim-wham that some find to be insightful and others have termed “overcooked navel gazing.” Granted, there are no elves or dragons or knights or wizards in these books, but they are still fantasies, none the less. I mean, if you have a flying head, a town with a panopticon that floats in the clouds, a monster who sucks the essence out of hapless victims through their ears, what the hell else can you call it? At first glance, it would seem that any writer would be proud to have his work compared to that of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, but upon closer inspection it becomes evident that in today’s publishing world, when a novel does not fit a prescribed format, it immediately becomes labeled as Kafkaesque. The hope is, of course, that this will be interpreted as meaning exotic, when, in fact, it translates to the book buying public as obscure. Kafka has become a place, a condition, a boundary to which it is perceived only the pretentious are drawn and only total lunatics will cross. Read the whole thing.
• Do cats cause schizophrenia?
• Birnbaum vs. Himself.
• Coffee and Ink lists a number of books she’s looking forward to. Me too.

• Wonderful, in-depth WaPo article on the head of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and his long-term spy and sabotage campaign against a writer who said his father was in the closet in an article.
• Jenny Davidson reviews Paul Collins new biography of Thomas Paine for the Village Voice. (She also posts her favorite poem about marmosets.)
• Anne has a new FITT report over at the Vertical Blog.
• If anyone out there has access to the NYTimes’ select content and wants to email me Jonathan Lethem’s piece on Italo Calvino, you’d be my favorite. (GWENDA007ATGMAILDOTCOM) Thanks!
• Rosemary Graham on pink book covers in YAland. (Via Cecil.)
• The WaPo reviews Ray Kurzweil’s new book on singularity, providing a pretty good primer on the subject.
• Also in this week’s BookWorld, Walter Mosley on the importance of politics and poetry in novels.

• Colleen Mondor writes compellingly about why Walter Dean Myers should have won an NBA. (Where did the time go? I haven’t read any of the books that were nominated in the children’s category this year, but I plan to start with Autiobiography.)
• Alan DeNiro passes on a press release related to dragon rights. Ahem.
• Jimmy Beck goes poetically smoke free in response to this.
• Good luck to Mark on the Tour de Tuscon! Mark’s chronicles of his training this year have been nothing short of inspirational. Bicycle racing = very hard.
• Twenty Questions with Tom Perrotta at Post Road magazine. (Via the Rake.)
• The Vertical blog is back after a vicious hijacking.
• Kameron Hurley ruminates on meaning in work.
  
• Keep looking in on the ED SF Project, where new appreciations are being posted all the time. Yay! (And, um, sign up for a story if you haven’t already.)
• Walk the Line. Yeah.

• 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.

Hey all, once again here I am with the Friday apology for sparse, crappy content this past week. And once again, I pledge to do better next week. There will be tumbleweeds here over the weekend, likely; it looks to be busy. Tonight we’re off to a sold out Loretta Lynn show, for which I’m told we have awesome seats. Tomorrow night, the refurbished, limping, zombie-like write club meets. The gym must be gone to, as my limbs feel like they are filled with sand from a week(ish) of gym avoidance. And somewhere in between I have to finish the book and write a new story to turn in at Christopher’s class on Wednesday night. (Did I mention I have no idea whatsoever for the story? Lemurs, anyone?) And I really will answer all that email I’m so offensively behind on this weekend. So, yeah, busy. I’m sure y’all are too. (Oh, and I’m starting to get very excited about the big Thanksgiving this year.)

• A study of the effectiveness of tin foil helmets. (Is there anything cuter than a geeky boy in a tin foil hat?) (Thanks, Christopher!)
• A thread on post-apocalyptic literature, something for which I have a soft spot. Add your own suggestions. (Via Ed, I think.)
• Michelle Richmond on the lovely junk mailness of the new McSweeney’s issue.
• I am totally coveting Colleen’s bookmail this week. AND she has fabulous taste. You’re reading her, right? See also: her guest recommendation at Moorish Girl.
• Another excellent post from Japan from Mr. Barzak. (Although, I really, really wish you were going to be here for Thanksgiving — we will call again, sir.)
• I really want to see the new Johnny Cash movie and Shop Girl. Why are they not on here yet?
• Reasons Why I Love the SF Tribe No. 102: Because our dust-ups can actually involve debates about whether venom cock appears in the finished text.
• (updated) Sigh: Arrested Development canceled.