The Mumpsimus

  After posting my thoughts on Michael Snyder's new biography of James Purdy, I got questions from friends who were interested in this writer they had never heard of and wondered where to start. Here, then, some quick recommendations... First, I don't think you can really go terribly wrong by just picking up whatever work by Purdy happens to be most easily available to you. He had plenty of range as a writer — more than he is often given credit for — but though I have not quite read all the novels, I have yet to feel there's a big range in quality there, with some novels great highs and others terrible lows (I think the range of quality in his short stories is bigger, as well as his plays; I have not read enough of his poetry to judge that yet). This makes recommendations easy, because if you like one Purdy novel, you will probably like them all to some extent, and if you dislike one Purdy novel, there's a very good chance he is not a writer for you — though it's a...

I saw an article at World Literature Today 's website called "Fun with Your New Head: Getting into SF" , and thought, "Hey, this'll be great — they probably have a good list of science fiction from around the world and resources for people to find out more about world SF. I love it when that happens!" Sadly, no. Writer Michael A. Morrison instead says reading William Gibson's first two novels is hard, so here are a bunch of critical studies of SF that you should read. This is perverse. And it is not helpful. Do not listen to this article, or at least any of it before the final paragraph where The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction is mentioned. That's a perfectly good introduction , though weak on work from the last 10 years. What a failure for a magazine called World Literature Today! SF is not just stuff published 30 years ago and then written about by academics. Really, it's not. I promise. And I say that as somebody who writes ab...

The busiest shopping days of the year are coming up soon, which means a couple of people out there might be looking for good books to give as gifts. Here are some that have delighted me over the past year and thus are on my list to give as gifts for readers looking for intelligent and entertaining reads: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Vol. 1: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson. This is simply an extraordinary novel, regardless of the fact that it's being marketed as a book for "young adults". It's one of those books I'll probably always try to have extra copies of, just to give away whenever I encounter someone who hasn't read it. My favorite novel from last year, The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia, is now out in paperback . I loved the hardcover just for its shape and weight and design, but the paperback has preserved most of the interior design, and so now an inexpensive and easily-available copy is ready for a whole new batch of readers...

My favorite benefit so far of being series editor for the upcoming Best American Fantasy is getting to read things I wouldn't otherwise know about or have ready access to, including a wide variety of magazines generally considered part of the literary mainstream. Inspired by these two posts from other bloggers, I thought I'd highlight a few that I have been looking through recently -- not an exhaustive list by any means, but rather a little sampling. Agni is a magazine I used to subscribe to, but because I try to scatter my subscriptions, I let it go, and now I regret it. I haven't read a recent issue, but I have enjoyed some of the web-only content they've posted, and I expect the journal itself is as varied and high-quality as I always found it to be. I know I'll spend a day at the library catching up with this year's batch of fiction, in case there's something appropriate for BAF , and I look forward to it. Gargoyle is a genuine find, a journal I ...