Another Huge Stack of Books from Borders

There is one, and only one, bright side to having had my entire basement flooded out. And that is the fact that I've been able to gleefully grab books from Borders' going-out-of-business sale, without worrying about shelf space or if I'm helping suppress the natural market for books or anything else. I've got twenty years of ground to make up, so getting 70-90% discounts is exactly what I need right now.

On Sunday, while I was typing up the list of stuff I got from last week's trip to my local Borders, I realized, looking at the list of stores and their closing dates [1] that there was another Borders store less than half an hour from me. So, seeing as how I had about 5,000 books to make up, I made my way there.

The current sale, at least in that location, had an additional kicker: buy 20 books or more and get an additional 15% off. Well, I'm not one to turn down a challenge, so here's what I found:

One Night Stands and Lost Weekends by Lawrence Block -- a collection of very early stories by a great mystery writer. I had a copy, but it floated away.

Steven Brust's newest Vlad Taltos novel Tiassa -- I had a galley of this (from which I wrote my review), which got lost in the flood, but the hardcover Bs are fine (hardcovers from A to L are my in living room, so that's what's left of a previously mighty edifice), so this can actually join the rest of one of the few series I still have complete.

Bangkok 8 by John Burdette -- I've been hearing good things about this mystery series for years and years now, and now I've finally broken down and bought the first one.

Poisonville by Massimo Carlotto and Marco Videtta. I have never heard of this book or the authors before, but it's from Europa Editions (who always do classy, worthwhile stuff) and it's a noir novel set in the north of Italy, so why not? (Plus, the title is a Continental Op reference.)

The Story of My Life by Giacomo Casanova, in a serious-looking Penguin Classics edition, to start to rebuild the shelf of random classics that I plan to read someday.

Rejected, a book of essays by various comedy writers about having their work not receive the reception that they might have hoped, edited by Jon Friedman. This is another book that looked vaguely interesting, and was less than three bucks at the current discount.

Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls -- see Casanova, above.

God Made Me Do It: True Stories of the Worst Advice the Lord Has Ever Given His Followers, by Marc Hartzman. The title explains most of it; I have a small stack of books (which I saved) that will make their way into the smallest room in the house, to be read in short installments, and this will join them.

The Titanic Awards by Doug Lansky. Lansky is a travel writer, and this book collects his personal thoughts on the worst of everything in the world that you might conceivably travel to do or see.

The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz. First in the humorous mystery series; I previously had the first two in trade paperback, but, alas! It's now what I think is the single and only mass-market paperback in my house, which is very odd.

The First Book of Seconds by Matthew Murrie and Steve Murrie. See God Made Me Do It, above, for the basic explanation of this book listing the second-best at nearly everything.

Emily, Alone by Stewart O'Nan. I love O'Nan's work -- though I've been working through it slowly, since it's emotionally wrenching -- and I lost three or four books by him to the flood. So, in return, I bought this cheap hardcover copy of his new novel, which I was holding off on because a) I prefer paperback and b) I was going to read Wish You Were Here, to which this is something of a sequel, first. No flood is going to make my house devoid of unread Stewart O'Nan!

The Sinner's Grand Tour by Tony Perrottet, a travel book about great places and things in the history of European smuttiness, from the Marquis de Sade's chateau to the pornographic bathroom paintings of Raphael.

The Humbling by Philip Roth, since I keep thinking I should read more Roth (though I did save my Library of America collections of his stuff) and because I always like to grab short books when I see them.

A Sport and a Pastime, a well-known mid-century novel of literary smut by James Salter. This is another one I had a copy of -- bought after seeing it glowing described by someone-or-other -- but hadn't managed to read yet.

Jesse Sheidlower's magisterial The F Word, because I've heard about it for years, and because I lost two jammed-full shelves of word & reference books.

Travel as a Political Act by Rick Steeves. Steeves comes across as a bit of a dweeb and a stuffed shirt on the little bits I've seen of his TV shows, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and I seem to be in the mood for travel narratives of various kinds recently.

Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente. I've met Cat, briefly, once or twice, and I liked her YA novel (Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland etc.; watch this space for a review before I have to return it to the library), so I thought I really should read her adult stuff.

Mr. Monster by Dan Wells, the second of three books about a teen sociopath (but a nice, well-mannered one, who doesn't want to hurt anyone and makes all kinds of rules to keep himself acting "normal") who discovers his mind is well-suited to deal with the honest-to-Ghu demons that keep showing up in his home town. Wells's editor is my old colleague Moshe Feder, who I saw at Worldcon. And I was on a panel with Wells there, for what that's worth. And and I read the first book, I Am Not a Serial Killer, on the way back from Worldcon and really loved the voice.

And last is Jonathan Yardley's Second Reading, a book of essays about other books...because I clearly don't have any ideas about what to buy next.


[1] Note that everything has a closing date now, and this coming Sunday is the last day any Borders stores will be open. If you're looking for bargains, you've got no more than four days to find them.

Comics Round-Up: What's On Top of the Printer

This was the post I was expecting to write two Sundays ago -- the day Irene blew through these parts -- the book equivalent of the Movie Round-Up I posted the day before. My life has been one long lesson in the futility of making plans, though, so I'm instead getting to write about these books two weeks later and from a different location in the house. (I also used to mock-complain about blogging from a basement; we must be careful with what we wish for.)

So: these are comics and similar things that I've read sometime recently, and I'm going to review them in reverse-chronological order, because I'm lazy enough to want to just work from the top of the pile. They are actually no longer on top of the printer, since everything is all a-hooey now that I'm squatting in the kitchen instead of hiding in the basement, but they're still a pile, and that's what matters.

First up, then, is the book I read just today, an appalling concoction from the curdled teat of modern corporate comics called All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder, Volume 1. It's written by the increasingly unfiltered Frank Miller and drawn by the slickly standard Jim Lee and Scott Williams, and has been dismantled conclusively in the fan press over the excruciating four years that these nine collected issues originally took as they fumbled their way into the world. (In fact, I read this book because I'd read several of those demolition jobs, and wanted to see the shaky foundations, out-of-true joists, and leaky roof for myself.) It features a magnificent introduction by Bob Shreck, one of those blurbs that a reader comes across only rarely, in which the writer tries to both maintain a cheerful, positive note while resolutely saying nothing whatsoever specific or laudatory about the work at hand. It's the "Gosh, that's certainly a baby!" of book introductions, and the fact that Shreck babbles for three pages about how much readers trust these creators can only be read (by this cynical reader, at least) as the lead-up to the unspoken "and just look at how badly they abused that trust!"

ASBAR -- that's what they've been calling it on the Intertubes, honest -- is a savagely overwritten and over-drawn Batman story, intermittently self-conscious about its crudities and stupidities but more usually wallowing proudly in the accumulated muck and filth of thirty years of Frank Miller's reflexive violences. It does violence to its characters, to the English language, to every theory of dramaturgy ever invented, and to the trees that had to die for this to be printed. Very little about it makes more than momentary sense, and it laughs at any thought of a comprehensible timeline. One reads ASBAR because one wants to see a lovingly-depicted Batman administer savage beatings to collections of pen lines one can fervently believe deserve it, while muttering nonsense. If Grant Morrison's Batman is the calm, collected detective superego, always in control of every situation, then Miller's is pure raging id, harnessed, however momentarily, in the service of what passes for righteousness these days.

I wrote a review of Orcs: Forged for War -- a graphic novel written by Stan Nicholls and set in the world of his previous "Orcs" novels, with art by Joe Flood -- for the December issue of Realms of Fantasy magazine, so you should really wait for that for the full force of my opinions. But, in short, it's a fun, moderately serious fighting-fantasy romp from the POV of the "bad guys," though it's more than a little obvious (pseudo-Puritan humans as the antagonists! Boo! Hiss!).

The other half of that Realms column in December is taken up by my thoughts on a weird single-volume manga by Jiro Matsumoto called Velveteen & Mandala. It's squickily sexual and scatological -- saying that it's about two very psychologically damaged schoolgirls who battle zombies in a should-be bucolic landscape only begins to scratch the surface -- but it's fully itself, and not quite like anything else I've seen.

I've been reading Roger Langridge's recent work on the sharecropped Muppet Show comics recently -- which are brilliant, by the way, and almost magically transmute the antic vaudeville/puppet-show atmosphere of the original TV show into something that works on the printed page -- and have been thinking for a while that I really needed to drop back and check out some of his own comics. I finally did with Fred the Clown last month. Fred is a figure of innocence, a lovelorn sad sack who keeps getting hit by custard pies -- and, even harder, by life -- over and over again, but keeps standing back up to go on. Langridge mostly tells his story in short wordless comics stories -- interspersed with a few much wordier pieces that are essentially illustrated prose pieces -- told mostly in his usual style, a crisp modern interpretation of the classic '20s animation look, with a few outliers in carefully-rendered aping of others' styles. They're slapsticky stories of a sad clown, using the accouterments of vaudeville and early Hollywood, that nonetheless feel entirely new and fresh and funny. I don't know how Langridge does it, but he does it very very well.

Sara Varon's Bake Sale is entirely a simpler book, and -- if you'll excuse the pun -- a much sweeter one as well. Varon has followed up Robot Dreams -- the wordless story of Dog, his best friend Robot, and the events that separated them (which I reviewed for ComicMix) -- with another story of anthropomorphized creatures in a world like our own. This time out, they're all food, so our hero is Cupcake, who runs a small bakery in what's probably Brooklyn. He hangs out with his friend Eggplant, he plays in a band -- it's all pretty low-key. There is a semi-buried message along the way, which is quiet and unobtrusive enough for a reader to overlook but does reinforce this book's origins for younger readers. (Kids need morals, remember!) It's more down-to-earth and less expansive than Robot Dreams was, but it does have a lovely matter-of-factnesss of its own. No one who enjoys the first book I reviewed above would find anything at all to like in Sara Varon's work, but the rest of us can read a cute book like Bake Sale and then pass it along to some smaller proto-person that we know.

And that's it for this time; I didn't quite get to half of the comics on the already-read-it stack, but at least I made a dent. Tomorrow may bring another similar post, if other events don't intervene.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/10

Every Monday morning -- except when preempted by circumstances, such as floods or travel -- I post a list of the books and other items that I've seen for review in the previous week, annotated in a style I intend to be be both mildly amusing and vaguely informative.

This is the latest such post.

Unfortunately, nothing whatsoever reached my mailbox last week, so I have nothing to write about. As usual, this makes me fear that I've been forever stricken from the Great Publicity List in the Sky, and that I will never see a review copy forevermore. More likely, though, is that publishing has been blearily blinking its eyes and smacking its jowls over the past week, trying to recover from the usual yearly Hamptons bacchanal and get back to work.

Next week, I suppose, I'll see which of those possibilities is true. Meanwhile, have some soothing white space:

Yet More Books Looted from the Horde of the Slain Dragon B'Ordeur

Yeah, it's a particularly silly post title, isn't it? But how many times can I say "Borders is going out of business, and I bought even more books there"? (There will be, at most, one more time, since this seems to be the final week -- check the closing schedule for those last-minute shelf-fillers, and note that nearly thirty stores closed yesterday and another forty close today.)

This was my trip from Thursday night, the day they jumped discounts to 70-90% (probably the very last price change), and I brought home two big bags full of:

Two more books by Nicholson Baker -- Room Temperature and The Anthologist. Room is his second novel, and, like both The Mezzanine (which I got on a recent Borders trip) and A Box of Matches (which I reviewed a couple of years ago), it's a short book focused on a single character's thoughts during mundane actions. Anthologist is a recent novel, also pretty short, that was reviewed very well. And I'm not admitting that I'm thinking about reading a burst of Baker so that when I inevitably get to his smutty new novel House of Holes I will have a very good excuse for doing so.

Julian Barnes had a new book of stories out, Pulse, which I didn't know about -- I've read nearly all of his books (aside from a copy of Arthur & George that I'd been meaning to read and lost in the flood), and I saw no reason to stop now.

I probably had a copy of Diablo Cody's Candy Girl, but I'm pretty sure that I've never read it, and I get the impression that she tells an interesting story. Plus, I have to imagine that the story of a year spent as a stripper -- by a woman who has no particular axe to grind or sob-story to tell -- has to be a lot of fun.

I intermittently want to read more travel books -- I just finished up one of Paul Theroux's great grumpy sojourns, for example -- and I'm also fond of stunt books that transcend their stuntiness, so I grabbed Tony Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange, in which Horowitz wandered around America searching for signs of the earliest explorers.

Reif Larsen's odd metafictional novel The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet -- complete with fictional "real" documents included, something I'm always interested in -- got great reviews, and was in the back of my head, so I was happy to find a copy for 80% off.

I haven't kept up with Walter Mosley's books, which is a shame, since he's a compelling and always-interesting writer. I do want to at least hit his mystery novels, since I started with his great Easy Rawlins books, so I grabbed a nice paperback copy of the first book in his new series, The Long Fall.

K.J. Parker is another writer I really want to read more of, so I grabbed her [1] standalone novel The Company when I saw it. It's the story of five war veterans who colonize an island -- and, if I know Parker, things rapidly go badly from there. (I've read the Scavenger trilogy -- Shadow, Pattern, and Memory -- which are brilliant, stark novels about an amnesiac man or god in a almost Beckettian landscape.)

I've had Michael Specter's Denialism on my look-for-it list for around a year now; long enough for it to turn up in paperback. It's a book about the dangers of irrational thinking, and (I think) one that's not overly partisan.

Similarly, Paula Byrne's biography of Evelyn Waugh, Mad World, is another book I've vaguely looked at and nearly picked up a couple of times, so it was great to find it cheap. It focuses on Brideshead Revisited, and it will help to restart my shelf of books about Waugh, which I think I lost in the flood. (I had his letters and his diaries -- at least one or the other, I can't quite remember -- and half of a two-volume complete life.)

I know I had a copy of Scott Westerfeld's scientifically-justified-vampires novel Peeps, and had even read the first chapter before putting it on the shelf, but it was swept away by the flood as well, so I got a snazzy little Razorbill paperback for nearly free.

I've read at least one of Doug Ten Napel's graphic novels before -- I know I got to one during my Eisner judging -- and I like his energy and style. So I grabbed Creature Tech, about which I know very little -- it's an adventure story of some kind published by Image pretty recently, and that's all I need.

And the happiest discovery was Bill Mauldin's Willie & Joe: Back Home, a collection of his post-war cartoons. Mauldin is one of the great cartoonists (and, in his way, journalists) of the 20th century, but I'm more familiar with his wartime work than with the years just after. Plus, this is pretty much a brand-new book, so I'm not sure how it made its way into the liquidation -- but I'm not complaining!


[1] Parker's biographies have consistently avoided personal pronouns, and Parker's books are tough-minded stories of driven men in dangerous circumstances, so my personal theory has always been that Parker is actually female. (I like to believe that this writer, who is as ineluctably masculine as James Tiptree, Jr. was, is equally as actually masculine as Tiptree.) I've seen some evidence to support this, but it it not confirmed.

Quote of the Week: Into Deepest Slovenia

This is going up very late in the day, but at least it's a post:

"After all that traveling and trouble I was nowhere. Yet I had to admit that it was a satisfaction being on this tiny platform, among unreadable signs, particularly after the celebrated places I had passed through. The pathetic name Pivka seemed curiously belittling and joyless, like a nickname for a dwarf. But because travel is often a sad and partly masochistic pleasure, the arrival in obscure and picturesquely awful places is one of the delights of the traveler."
 - Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules, p.226

Read in August

Another short list this month, and again a lack of reviews of most of them; recovering from the rigors of Book-A-Day is taking vastly longer than I expected.

Or, maybe, I'm just naturally lazy, and I'm finding my own level.

Either way, here's what I did get through this past month, as the summer ground onward and we were beset by earthquakes and hurricanes:

• Rick Geary, The Lives of Sacco and Vanzetti (8/1)
  
• Sara Varon, Bake Sale (8/2)
  
• Gilbert Gottfried, Rubber Balls and Liquor (8/2)
  I neglected to write anything about this book at the time, so now -- more than three months later -- I've noticed that, realized that this book is too slight (and too forgotten, at this point) to make a real post, and just started typing here.
  
  It's a comedian's memoir, filled with the obvious high points of his career -- his famous "Aristocrats" joke at a roast right after 9/11, his time as the Aflac duck, his more memorable movie roles, various events on Hollywood Squares -- and filled out with a lot of details about how he was a weird kid with few friends and no real aptitude for anything constructive. If you like Gottfried's act, you'll enjoy the book -- as I recall, he did have a ghostwriter, but it's all in his voice. (Without having to actually listen to his voice for hours on end, if you understand me -- unless you spring for the audiobook, I suppose.) This is very much what it is, and it's the kind of thing that you probably already know if you'd be interested in.
  
• Roger Langridge, Fred the Clown (8/3)
  
• Lawrence Block, A Drop of the Hard Stuff (8/8)
  
• Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (8/14)
  
• Dan Wells, I Am Not a Serial Killer (8/22)
  
• Stan Nicholls & Joe Flood, Orcs: Forged for War (8/23)
  Look for my review in the December 2012 issue of Realms of Fantasy.
  
• Jiro Matsumoto, Velveteen & Mandala (8/24)
  Look for my review in the December 2012 issue of Realms of Fantasy.
  

I wrote the above -- but none of the reviews of the actual books I read, as you may note -- a couple of days before the actual hurricane hit, which shows in the flippant tone. (I'd definitely put it differently now, but it's not worth rewriting.) My expectation was that I'd spend that last week of August alternately reading books and writing about books, with time out to do frivolous activities with my family. And let that be a lesson to all of us about what happens to plans.

Borders Deathwatch Enters Its Final Days

Have I mentioned the Facebook page with the dates of store closings yet? Well, if not, I have now. The big rush of closings is starting now -- all of the airport stores are closed, and more are closing each day. (My local has a big "9 days left" sign on it, but it's listed as "TBD" on that site.)

Anyway, I went back out there tonight for another bunch of ever-cheaper books (they're now all 70-90% off), which reminded me that I never blogged about the books I bought last week -- that was my first post-flood book purchase (gotta get back on that horse!), but they didn't come into the house until today, out of deference to the gentle sensibilities of The Wife, whom I suspect is none to happy with the stacks of books scattered around the kitchen and bedroom. (I didn't save much, compared to what I lost, but it's still a lot when it's on the floor in unruly piles.)

So this is what last week brought, and I'll get to this week's bigger haul in a day or two:

I had a copy of Kate Atkinson's mystery novel Case Histories in hardcover, because my next-door-neighbor at the book clubs, the editor of the Mystery Guild, had said it was really great. That copy is now toast, but I have a slimmer new trade paperback, which I might get too soon.

Alain de Botton has been a mixed bag for me -- I really liked How Proust Can Change Your Life, but was much cooler on The Architecture of Happiness -- but I'm a sucker for quirky non-fiction, particularly if there's a stunt aspect to it. Which is to say that I grabbed A Week at the Airport when I saw it; de Botton was the "writer-in-residence" at Heathrow for a week in 2009.

Everyone has a few books that they need to re-read every so often; I may be particularly odd in that one of mine is John Gardner's Grendel. But it is, and I lost my copy in the flood, but now I have a new one, which I may need to read again before it goes on the permanent shelf.

When books are cheap, there's a freedom to buy really weird or silly ones -- so I got Wanted: Bear Cubs for My Children, a collection of weird Craigslist posts edited by Gary Fingercastle.

I've thought I should read Carla Speed McNeil for a while, and had my eye on a copy of her recent The Finder Library, Vol. 1 in that Borders as the discounts rose. (It's like a game of chicken -- how long can you wait and still have the book be there?) This time, I grabbed it.

I had a couple of Jean Shepherd books -- I know I read The Ferrari in the Bedroom, since I reviewed it, but I'm not sure what else was on the shelf, read or unread -- but there's no reason not to grab a copy of In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash when you see it. And so I did.

Longer ago than I care to remember -- it was before I started this blog, which is plenty long ago -- I read The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, and realized that Jeff VanderMeer (who edited that book with Mark Roberts) had a very similar strain of quirky appreciation to my own, and so I set out to get more of his stuff. (Most of those perished in the flood; I did manage to read Finch in the meantime, but nothing else.) And now he's back on the Lambshead beat, editing The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities with his wife, the Hugo-winning just-barely-ex editor of Weird Tales, Ann VanderMeer. It was a brand new book, and I got it for something like 60% off. Sometimes life can be pretty darn sweet.

And last was Martha Wells's The Cloud Roads, in part because I heard her read from it at Worldcon. (I was planning to go to more readings this year, but that was the only one I made it to -- I really need a friend, or cluster of friends, at Worldcon to drag me to things so I don't just mope around on my own.) I've been a Wells fan since The Element of Fire, which I read for the SFBC, and I read all of her books for about a decade (and, if I remember right, bought a bunch for the club). I was sitting on her trilogy from the middle of this decade -- another thing that I was holding to read for a club omnibus when the axe fell -- but those, too, were lost in the flood. But now I've got this one, which is newer and shinier and stands alone, so I have to consider it better in all possible ways.

Top Shelf Sale Time!

Hey there -- didja know that Top Shelf is having one of their periodic awesome sales?

(Well, they are.)

There's a new edition of Craig Thompson's Blankets, the must-have Eddie Campbell one-two punch of From Hell and Alec [1], two excellent American Elf collections from James Kochalka for a mere $10 apiece, Nate Powell's ominous and amazing Swallow Me Hole for the same price, the awesomely nutty Veeps for $5, and a huge list of $3 books.

If you can't find anything good to read there, you either have horrible taste or already have an enviable Top Shelf library -- there is no third choice.


[1] I'm putting together my own order now, and I'm seriously considering buying Alec again; I lost my original copy in the flood, and I don't know if I really want to live without it.

Reviewing the Mail: Most of August

This post is either several hours late, one week late, or even two weeks late, depending on how you count. It contains the books that came in the week I was away (on business and at Worldcon), the week after that (that I could have been writing about last Sunday, when I was instead frantically trying to remove water from my basement at a very insufficient speed), and this past week as well.

Luckily, publishing is very sleepy in August -- plus I suspect my mail may have been slightly disrupted this past week by the giant piles of flood debris -- so the pile isn't as huge as it could be.

I haven't read any of these things -- I didn't manage to read anything this past week, possibly the very most annoying thing about this flood -- and I may never get to many of them. But here's what I can tell you about them from a quick glance, my innate boundless cynicism, and twenty years of experience in the salt mines of American publishing:

I'll start with My Shadow in the Distance, the fourth collection of Lewis Trondheim's "Little Nothings" diary comics (originally published, absolutely free, on Trondheim's website -- but they make somewhat less sense if, like me, you don't speak French). I've read and reviewed the first three volumes -- Trondheim is both a fine chronicler of the small moments of his interesting life and a talented watercolorist -- and I expect to like this one as well. NBM publishes it this month.

With Fate Conspire is the fourth and last book in Marie Brennan's Victorian fantasy "Onyx Court" series, published by Tor in hardcover last month. (Midnight Never Come is the first, and presumably the place for reasonable people to begin.) It's 1884, and the rapid industrialization of England has hit the secret faerie world hard -- particularly the Onyx Court, far below London, which is in danger of utter destruction by the rapidly encircling underground railroad lines. At the same time, a young human woman is looking for the boy who was stolen away from her by those same faeries, years before -- and she might have finally found them. This could probably be called "steampunk" by a particularly enthusiastic marketer, and, if you like Victorian stories with zeppelins in them, you'll probably like them with faeries instead.

Ellen Datlow's newest collection of original horror stories is called Blood and Other Cravings, and, as you might guess from the title, it's another batch of tales about vampires. (Though I should note that Datlow has been getting excellent stories about vampires out of interesting writers since a certain Mrs. Meyer was in diapers, so I doubt there's anything at all "trendy" here.) The seventeen stories in Blood include work from Elizabeth Bear, Melanie Tem, Lisa Tuttle, Barbara Roden, Kathe Koja, Carol Emshwiller, Margo Lanagan, and even a few male writers (like Richard Bowes and Laird Barron). Tor publishes it in hardcover on September 13.

For this next book, I think it's best that I stick to plain, unadorned facts. Angel is credited to Nicole "Coco" Marrow and Laura Hayden. Marrow is married to actor/rapper Ice-T and stars in the TV show Ice Loves Coco with him. She is also, it says here, an actress, model and fashion designer, as well as the author of a blog that gets over two million original hits a month. (It doesn't say anything about Hayden.) The story is about an amnesiac woman who is one of two survivors of a plane crash in the Hudson, who can hear the thoughts of the men near her, and who physically transforms to be the perfect woman when a man "gets close" to her. Tor will publish it in trade paperback September 13th.

Spellbound is Blake Charlton's second novel, the sequel to Spellwright, about a dyslexic magician in a world of verbal spell-casting, and it, too, will be available from Tor on September 13th. This time, it's ten years later, and series hero Nicodemus Weal has been joined by healer Francesca DeVega to continue his battle against the demon Typhon to stop the looming War of Disjunction.

Blackdog is a long fantasy novel set in a world infested by gods and goddesses, from K.V. Johansen, better known up to now for her fantasy series for teens and children. The main characters are a caravan guard -- who almost immediately is possessed by a shape-changing guardian spirit -- and a girl who is the currently-powerless avatar of a goddess. This one is published by Pyr, and will be available tomorrow.

Rudy Rucker is one of the original gonzo wildmen of SF, responsible for bizarre novels like White Light, The Sex Sphere, and Master of Space and Time -- always closely rooted in real mathematical theory, of course, as any good SF novel should be -- as well as founding the one-man literary movement Transrealism and generally being a quirky, utterly individual personality. So of course he had to write an autobiography eventually, and Nested Scrolls is that autobiography. Tor is publishing Nested Scrolls as a hardcover in December.

I have to admit that I'm not that plugged into the adventures of James Barclay's Raven -- a mercenary group once described as four men and an elf, though I'm pretty sure the group changes regularly due to attrition and recruitment -- but I do have here Ravensoul, the fourth book in "Legends of the Raven," the series that followed the original "Chronicles of the Raven" trilogy. This one seems to be the last novel, in which the Raven -- older, wiser, several of them no longer dead -- battle against an even nastier interdimensional enemy than anything they'd seen before. Pyr published this one at the beginning of August.

Margaret Atwood has denied committing science fiction several times in her long career -- most notably concerning her most famous novel in our parts, The Handmaid's Tale, which she repeatedly denied was SF even though it's a novel set in an extrapolated future -- but her relationship to the amorphous blob of stories called "science fiction" has clearly shifted and changed over the years, and that relationship has never been as clear or distinct as some have pretended it was. Last year, she gave three Ellman Lectures at Emory University on the subject of her relationship with science fiction, speculative fiction, the fantastic, and related parts, and now those lectures have been collected -- along with a number of other essays, lectures, reviews, and other writings -- as the book In Other Worlds. I still suspect Atwood of being one of those writers with very idiosyncratic and self-serving definitions of common literary terms, but I definitely want to see what she has to say on the subject. In Other Worlds will be published by Doubleday in October.

Zahra's Paradise is a graphic novel from First Second, a slightly fictionalized -- to protect real people, and to unify similar elements in many stories -- account of the Iranian elections of 2009 and life in that country today, by two Iranian activists, writers, and artists who use the pseudonyms Amir and Khalil for this book. It publishes this month.

While sitting here, I've just read The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man, a picture book (aimed at ages 4-8) written by Michael Chabon, with art by Jake Parker. It's about a superhero and his secret identity, and it's a sweet little thing for the right audience -- sadly, my own sons are much too old for a book like this now. HarperCollins's Balzer + Bray imprint publishes this book tomorrow.

And last for this week is a "new" Osamu Tezuka grapic novel, from his prime period in the late '60s and early '70s. (We've previously seen the books MW, Ayako, Ode to Kirihito, and Apollo's Song from that era.) The Book of Human Insects is the story of beautiful young Toshiko Tomura, who moves effortlessly from one field to another, getting more and more famous, doing whatever she needs to in pursuit of her goals. Vertical -- the boutique publisher of books from Japan that's been responsible for nearly all of the excellent Tezuka books for adults over the past decade -- will publish Human Insects on September 20th.

Quick Flood Update

The floodwaters have receded (I may have pictures, and a longer post, later), and the cleanup is mostly done -- we had a bunch of teenage boys (the son of our electrician and some of his friends) pulling junk out of the basement for two days, and then today was spent mostly cleaning.

It's still officially the very worst vacation of my entire life, but the basement is now empty and almost entirely clean. And we got a new hot water heater yesterday, so we can take showers and wash dishes in the house now. (Still missing: new furnace, clothes washer, dryer, and every last piece of furniture or walls that we might want in that now-empty basement.)

It was the worst-ever flood in human memory in these parts -- a good foot worse than the previous worst storm (another hurricane in 1984), and it covered my entire yard with brackish river water at its worst last Sunday night. There's now daily garbage pickups, working their way through the massive piles of debris and trash, and we're still dragging our garbage out to the street. (And I'm planning to spend most of tommorow in the back yard, trying to salvage as much as I can of my CD collection -- the cases and booklets are toast, but I'm dunking the CDs themselves in a light bleach solution to disinfect them and getting them into big organizer books.)

So things look lousy here, but it's been such a long way up from last Sunday night -- when I thought the whole house might be unlivable -- that it feels like progress and a good thing.

But I still lost about 300 linear feet of books (call it somewhere between 5,000 and 7,500 books in all), around 5,000 comics, hundreds of magazines -- plus most of our Christmas ornaments, letters to and from The Wife when I was at college, our old prom photos, and lots of other sentimental stuff -- the basement was my office plus our storage space, and we didn't have time to think about the storage stuff as the waters rose.

Here's where I'm supposed to say "we're all OK, and that's what really matters" -- but hardly anyone dies in a NJ river flood, unless they're really stupid or unlucky. So just making it out alive and unscathed isn't actually notable. Life will go on, but that doesn't change the fact that this was a horrible week, and I intend to take it up with The Management.

Quote of the Week: Nesbitt on Prefaces

"I ought to have put this in the preface, but I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other writers have never thought of this."
- Edith Nesbitt