Hangovers

• Maria Tatar at Slate on "Fairy Tales in the Age of Terror."
• Alan DeNiro, rapmaster, posts the TOC for his collection Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, forthcoming from Small Beer in the spring. (Yay!)
• Ben Rosenbaum and Ted Chiang‘s shorts for Nature are online. (Via Didi.) And the Shortform Community at LJ has a more complete list, including links to Hiromi Goto, Kim Stanley Robinson and Nalo Hopkinson’s contributions, among others.
• Oprah invites live and breathing authors to her show again, starting with James Frey. (Via Annie at Maud’s.) I’m thinking I heard good things about the Frey; perhaps O’s taste is getting better*. Update: Once again, let us bow before The Onion’s wit.
• Copies of Laila Lalami’s book Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits are appearing in stores. Buy!

*Which is not to succumb to the argument that she doesn’t usually pick good books, just to say that there are some pretty banal choices in that list alongside the Marquez.

• Over at the new and improved Strange Horizons review section (which has an RSS feed even), Greg Beatty praises Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller. Oh, but this is a lovely book. Everyone who wants to understand science fiction as a community will want a copy. Many people who want to become professional writers, or better writers, will also want copies, and that’s because this book blends two genres. On one hand, it is a memoir. In these 190 pages of honest, often poetic prose, Kate Wilhelm recounts the story of how the Clarion Writing Workshop came to be; the many struggles she, Damon Knight, Robert Scott Wilson, and a host of other dedicated teachers, administrators, and volunteers faced; and the lessons they learned along the way in close to three decades of shaping Clarion into its present form. I’m really looking forward to reading this one.
• Weather Underground in Rita watch mode, and Ed has some invaluable link gathering. Too horrific to contemplate.
• OGIC reveals her LBC nomination, the last one for this round. Discussions and author appearances to come. If any of the books look like your kind of thing, read along and participate in the discussion weeks. (Or just participate!)
• Cory Doctorow points to new James Patrick Kelly goodies on the web: Periodically, Jim goes into a studio and records himself giving spellbinding readings of his stories, which he then releases gratis on the Web, under a Creative Commons license, with a tipjar for donations to pay for more studio time. Jim has just posted three more stories: "The Edge of Nowhere," "Barry Westphal Crashes The Singularity" and "Proof of the Existence of God (And an Afterlife)."
• Carl Zimmer at The Loom on puzzles and creationism. (And he reveals that his brother is a consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary, which seems like one of the coolest jobs In The World.)

• The National Book Festival will be held Saturday in Washington, D.C. The Washington Post is hosting online author chats all this week. You can find a schedule here.
• I think it’s a sad commentary on the state of our world that bourbon even needs to advertise on television.
• Anne at the Vertical blog chooses her favorite MacArthur winner — sound historian Emily Thompson; who’s yours? Meanwhile, the Old Hag points out that every photo on this page is "unintentionally hilarious."
• I keep forgetting to mention that the third issue of Jason Sizemore’s Apex is now available.
• Michael Chabon pulls negative blurbs from reviews of his books. (Via Moorish Girl.) A gem on Wonder Boys from Time’s John Skow: "Some of this is worth a smile, some a raised eyebrow, but let’s agree with Chabon’s publisher that he has actually written his third book."  
• Another LitBlog Co-op nominee revealed — this one from our favorite Happy Booker.
• Which John Cusack are you? (Via the Cinetrix.) I was David Shayne from "Bullets Over Broadway."
• The Monarchs won ! Yay!