The Mumpsimus

Remember the Third Bear Carnival ? Of course you do. Well, after a lot of hard work from various folks, we now can offer all of the Carnival posts, plus some new content, as a free, downloadable e-book . Thanks to the contributors, to Matt Staggs for doing the initial compilation, and to Jill Roberts and Elizabeth Story at Tachyon for making it all look great. And thanks to Wired.com for hosting the file! And don't forget -- The Third Bear is always happy to go home with you ...

photo via Shorpy.com Step right up, folks!  Dr. Eric Schaller, Prestidigator & Mime, and I, your humble host, have consulted with our oracles and soothsayers, and after centuries of deliberation, we have discovered a winner of the Win a Unique Third Bear contest .  We were amused by all the entries, and thank everyone who participated. Congratulations are due to Alys for this contribution: The Fourth Bear is always there, waiting just out of sight, around the corner, behind you, where you’re not looking, to snatch the only custard doughnut, or the last piece of pie. She hoards these things, as dragons do gold, in her den. She sleeps on a bed of stale pastry, and eats it in her sleep. Sometimes, children have mistaken her for a witch. She keeps her teeth and claws polished clean, but her fur is sticky with chocolate and cherry jam and other substances best not inquired into.  (Alys, please email me your mailing address, and I will send the book to you!)

When I came up with the idea for the Third Bear Carnival , I quickly knew one post I wanted: something by Ann VanderMeer, Jeff's wife, who first knew him as a very young and mostly-unpublished short story writer, and who was one of the first editors to publish him with any frequency.  She was Ann Kennedy back then, and it's partly the stories that put her on the path to becoming Ann VanderMeer, because in Ann Jeff found his perfect reader and his perfect love. It took a bit of convincing for me to get Ann to write about her relationship not only to her husband, but to his stories.  Ann thinks of herself as an editor and not a writer, but she sent me a contribution back in July, and I've held onto it until now.   Much as I love what everybody else has contributed to the Carnival over these past weeks, and grateful as I am to each them ... well, this one's special... Ann & Jeff VanderMeer VanderMeer Stories: A Personal Reminiscence by Ann VanderMeer The ear...

I've got one very special post saved for tomorrow, but this post will end my own contributions to the Third Bear Carnival . To bring things to a close, I recorded a reading of a very short story hidden in the Afterword to the book, called "The Magician"... (It may take a few seconds to load and buffer.) [Direct link]

The Third Bear Carnival will come to an end later this week, and in honor of that, here's a contest.  I have a copy of Jeff VanderMeer's Third Bear collection that includes a unique cartoon by Eric Schaller, drawn on 24 July 2010.  This is the only copy of this cartoon that exists, at least as far as I know (most of Eric's cartoons are reproduced in bulk by the many small, innocent children he has imprisoned in a sweatshop deep beneath Dartmouth College).  It is drawn on the title page of the book, which in all other editions is unillustrated. Here's how you can win this unique copy of The Third Bear : In the comments to this post, write a description/explanation of 100 words or less about The Fourth Bear.   (Yes, we know all about the Third Bear now, but what is the Fourth Bear?)  The deadline is this Friday, August 27, at 12pm Eastern Standard Time.  Eric and I will then consult, and the entry that we agree is most interesting will be the winne...

When deciding on whom to invite for the Third Bear Carnival , one person I knew I really hoped to convince to join us was Micaela Morrissette, because Jeff VanderMeer, Ann VanderMeer, and I had become aware of her short fiction at the same time -- when we read her story "Ave Maria" in Conjunctions 49 and immediately decided to reprint it for Best American Fantasy 2 .  (We weren't alone in loving the story -- it won a Pushcart Prize , too!)  She has since gone on to all sorts of wonderful things, including publishing an acclaimed story in Weird Tales , "Wendigo" .  My first encounter with Micaela, though, had been way back in 2005 when my story " The Art of Comedy" appeared on Web Conjunctions and Micaela helped with the layout and formatting. And now, with Micaela writing about two of Jeff's stories, it feels like we've all come full circle!  But more importantly, here are some wonderful, and wonderfully-written, insights on Jeff's work...

David A. Beronä is Dean of Library and Academic Support Services at Plymouth State University, and author of Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels . He was instrumental in helping to organize last year's "Illustrating VanderMeer" exhibit, and so I thought he might enjoy joining our carnival . David posted this piece as a downloadable document on his website , and I asked him if he wouldn't mind my posting it here as well... Two Stories from Jeff VanderMeer’s The Third Bear by David A. Beronä As part of a reviewing process that my friend Matt Cheney developed, I was part of a group each reading two stories from The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer. I chose the time when I had time travelling on a plane to read these stories. I found that a different setting (I usually read on my porch looking out over the hills in New Hampshire with the sound of birds in the background) physically took me out of my ordinary world, bound by gravity, into a unaccustomed ...

The ever-marvelous Rachel Swirsky has posted her contribution to the Third Bear Carnival , "A Meta-Fictional Diptych Relating to the Stories 'Appogiatura' and 'Fixing Hanover'" (cross-posted to Alas, a Blog ) , which could be considered, as she notes, fan fiction. Now if only all fan fiction were like this... Rebecca Salt, age fourteen, daughter of divorced middle class Jews from Long Island, was tired of being a Speller. She could still remember how things had felt before she got competitive, when Spelling was still a pleasure, when she had a sort of palpable sense of the l-u-x-u-r-i-a-n-c-e** of words and letters. She'd heard the symmetry between alphabet and language as a kind of ringing d-u-l-c-i-m-e-r, intricate and melodious. Sometimes the joy she took in words felt a-u-t-o-c-h-t-h-o-n-o-u-s, seeming to rise up in her from some ineffable, otherworldly source. Six years into the rote of shuffling flash cards in every free moment, gasping out word...

The Third Bear Carniva l continues, and will continue to continue over the next few weeks, I expect. The latest freakshow act contribution comes from Brian Francis Slattery , who offers some thoughts on "The Goat Variations" and "Three Days in a Border Town" over at The New Haven Review . Here's a taste: One of the abiding pleasures of writing books, and being lucky enough to have them published, is the way in which they have led me to discover parts of the literary world I may not have discovered otherwise. Among them is a brand of science fiction and fantasy that’s been given all kinds of labels—my favorite is the New Weird—but basically boils down to books in which many strange and interesting things happen, and in which the writing is really, really good. My running favorite author in this group, which makes him one of my favorite living authors, period, is Jeff VanderMeer, a prolific and vastly talented writer perhaps best known for his books about a f...

by Eric Schaller [This post is part of  an on-going series  of explorations through, investigations with, and inspirations from  Jeff VanderMeer's  new short story collection,  The Third Bear .]

by Eric Schaller [This post is part of  an on-going series  of explorations through, investigations with, and inspirations from  Jeff VanderMeer's  new short story collection,  The Third Bear .]

[This post is part of an on-going series of explorations through, investigations with, and inspirations from Jeff VanderMeer's new short story collection, The Third Bear .] "The Quickening" is the one story original to The Third Bear, and it's a story that fascinates me because it is entirely composed of ambiguities.  I like ambiguities in fiction -- they respect the reader by assuming an intelligent audience that wants to be an active participant in the meaning and import of the tale.  (Speaking of awareness of the audience, I should note that this post will probably make most sense to people who have read the story.  Yet another reason for you to get the book!)

  In honor of the publication of Jeff VanderMeer's new short story collection, The Third Bear , I've asked a group of writers to read a couple of stories each and create some sort of response over the next few weeks. Some of those responses will be analyses of the story, others will be personal essays, at least one will be a work of visual art, and, who knows, some folks might be inspired to create stories of their own, or poems, or movies, or stained glass windows. I've given them no limits or guidelines other than it has to be something they can either post to their own blog or I can post for them here. I will keep updating this post with links to each entry in what I'm calling the Third Bear Carnival. If you happen to have a copy of the book, or even just of some of the stories in the book, feel free to create something of your own and link to it in the comments to this post (I'll add relevant links to the main set whenever I have the chance). Many of t...