Getting the Links Out

I had lots of April Fools things planned, but ended up spending the day judging the New Hampshire Educational Theatre Guild's State Festival, helping to choose two plays out of thirteen to go on to the New England Drama Festival, and it just wasn't quite the right place for joking around -- "And the winner is X! [Pause.] April Fools!"

Locus Online did published their annual April Fools news items, though, with news about space tourist Barry Malzberg, "adult" Star Wars novels, a new publisher for prolific writers, the lies in Jack Williamson's memoir, the SFWA Grandmaster Award, and corporate sponsorship of the World Fantasy Award.

Ed Champion posted a bunch of April 1 literary news, some of which even overlaps with certain of the Locus Online pieces -- "Harlan Ellison's Anger Lost" and "Joyce Carol Oates: 'I Will Write No More'", which should probably not be taken as an indication that Whime Press's hopes of publishing Oates's unpublished novels are dashed, because Oates has enough material stashed away to continue publishing two books a year for the next ten at least.

The new issue of SF Site is up, and includes some April Foolish fun by Jeff VanderMeer: "Lost Books Resurrected", with good news about the lost works of Milorad Pavic, Bruno Schultz, Alasdair Gray, Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, Cormac McCarthy and Angela Carter. The issue also contains a bizarre interview Jeff did with the folks at Payseur & Schmidt. Not related to April Fool's Day, though I expect some people wish it were, is my review of Gregory Frost's Attack of the Jazz Giants and Other Stories, in which I am curmudgeonly about short story collections in general and this one in particular.

And now for some links that I've been saving up and have nothing to do with April Fool's Day...

• Samuel Beckett's 100th birthday approaches, and lots of events are happening, and a gazillion articles have been pouring forth. The Irish Times has some good ones, including a story of Beckett and Buster Keaton in NY and John Banville on Beckett and visual art.
  
  
• TTA Press has put a PDF of Will McIntosh's fine story "Soft Apocalypse" online. This was one of my favorite Interzone stories from last year.
  
  
• A profile of Copper Canyon Press
  
  
• "I had never seen any of [Beckett's] later plays staged before, and their intense physicality -- the rigor not quite mortified poses of the bodies, the harshness of the lighting on the faces -- cannot even remotely be rendered by reading alone. Here, 'live' theatre regains its power precisely by subtracting the 'living' and the 'theatrical' -- the shrill mugging of theatre acting is replaced by the stasis of bodies assuming the unvitality of the catatonic."
  
  
• Alasdair Gray has a blog.
  
  
• Contemporary Indian writing: the end of exoticism? (via Amardeep Singh)
  
  
• Profanity (specifically, the F word)
  
  
• Gabriel Josipovici on Jorge Luis Borges