Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/29

Every week, I make a post on Monday morning to list the books that came in the mail the previous week. Some weeks, it's a lot of books, and I'm happy but a little overwhelmed. Some weeks, there are no books, and I'm vaguely sad (from not getting free things, oh poor me) but also chipper from the added free time. And some weeks, it's in the middle.

This, then, is a Baby Bear week. Maybe the most Baby Bear-iest of weeks possible, because I only have one book to write about.

I'd like to say that means I can take more time and really tell you a lot about this book, but, sadly, I don't actually know that much. You see, this is a collection of short stories set in a bunch of the author's fictional worlds, none of which I've ever read about before.

Perhaps I should say what the book actually is.

Brandon Sanderson is prolific and inventive, so it's not a big surprise that a number of his ostensibly-separate fantasy worlds have a deep connection. His new book Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection collects nine "short" (mostly novella-length, I think) stories set in the worlds of six of his fictional universes, including the Stormlight Archives, Elantris and Mistborn.

Again, I haven't read any of those series, so I don't even know if this everything-is-connected idea is new or if old-time Sanderson fans are all thinking "of course it's all connected! That's his thing!"

But Arcanum Unbound is a big fat collection of Sanderson, including one brand-new Stormlight novella and a long Mistborn story that I think was only in electronic form previously. And it's coming from Tor on November 22nd. I'm sure many of you will be happy about that, even if I can't tell you anything meaningful about who's in what story and how they connect to their respective novels.