Two really well done reviews of the new volume of Interfictions are out.

First one from Strange Horizons:

If anyone else feels like we’re still drowning in slipstream—or, rather, drowning in definitions of slipstream—this follow-up to the 2007 anthology Interfictions certainly won’t offer any easy answers to the question of what’s been going on lately with all this genre-bending stuff. What Interfictions 2 does offer is a set of stories that, if united by only the most tenuous thematic and generic threads, couldn’t be more worth reading. Indeed, the folks at Small Beer Press and the Interstitial Arts Foundation have once again produced an enormously rich anthology that takes an almost manic diversity for its guiding principle, not so much in order to provide something for everyone, but seemingly to include something from just about everywhere.

Read the whole review, which is long and very detailed, and thus cool), by clicking here.

Second review from Charles Tan at Bibliophile Stalker:

Of course I don’t read interstitial fiction for interstiality’s sake. At the end of the day, I ask, did I enjoy this story, and did the form suit the function? In the case of Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, it’s a resounding yes. There’s no bad story here, and only a few are what I consider barely above mediocre. A lot are standouts and favorites (although not the “best of the best”) such as “The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper” by Jeffrey Ford, “The Beautiful Feast” by M. Rickert, “The Two of Me” by Ray Vukcevich, “Black Dog: A Biography” by Peter M. Ball, “Child-Empress of Mars” by Theodora Goss, and various other authors that I’ve never heard of (making this a doubly pleasant read). And when it comes to agenda, as Jetse de Vries pointed out, there’s a couple of “international writers” (whether by descent or actual nationality) in this book and one only needs to read their stories to affirm how richer the book is for their inclusion, as opposed to simply being a token presence. (The Anglophone presence is also great.)

Read the whole thing by clicking here.

Great to see readers responding to the book so quickly.  Keep ‘em coming!

“Despite everything, I believe people are good at heart.”

I’m so glad Anne Frank could believe this.  It’s a testament to her own goodness.  It is not a testament to human nature itself, though.  It tells us more about Anne than it does about ourselves.

I don’t believe it.  I don’t attribute my disbelief to my own goodness, but to what I have seen of humanity, including what was going on around Anne, after the fact, and would like to say, You know what?  People are still very eager to do away with other people who are not like them.

Anne, you are a beautiful star.

But people? In general?  They are not.

When we are exceptional, when we see those unlike us as ourselves, despite our differences, THEN we are as beautiful as Anne.

When we are unable to do that?  We are ugly, inhumane, and disturbing.

I speak about this in relationship to the writing of fiction.  Is it worthwhile to speak of that which is good about us?

It is.

But there is a stronger push against, a resistance, to writers who speak about our ugliness, that which is disgusting in human nature.  And the more we resist it, the more I wish to represent our ugliness.

It should not be forgotten.

It should be the thing about which we are most uncomfortable.

It should be the thing we talk about more than anything.

Until we have done away with it.

Then, let us speak of our goodness, as Anne would.  But when our goodness has been won, an earned virtue.

Okay, we can speak  of our goodness, which we would not want to lose.

But not at the expense of acknowledging that which comprises our darkness.

Otherwise, we are living within an ideal, what we would like to think about ourselves, not about reality.

And even when we write fantasy, we should be speaking to reality.  The reality of the story.

Otherwise, we are making ourselves feel good about ourselves without reason.

Earn it.

That’s all.

Earn it.

(AP) Several squirrels are barking at each other outside my upstairs window like military personnel.  If any of them turns out to be the jerk who was living in my attic a year and a half ago or so, and if he’s planning to launch a new attack, there will be war.

Just sayin’.

I hereby repeal my obviously premature congratulations to the state of Maine, which I gave out all too naively this past May.

Now, instead, I’d like to say good luck to those Mainers who want a better, inclusive, love-supporting culture in which to exist for their and their children’s futures.

I feel sorry for everyone, even for those who voted in the spirit of exclusion and inequality.  I really do think they don’t understand what they are missing.  They see their decisions as a protection and defense, but all they are defending are walls that separate people, rather than unify.  When they’re able to coexist in a mature manner with people who are unlike them, perhaps then Maine will be ready to be a better place, and a better people as a whole.

It’s not really Maine specifically, though, and I’m disturbed by all of the Twitterers and Facebookers and other online social groupers who are taking their disappointment and disgust out on Maine alone.  This is really how the majority of the United States still feels on the subject.

There is still a lot of work to be done.  And even if all of the U.S. acknowledged the rights of gay people to marry, there would still be problems with the culture’s general destructive nature towards LGBT people.  After all, look at what’s occurring in Merry Olde England, where gay marriage is legal.

Changing the law is one thing.  Changing a culture is another.  Of course changing the law is the beginning of something.  But it’s the first step on a long road to come.

The second volume of Interfictions releases today, and just tonight I learned that the anthology has been selected by Amazon.com as one of the top 10 SFF books of 2009!

You can see the whole list by clicking here.

I can’t wait to hear what readers think of the selection of stories Delia and I pulled together.  I think the book has great range.

Happy reading, if you give it a go.

As mentioned in a previous post, I did an interview with the lovely Jamillah Knowles of the BBC this past Sunday about the second volume of Interfictions, which I co-edited with Delia Sherman, and now it’s available as a podcast.   Here’s a link to it, but, just so you know, it’s a conglomeration of subjects she’s covered. My interview comes in around just over the halfway mark, if you want to skip ahead.

Happy listening.

The other night, pre-viral infection, I was in a bookstore and was stopped in my tracks by a book I’ve looked at too many times in too many similar covers:  Wuthering Heights.  It was face out and had a beautiful cover design, full of color, with a Tim Burton-esque rendering of Cathy on the front cover.  I took it down off the shelf to see the wraparound from back to front, a whole landscape of the book done in the same style really, and was really toying with the idea of buying the book just for that cover.  I put it back, though, and then suddenly, five minutes later, found myself stopped once again, this time by another stunning cover on another classic standard, The Scarlet Letter.  Quickly I began to search the shelves to see how many others had been designed this way, and the only other one that I discovered was Pride and Prejudice.  All of them had been designed by fashion designer Ruben Toledo through Penguin Classics.  You can take a look at them by clicking this sentence and visiting a website that has more info on the designs, but really, come back and tell me what you think of them. Am I crazy for loving these new spins on familiar novels?  Or are they refreshing, as my own instincts and sensibilities decree?  I have a feeling they’ll be that sort of thing where people either love ‘em or hate ‘em.

Sort of like how people are reacting to the movie Paranormal Activity.

Oh heck, why don’t I make use of that nice polling function wordpress offered a year ago?

And while we’re at it, why not another?  (I’m starting to feel like my friend Chance, who holds regular polls on her livejournal). This one about Paranormal Activity, which I did manage to see.  Uh, I guess if you haven’t seen it, there is a spoiler in the poll, so just a warning.

Now back to recovery.

An article from the NYT on the rise of teenaged runaways over the past few years, as the economy has worsened. It’s sad and, for me, recognizable.  One of the things I encountered every now and then when I was going around reading from my first novel, One for Sorrow, after its release a couple of years ago, was the occasional reader who would come up to me afterward to say how much they liked the book but found something about the running away that the narrator, a fifteen year old from rustbelt Ohio, slightly fantastical.  I would laugh because it has ghosts in the book, but it was the very real event of running away that felt at a remove for these rare but present readers.  For me, it was something I’d seen over the years in and around this region of Ohio, as the loss of industry grew to a devastating level, and families no longer able to support themselves sometimes began to implode under economic pressure.  Kids ran away from trouble that brewed at home in those conditions.  Here it is, a bit more evident, apparently trending as more places feel the pinch.  It’s sad stuff, but it’s good to see it being recognized for what it is here.

I hate being ill.  When I am, my body feels like a foreign country.  A foreign country that’s been taken over by a hostile imperial army.  My head feels like my feet, as if I use it to move myself around from place to place.  I sigh a lot, and linger on bad memories.  I am reduced to feeling like a child, powerless and confused.  And all this just from a low fever and aching muscles and bones.

Obviously, I am ill today.  And complaining from my bed.

I was at a book launch party last night.  My friend Rochelle’s father recently published his own father’s journals that he kept as a young lawyer in Youngstown during the Great Depression.  It is in fact called The Great Depression: A Diary, by Benjamin Roth.  The book has received a lot of attention in places like the New York Times and the Washington Post, etc.  It’s a timely book, and I’m looking forward to reading through the eyes of someone who was alive during that period of our history.  The party was fun:  good food, good wine, good conversations.  I came home and went to bed well-fed and slightly giddy.

Then woke this morning and felt only slightly hesitant to get out of bed.  I tried to sleep a bit more and finally did, and then woke later in the morning so that I could do an interview over the phone with a lovely English journalist who will be podcasting said interview on the BBC on Tuesday, I believe.  It was about the new volume of Interfictions.  I was a bit scattered.  By then,  I was starting to realize that the fogginess was not outside my window but in my head, and that the minor aches that had kept me in bed for an extended sleep were getting worse.  I don’t think it’s the swine flu, as it feels minor compared to the symptoms people have described with that.  I’m drinking lots of fluids and vitamins and eating a bit, though I don’t feel like it.  Mostly, though, I felt like Bridget Jones after that interview.  Silently self-deprecatory.  Let’s hope after editing, an illusion of being coherent will be achieved.  Otherwise, I imagine legions of people in the UK will wonder how I manage to get from point A to point B in my daily life.

Haven’t managed to be able to concentrate on other work now either.  Instead, surfing the internet for entertaining bits and pieces to see me through the day.  If you’ve got anything good to watch/read/listen to while ailing, please send links!  I have a feeling that, unless this is a quiet sort of 24 hour thing, I will be needing them for the next day or two.

Otherwise, a busy week ahead of me.  Illness is also untimely.  There should be federal regulations on this sort of thing.

Author Nicola Griffith has blogged a call to action, which you can find here, in regards to a woman dying in the hospital whose same sex partner and children were not allowed by law to see her or receive any updates on her condition.  The hospital was later sued and the state awarded the hospital the win.  Complete insanity, complete and utter discrimination, all made somehow legal.  A woman died alone without the ability to see her loved ones, her children, because she was a lesbian.  That’s it, that’s all.

As another writer, Jeffrey Ford, states in his blog, “I’m sure many of those enforcing this law think themselves “good Christians,” but that’s the problem with too many Christians these days — they know all the dogma but forget about Christ’s most important message — Compassion.  There were also those involved, no doubt, who let the stupid Law grind itself out because they couldn’t think through to the point of how heinous it is.  I didn’t see anything about this case on the news — just endless stories about the publicity stunt with the kid in the UFO.  Sometimes I just get disgusted with America.  The open and government sanctioned persecution of gays in our culture shows us at our absolute worst.  Here we are in the 21st century and this situation, instead of getting better, is a Civil Rights crisis.”

Go read Nicola’s blog first, then blog about this crime yourself.  Yes, that’s what it is:  a criminal act justified as legal by an unfair, discriminatory legal system.