Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/17

I still wish the SFF folks were sending me more books --after so many years at the clubs, I only feel as if things are cosmically right when I have to open many, many packages full of paper and grey fluff every week -- but there's plenty enough this time for me to ramble on about.

For instance, first this week was Thomas M. Disch's The Word of God, which is...well, that's hard to explain. In 2005, Disch, annoyed about things in general, declared that he was God. (Not in the "thou are God" sense, but in the "YHVH, creator of the universe" sense. No, I wasn't aware that was possible, either.) And The Word of God is his memoirs as God.

If I were still at my last job -- which I am not -- I'd be jumping all over this. The clubs used to sell piles and piles of somewhat blasphemous speculative stories, starting of course with Stranger in a Strange Land (which we never counted) and going through Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter, Parke Godwin's "Galactic Bus" books, and the very silly God The Ultimate Autobiography. (We used to joke about doing a "blasphemy flyer," printed on a brain brown-paper wrapped, but never quite got around to it.) Tachyon is publishing Disch's theogony in July in trade paperback.

From Del Rey Manga, here is something I didn't think existed: a one-volume manga story. Haridama: Magic Cram School is by Atshushi Suzumi, and is set in, yes, a magical school, where boy and girl best friends are enrolled as "Obsidians," students who have to use swords to enhance their magic. It's not"volume one," it's complete here, and it publishes May 20.

Also from Del Rey, also apparently complete in one volume, but facing the opposite direction: The Reformed by Christopher Hart and Anzu. This one is in manga-style, but reads left-to-right and was created by non-Japanese. It's a vampire story, with another in the ever-popular line of tormented vampire heroes, who can live forever with can never know...love! It's coming June 3rd.

And then, to complete the trifecta of manga-ish things, is Maid Machinegun, a light novel from Del Rey, by someone calling herself Aaliyah (not the dead singer) with illustrations by Suzuhito Yasuda. This one will be available May 20th, and it's about a young "fangirl" who works at a struggling maid cafe -- it's not clear where the machineguns come in, but I guess they do, eventually.

From Del Rey's corporate twin sister Ballantine came the second in what looks like a Jennifer Stevenson trilogy (after The Brass Bed, last week) -- The Velvet Chair. It's more sexy contemporary fantasy (or paranormal romance, or romantic fantasy, or fantasy romance, or some combination of those words), and it will be published May 20th.

Moving a few floors away in the Random House building, we come to Pantheon Books, who thought I might like to pass on the fact that Jessica Abel's La Perdida will be out in a new trade paperback edition on May 20th. (I reviewed La Perdida last year, and had somewhat mixed feelings about the main character, but Abel is a real talent, and La Perdida is well worth reading.)

Also from Pantheon is Joann Sfar's The Rabbi's Cat 2, sequel to the popular graphic novel of the very similar title. This was published April 1st.

And last this week was a care package of the last three issues of the new Weird Tales -- the most recent ones since Ann VanderMeer took over as editor. I do intend to read these, but my track record of reading fiction magazines has been very bad lately -- Ellen Datlow gave me a copy of the issue of Subterranean that she edited, and I'm still carrying it around more than six months later. (I've also been friendly with the last half-dozen or so people involved with Weird Tales without managing to read an issue, though I keep hoping to break that streak.) So I'm hoping that I have some readers who are more devoted to short fiction than I am, and can tell me what's particularly special and Weird these days.