Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/28

After a horrible sixteen hours, I have Internet again! (Yes, you wouldn't have noticed. But I'm celebrating anyway.) The friendly (and vaguely hipster-ish) tech from Cablevision fixed about four problems while he was here, and now I can blog once again.

It doesn't mean I'll be doing it any more often, mind you, but I can.

And it means I can now put together the only thing I can be expected to blog about regularly: the books that arrive in my mail every week. I haven't read them, but here's what I can tell you about them.

First up is Nebula Awards Showcase 2015, which collects last year's Nebula Award winners (published in 2013) along with some related essays, excerpts, and nominees. This year's edition is edited by Greg Bear, a former President of SFWA as well as a long-time top SF writer himself. And included are the winning stories by Ken Liu, Rachel Swirsky, Aliette de Bodard, and Vylar Kaftan as well as stories by Alaya Down Johnson, Robin Wayne Bailey, Andrew Robert Sutton, and a couple of writers who don't have three names. The Showcase is published in trade paperback by Pyr, and will be available a week from tomorrow.

I also have here Rose Guns Days Season 1, Vol. 2, the continuation of a manga series by Ryukishi07 (story) and Soichiro (art), which I think is based on an animated TV series. (This has a "Season 1" subtitle, which is A Clue.) I know about as much about what is going on in the book as I do about what is going on on the cover: which is to say, almost nothing. This is from Yen Press.

Also from Yen is Barakamon, Vol. 8, from Satsuki Yoshino, continuing the fish-out-of-water story about a world-class calligrapher rusticating in a very colorful, very small Japanese town. (As I've said before, it looks to be Northern Exposure, only somewhat further south and on the other side of the Pacific.) I did read the first volume of this series last year, and blogged about it, if you'd like more details.