“I don’t believe in this fairy tale of staying together for ever. Ten years with somebody is enough.” Who said it? Full story »

After feeding twenty-six books into my head in thirty days, I’d like to say that I’m letting my brain decompress, but I’ll be honest: I’m still reading. In fact, I have two books going right now, Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself and Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson. I want to hit up Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and Wendell Barry’s agrarian essays, too, and I want to spend some time with David Cushman’s book on The Wilderness, Bloody Promenade. Maybe then I’ll be done. Maybe.

But there’s David Gessner’s Sick of Nature. There’s Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. There’s George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. And there’s still John Muir looming over everything, a backdrop to much of what I’ve read, as significant as the Sierra Nevadas, as significant as Thoreau and Walden.

So many books, so little time. Full story »

“There ought to be limits to freedom.” Who said it? Full story »

War may be hell, but it produces terrific literature, and “When We Walked Above the Clouds” by H. Lee Barnes is a cracker of a book.

In the mid sixties, the author was adrift and jobless in West Texas, a kid far too bright and talented to be in the circumstances he was in and too damaged and young to have figured a way out of it. To beat the draft, he enlisted in the army, and during training signed up for Special Forces, eventually ending up in Viet Nam in a mountainous outpost named Tra Bong.

Barnes tells this story straightforwardly, in pristine, laconic prose free of emotion or literary embellishments. I loved the late Hunter S. Thompson for his savage humor. But I also read him for his clean sentences—words used in a way that harnessed their full power and created a rhythm that held the reader locked in paragraph to paragraph, page to page. Barnes is not the good doctor, but he’s excellent. There is some awful good writing in here–clean and powerful.

And it is a heck of story. The camp he spent the war in, Tra Bong, was a shithole. Full story »

“The cyclops woman squints at them, those who deem themselves unlovely, and knows that no one would look at them twice in a crowd.” - “The Cyclops” by Teresa Milbrodt…

We live in an age of integration. We mainstream, accommodate, and in other ways try to make up for the cruelty of much of human history toward humans whose physical, mental, and emotional characteristics fall outside the range of that which we in our blissful ignorance have long called “normal.”

Teresa Milbrodt’s new book, Bearded Women, is the writer’s attempt to make “otherness” part of “normal” human experience. This group of stories takes human characteristics which we would normally associate with “freak shows” and weds them to narratives about “normal” human problems. It’s a brilliant conceit – and Milbrodt executes it so well that the reader finds him/herself following each story not with the voyeur’s eye to the main character’s “otherness” but with the sympathy/empathy that we would show to anyone we encountered who was struggling with problems that we’ve either faced and solved ourselves or helped friends or family members face and solve.

A few examples from the book will serve to make my point here clear:

* In “Bianca’s Body” the main character is a woman with two lower torsos – surely freak show stuff. Full story »

Teresa Milbrodt is earning a good bit of acclaim lately, and her new short story collection, Bearded Women: Stories, should only amplify her reputation. Fiction Editor Dr. Jim Booth will have a review of the book in the coming days, and in the meantime we were able to persuade the gracious but extremely busy Milbrodt to field a few questions.

Scholars & Rogues: Bearded Women presents the reader with such a wonderful menagerie of freaks – there’s a gorgon, a set of conjoined twins, a giantess, a three-legged man, a woman with a parasitic twin, a woman with four ears, a Cyclops, women with beards, and the list goes on. I know this is a wide-open question, but can you explain for our readers where all these characters came from?

Milbrodt: I have always been fascinated by people who look different or those who don’t fit in. Full story »

“Television is an invention whereby you can be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn’t have in your house.” Who said it? The answer is at the end of this post. Now on to the links! Full story »

By the time I’d finished the first third of this book, I was ready to send my review copy back to the publisher with a rude note. By the end of the second third, I had decided it might interest a few academics and overly educated Upper Eastside acquaintances. By the end, I decided buy copies to send out as Christmas presents. And of course, that is a pretty good compliment.

Let’s back up though. I began Sweet Heaven with high expectations. Essays, when written well, surpass fiction for their insight and immediacy, and the topic of this book, the various beliefs held by various groups in America, is a fascinating one. There are two hundred nations on this planet, but America is the only one founded simply because people wanted a place to believe whatever in the heck they wanted to believe. (OK, maybe Israel.) If you live in America and want to try to make sense of anything – from current events to conversations with your friends from Texas – you have to understand the variety of belief systems at play. Full story »

by Lindsay Hayes

A recent study conducted at University of California, San Diego revealed that people enjoyed short stories more when they had been given a spoiler about the ending. That’s nice, but as far as I’m concerned spoilers are still the revelation of the damned.

While some have taken this study to mean spoilers aren’t so bad after all, I have a different take. Uses and Gratifications theory tells us that people use media for whatever purpose suits them at the time. Enjoyment is far from the only use of media consumption. It’s worth noting that the participants in this study were just that – participants in a study. They were not at the local Barnes & Noble seeking the gratification of a good read after a hectic work week. Full story »

Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming. – Dr. Ian Malcolm

Mary Shelley spent the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva, Switzerland with her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their close friend Lord Byron “watching the rain come down, while they all told each other ghost stories.” Thomas Pynchon says that by that December Mary Shelley was working on Chapter Four of her famous novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

It was the challenge of writing ghost stories to amuse each other that set Mary upon the idea of a different kind of horror story – one not based in the supernatural, but in science.

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. Full story »

OK, so I got a Kindle. This is a major step, for someone who is as much of a book junkie as I am. Actually, more like a book magnet. And after decades of buying books, they add up. Especially since I’m a packrat, as Mrs W never tires of pointing out, and living in a flat with limited space, it leads to books three deep in the bookshelves, that sort of thing. Of course, there’s the occasional cull, but that just clears out space for a while that fills up again. Then there’s the feeling that while I’m not likely to read any Dan Brown ever again—once was enough—there’s still no reason to believe that a single tree should ever be sacrificed for a Dan Brown book, as Mrs W once commented. Elitist, I know, but there it is.

So I thought about this for a while, and a couple of years ago we borrowed one for a long weekend from the son-in-law, and Mrs W really liked it, but that was in the US, and for a while there the availability of titles in the UK was pretty sparse. Full story »

by Samantha Berkhead

Author: King Abdullah II of Jordan
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Inc.: New York, 2011

It seems oddly prophetic that Jordan’s King Abdullah II published his first book when he did. Our Last Best Chance, a memoir pressing the need for peace in his region of the world, was released just as Tunisia’s revolutionary uprising blazed a trail for the Arab Spring of 2011—-a wave of citizen protests washing across the Middle East, the full implications of which remain frustratingly veiled to many.

From Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf to Bill Clinton’s My Life, books authored by state leaders usually get published while they are not in the position of power for which they’re known. This trend makes Abdullah’s book all the more intriguing—-Our Last Best Chance was written and published just over 10 years into his reign. Full story »

Author: Robert Lane Greene
Publisher: Delacourte Press: New York, 2010

by Samantha Berkhead

It’s plausible to argue that lingual differences have caused more discrimination, conflict and cultural controversy throughout history than race or religion ever did. From the Hindi-Urdu bloodshed in India to the Balkan Wars, history shows that tolerance for different languages both within and without national borders is hard to find.

Robert Lane Greene, an international journalist, speaker of nine languages and M.Phil from Oxford University, takes on several interlocking topics and forges them together to show why certain people speak the way they do.

For the average nonfiction author, synthesizing millennia of politics, history and economics (among many other unlikely factors) into a simple explanation of contemporary language would be a daunting task. Yet Greene’s linguistic elucidations never become muddled or obtuse. Full story »

What is an alien? Someone not of my own species? Of my own country (cue political flatulence)? Of my own neighborhood? How about of my own planet? How have governments used UFOs? All of these were subject to lively (but short) series of talks this evening at the British Library, where tonight’s talks focused on Aliens and the Imagination. We had a pretty good line-up—fantastic, in fact: Gwyneth Jones, one of my all time favorite SF writers; David Clarke, who among other things is the UFO consultant to the National Archives here; biologist and mathematician (and science and SF writers) Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart; film director Gareth Edwards, who brought us Monsters; and writer Mark Pilkington, who also helps run the Strange Attractor blog. As usual, I thought the problem was too many people and not enough time—but these are all really interesting people, and I could have sat there all evening. Too bad there was no time at the end for the speakers to ask each other questions, or for questions from the audience.
Full story »

Bottom of the 33^rd by Dan Barry. 255 pages, $26.99, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, NY

This is a masterful non-fiction book about the game of baseball and its permeation of American society.

In particular, it describes a 33-inning marathon game in mid-April of 1981 (the longest professional or semi-professional contest in the history of our national sport) between the Pawtucket Red Sox, a Boston farm team, and the Rochester Red Wings, a Baltimore Orioles minor league club, both in the Triple-A International League.

The play-by-play description is interesting enough, but New York Times national columnist Dan Barry – one of the most skillful and talented writers currently on the national literary landscape – has made sure the recounting is much, much deeper than that. Barry has forged a hallmark of Americana. Full story »

Back to the British Library this evening for another interesting panel discussion as part of their Science Fiction series, this one on “Who owns the story of the future?” Given the extent to which we’ve seen the media get compromised by corporate ownership over the past two decades, at least in the US, this turns out to be a really good question—where do the narratives come from that we tell ourselves to make sense of the world as it is today, let alone of the future. And one that people seem to be interested in, given that it was literally a full house. Part of that may have been the fact that two of the speakers were William Gibson and Cory Doctorow, who have clearly thought about these issues in some detail. Plus, they’re old hands at this sort of thing. The other panel members all looked just as interesting, all being writers on what the future may or may not hold.

First, Mark Stevenson has written An Optimist’s Tour of the Future. And economist Diane Coyle has just published something that is sure to go on my reading list—The Economics of Enough (reviewed here by Fred Pierce). I haven’t read any of these, I have to say, so this was a bit of an adventure—going to talks with people you’ve never heard of can be a dicey proposition. On the face of it, Coyle appears to be genuinely frightened of what the future might hold, whereas Stevenson, I imagined, might be pretty chipper about things, a representative of the Matt Ridley view of the world.
Full story »

The good folks over at the British Library, bless their hearts, are having a substantial exhibit that starts today on science fiction—Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it. This looks great, and it has barely opened. As part of the show, there will be, as is usually the case with any British Library show, a series of events, ranging from talks by interested parties and scholars, to films, to musical events —including George Clinton.

The talks look excellent, and if this evening’s was any indication of how these will go, I expect to have a really good time attending some of them and providing updates. This evening’s session, with the same title as the exhibit but the subtitle “Why Science fiction speaks to us all,” had a stellar line-up: Erik Davis, China Miéville, Adam Roberts, and Tricia Sullivan, all moderated by Sam Leith, the former literary editor of The Telegraph. Full story »

So Saturday was World Book Night. It was actually an all day thing for most of us, and really started Friday night at Trafalgar Square. This was a big deal—giving a million books away free. What a great concept. I stumbled across this a couple of months ago, I can’t even remember where—probably on one of the SF writer blogs that I hit regularly. So I went and signed up to give away books, free, to anyone I felt like—friends, neighbors, complete strangers. There was a list of 25 books, selected by a panel, and I picked one of my favorites—Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I love the idea of this. Yes, it’s probably at root some marketing thing from the publishing industry, but, at the same time, I don’t care. Just the idea of giving one of your favorite books to someone you know or don’t know, and not knowing what the reaction will be. Full story »

photo credit: Deborah Copaken Kogan

When physicists realized most of the universe was missing, they suddenly knew they had a major problem on their hands—the biggest problem imaginable, actually.

Problem was, they hardly even know how to imagine it.

They started looking, using a series of ultra-sensitive experiments. One of them included a set of data-gathering devices buried deep beneath the bedrock of northern Minnesota in an abandoned iron mine. The devices fed their data into a computer system, and teams of scientists around the world gathered together to look at the results simultaneously.

“The time had come to look inside the box,” writes author Richard Panek.

The data revealed two dots. But those dots didn’t represent periods punctuating the conclusion of their scientific search. Indeed, each dot more accurately resembled the dot at the bottom of a question mark: Why can we only account for about four percent of the universe? Why can’t we find the rest of it? Full story »

So on Saturday I wandered over to Imperial College, because the student science fiction association was putting on its annual fest, Picocon, complete with invited writers. And I really wanted to hear Paul Mcauley, of whom I am a fan. I don’t know how many Americans have hung out at Imperial, but it’s the functional equivalent of hanging out at MIT or Cal Tech. Now imagine the kids there who read lots of science fiction, and you’ve got the idea. The day went well, except for, well, the other writers, of whom there were two. Each give a little talk for an hour, and Mcauley’s was the most interesting–writing a novel backwards. He described how he came to write his two most recent novels–The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun (both highly recommended). What he did was start out looking at all those great pictures of Saturn’s moons that were being sent back from the Cassini Solstice Mission. So Mcauley started wondering how could people live on these moons? Full story »