The Mumpsimus

As of a few weeks ago, all of Shirley Jackson's novels are now in print in the United States, thanks to Penguin Books. (UK editions of some are scheduled for March.) I noted in July that this was scheduled to happen, and I fully intended then to write all about the novels individually, but that hasn't yet happened. (I still plan to do so as soon as possible, but the whole getting-a-PhD thing is a bit of an obstacle at the moment.)

I've been reading Jackson's work for most of my life, but finding copies of any but her most famous books has always been difficult — and in the case of Hangsaman, nearly impossible unless you wanted to shell out a lot of money for an old copy. When the Library of America announced they were putting together a Shirley Jackson volume a few years ago, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, I had high hopes that it would include at least one of the lesser-known novels, but it didn't. Yes, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Cas…

I was remiss in not noting the book release of my friend and comrade Jeff VanderMeer's new novel, Annihilation, the first volume in the Southern Reach Trilogy, to be followed by Authority and Acceptance later this year. It's getting lots of good press, great reviews, and wonderful support from its publishers. (You can read the first chapter here, if you're curious.)

I was stunned this morning to learn of the death of Stuart Hall, one of the great intellectuals of our time. Stunned not because it was entirely unexpected — he was not in the best of health, and had mostly retired from public life — but simply because it feels strange to live in the world after Stuart Hall.

It's entirely likely that you have never heard of Stuart Hall. His fame, particularly outside of the UK, is mostly related to a specific academic field (cultural studies) and his work has not been as well collected and disseminated as it deserves. I was late to his work, learning of it only when I began my master's degree (in cultural studies), and at first I couldn't see its significance — a lot of what he said seemed tied to specific events, specific moments, and many of the ideas he considered were, I assumed at first, part of an academic past that was no longer relevant. His sentences tended to be complex, his vocabulary and range of references even more so. But s…

The start of a new term and then a huge computer disaster caused me not to post a link here to my review of Nnedi Okorafor's first short story collection, Kabu Kabu, which Strange Horizons recently published. Here, for anyone who missed it and is interested, it is. The first paragraph, to give you a sense of it all:
Nnedi Okorafor's first short story collection begins and ends with tales that evoke histories and challenge orthodoxies. "The Magical Negro" liberates an unfortunate cliché of fantasy fiction to go his own way, and so plants a sign in the narrative ground to let us know that these journeys, though fantastical, will seek some roads less traveled. "The Palm Tree Bandit" (first published here at Strange Horizons in 2000) reconfigures a different sort of mythos, shaking up the cartography of West African folktales to open some paths for women to play around with symbols and tools too often reserved for men. Both stories are narrative manifestos, fic…

Last night, viewers in the US got to see what viewers in other parts of the world have already seen: the first episode of the third season of the phenomenally successful BBC show Sherlock. I've already seen it — twice, in fact — because I enjoyed previous seasons of the show enough to work around the BBC website's geographical limitations and watch the episode when it first aired, and then I saw it again at a local cinema's preview showing, where my friend Ann McClellan gave a presentation on Conan Doyle and Sherlock. I've also seen the other two episodes of the season, watching episode 2 twice and episode 3 once.

Recently, I watched the 13-episode first season of NBC's Hannibal, based on Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter character, and I've been thinking about certain overlaps and significant contrasts between the two shows in their approach to their material. The comparison first occurred to me after I re-watched the first episodeof Sherlock in preparation…

I'm perfectly aware of always being on the move in relation both to the things I'm interested in and to what I've already thought. What I think is never quite the same, because for me my books are experiences, in a sense, that I would like to be as full as possible. An experience is something that one comes out of transformed. If I had to write a book to communicate what I'm already thinking before I begin to write, I would never have the courage to begin. I write a book only because I still don't exactly know what to think about this thing I want so much to think about, so that the book transforms me and transforms what I think. Each book transforms what I was thinking when I was finishing the previous book. I am an experimenter and not a theorist. I call a theorist someone who constructs a general system, either deductive or analytical, and applies it to different fields in a uniform way. That isn't my case. I'm an experimenter in the sense that I write …

I don't want to be the cancer guy. I want to be the sci-fi guy. ... One of the things I realized almost out of the gate, literally the second day I was in the hospital, was I'm not going to get very much that's good out of this experience, maybe get to keep my life for a while, so I may as well make something of it that will help other people.
—Jay Lake In all of my recent reflecting on 2013, I neglected to mention one of the most powerful and educational bodies of writing that I read through the year: Jay Lake's blog posts on his experience with terminal cancer. (An index to early entries is here. See also: "A brief user’s guide to this blog".)

While Jay refers to these posts as "cancer blogging", which is entirely accurate, at some point I began to think of them by another name, conflating them with the title of a book by Audre Lorde: The Cancer Journals. The word journal also evokes the word journey, and that's what it feels to me Jay has…

Today, Open Road Media releases e-book editions of a number of Samuel R. Delany's best books. I've had the chance to look at the Kindle edition of Dhalgren, and it's really excellent. Indeed, it looks to be the most accurate text, incorporating the corrections to errata in the Vintage editions, which were, until now, the most accurate.

The other Open Road editions (which I haven't yet seen) are: Babel-17, Nova, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, The Motion of Light in Water, and the four Nevèrÿon books.

Strange Horizons has just published a collection of short notices from reviewers about what they read and viewed in 2013.

I thought there were too many good things in 2013 for me to be able to even simply list them all in the 250 words I was allowed, so I decided instead to focus on the writer who had, to my knowledge, the best 2013: Richard Bowes.

The other entries are also fascinating, so it makes for a great reading list.

Thinking back on 2013 after I wrote my previous post looking back on the year, I realized I left two important books out that would have been there if I'd remembered they were 2013 books — for some reason, in my mind, they were 2012 books.

The first is Kit Reed's extraordinary retrospective collection The Story Until Now. In a great year for story collections, this was among the absolute best.

The other is the second published and translated volume of Reiner Stach's eventually 3-volume biography of Franz Kafka, Kafka: The Years of Insight, translated by…