The Mumpsimus

The Library of America has just posted a Fritz Leiber story, "Try and Change the Past" , online. If you've never read any Leiber , now's as good a time as any to start.

My latest Strange Horizons column has been posted, this time a celebration of Fritz Leiber's centennary . I mentioned last week that I needed to come up with a title for my Strange Horizons columns. Through much of last week I was fighting off the worst illness I've had in years, so perhaps the title is simply the product of fever, but nonetheless, now in a less fevered state, I like it: Lexias . It keeps to the pattern of the other columnists (Scores, Diffractions, Intertitles, etc.) in being a single, plural word. And it seems mostly accurate to my project, if you think of the word as Roland Barthes used it in S/Z : "a series of brief, contiguous fragments ... units of reading" (Richard Miller's translation). (For more on Barthes, by the way, this is an interesting site .) But for my purposes, "lexias" is fun, too, because it is the term Samuel R. Delany picked up (from Barthes) for  The American Shore , which can be described as a book-length...