Linkdump

Lots of things out there to cause you to leave here:
  • Some new unbooked blogs: Dracula Blogged and This Date, from Henry David Thoreau's Journal. I got the links from The Little Professor, who discusses them briefly, with some good ideas and questions about how they work and why. She's put up a lot of good posts, recently (including a review of Dozois's latest Year's Best Science Fiction).

  • Speaking of a lot of good posts recently, the academic group blog The Valve has been opened wide and spouting great ideas and discussions over the past week. There was John Holbo's post about John Crowley, and Crowley showed up to join the discussion in the comments. John Holbo then had an interesting piece on "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Pulp". And Ray Davis on "The Liebestod of the Author", with a fascinating anecdote about a Kate Wilhelm workshop at Clarion. And Miriam Burstein (the aforementioned Little Professor) on academic prose.

  • Wheatland Press has updated their website! You can now pre-order a bunch of upcoming anthologies (and need I remind you yet again that TEL: Stories includes a reprint of Greer Gilman's "Jack-Daw's Pack"? Your life, mind, and claims on humanity are impoverished without it, you know...) Last year's Polyphony 4 placed stories in a bunch of Best of the Year collections, including the upcoming Best American Short Stories, and is currently nominated for a few World Fantasy Awards. There are also new limited edition hardcovers of the Polyphony anthologies, signed by all contributor, and with a new introduction and a new story in each.

  • George Saunders has a new story at The New Yorker: "CommComm". I can't resist quoting the beginning:
    Tuesday morning, Jillian from Disasters calls. Apparently an airman named Loolerton has poisoned a shitload of beavers. I say we don't kill beavers, we harvest them, because otherwise they nibble through our Pollution Control Devices (P.C.D.s) and polluted water flows out of our Retention Area and into the Eisenhower Memorial Wetland, killing beavers.

    "That makes sense," Jillian says, and hangs up.

    The press has a field day. "AIR FORCE KILLS BEAVERS TO SAVE BEAVERS," says one headline. "MURDERED BEAVERS SPEAK OF AIRFORCE CRUELTY," says another.
  • A profile of Kelly Link & Gavin Grant, the people behind Small Beer Press. There are some little inaccuracies in the article, but it's nice to have a peek behind the scenes. (via Dave Schwartz)

  • Simon Callow on the 50th anniversary of Waiting for Godot.

  • A conversation with John Irving and Stephen King. Maybe title it Men with Plots.

  • Doug Lain on how to get published today.

  • John Quiggin at Crooked Timber has an excellent question:
    ...one vision of the future disturbs me. I was reading Charles Stross' Iron Sunrise ... set in the 24th century, and he introduces a character who had inherited the masthead of The Times and announced his profession as "warblogger".

    I don't really suppose our little virtual community is going to last a thousand years, or even 300, but just in case, can't we find some way to agree on a better name than "blogger"?
  • Derik Badman at the great MadInkBeard weblog has been writing a lot recently about comics.

  • Old, weird movie posters. (via Scribblingwoman)

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