After a six-month drought of published book reviews (that is, besides the book talk here at the blog), two new reviews of mine were both published on the same day, yesterday:

Best American Fantasy, ed. by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, at The Internet Review of Science Fiction

Best American Fantasy approaches the process a bit differently, by deliberately seeking out content from literary journals and zines in addition to material from genre publications. This ethic has resulted in a strong yet eclectic anthology.

More importantly, it does what good genre blending should do: bring together both groups whose tropes are being utilized. Jeff and Ann VanderMeer and Matthew Cheney all have roots and connections within the speculative fiction field, and so readers familiar with their work are more likely to pick up the anthology than if it were edited by someone else, and will be exposed to many authors that they may not have heard of, since a good majority of the stories were printed in traditionally "non-genre" venues; conversely, readers familiar with the reprinted authors and the venues in which their fiction was originally published are more likely to pick up the anthology than if the stories were written by writers more closely associated with speculative fiction, and will be exposed to the wild variety of ways that the fantastic can be applied in a fictional milieu. Both groups get a surprise, led through a threshold they might not normally have crossed.

Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett, at Strange Horizons

Bangkok Haunts is the third in Burdett's detective/thriller series, and is the best so far. The story begins with the viewing of a snuff film sent to [Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep] anonymously; the victim on the DVD is Damrong, a prostitute who briefly worked in the brothel run by Sonchai's mother, and who made Sonchai fall completely in love with her (a relationship that he barely escaped intact). Helping with the investigation is Kimberley Jones, the FBI agent who assisted Sonchai in the previous two books, and who has been ensnared by Bangkok's vibrant lifestyle and by Sonchai's katoey (transsexual) police partner Lek.

At the same time, Sonchai's superior, the opportunistic and savvy Colonel Vikorn, has decided to throw his hat into Bangkok's pornography industry, wanting to produce high-quality films to be shown in the city's hotel chains. They hire Yammy, a Japanese auteur with a death-wish, to create and direct the films, and are soon in business. However, much as Vikorn would like Sonchai to ignore the Damrong case and focus on porn, the murdered whore is proving difficult to forget.

I actually wrote the BAF review in September of last year, and pitched it to a number of reviews venues (newspapers, literary journals, online magazines), and had a helluva time selling it. Bluejack at IRoSF bought it not too long afterward, but because of the site's redesign and reorganization, it took a bit longer to publish it than I'd expected.

With Bangkok Haunts, things got in the way, mostly with the new teaching job, and I kept putting off writing the review. Niall got edits back to me quickly, but it took me several weeks afterward to get to them, as there were some substantive changes to make.

Anyway, I'm glad they're done and that they're up for your perusal. I owe a review of Cherie Priest's Not Flesh Nor Feathers to Bill at Subterranean, and I also need to write one up for Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else. I've just gotten some more ARCs in the mail as well. Teaching full-time has certainly cut into my reading (and reflecting) time that's so necessary to get to these books, but I am hoping to do lots of it during the June holidays.

A request to the great LJ overmind:

I'm helping out the NBCC to add venues for reviewing speculative fiction to our freelancers directory; the majority of the members seem to be concerned with mainstream literature, but I know for a fact that some are also interested in genre fiction, and these markets are woefully underrepresented in the directory.

If you know of good venues for freelancers to submit genre reviews, please let me know in the comments. Don't worry about the large venues -- like Publishers Weekly, Booklist, or Kirkus -- or the large newspapers -- like the Washington Post or Los Angeles Times; what I'm specifically looking for are the venues that many people may not know are friendly toward sf reviews. I already have Strange Horizons, The Internet Review of Science Fiction and The Green Man Review, since I've reviewed for all three, but I appreciate your suggestions; I'll also need (if you can include it) info on senior/managing editor, email/contact info, publication schedule, acceptable genres, word count range, payment, and methods of query/submission.

Many thanks in advance.

P.S. Yes, this is also partially a selfish request, as I'd like to be able to widen my circle of reviewing markets.

In my continuing quest to become familiar with the Singapore literary scene, I'll occasionally be reviewing books either by local authors or published by local indie presses. The following book was released by Singapore publisher Monsoon Books, which has an impressive catalogue of both fiction and non-fiction titles.

Locked Out: Stories Far from Home by Alison Jean Lester [ Select Books | BookSense | Amazon ] is a wonderful short story collection about expatriation and dislocation, two topics which I'm currently dealing with both personally and in the novel I'm writing. Many of the pieces in the book are told from the viewpoints of characters far from home and dealing with culture shock and the adjustment of living in a foreign city. As a Westerner herself now living in the East, Lester does this all with empathy, a wicked wit, and some incredibly beautiful turns of phrase.

The eponymous tale concerns a young American mother in Tokyo finding her first grey hairs, and dealing with the possibility of her husband having an affair with his sexy young Japanese assistant. Time and again, she comes back to the physical differences between herself and the tiny Japanese women around her, lamenting the fact that Tokyo fashions just don't fit her body type. When she gets locked out of her flat one day after a workout and must rely on the kindness of her Korean neighbor to not only let her get a shower but borrow some of her clothes, she is astonished how well they fit. After confronting her husband at his office (and taking his set of keys so she can get back into the flat), she's chuffed to realize his reaction to her substitute outfit:

"I thought you said Japanese clothes didn't fit you."

"Sook Young is Korean."

"Oh," Hank said, nodding. "Uh-huh."

He was looking at my breasts, staring at them like a thirteen-year-old. His mouth was actually hanging open. [...] I had known in the taxi that I was going to turn him on. I had been on the war path, and I'd scalped the enemy. But now all I could think was, Next time, remind me to marry a grown-up.

"Think she'd let you have the shorts?" he said.

I looked down at Sook Young's clothes. My old red shorts reminded me of the volleyball I used to play, and outlet shopping in Maine. Although Sook Young's clothes flattered me, they carried her physical memories. "I don't want her shorts, Hank," I told him, and left. (30-31)

Her other Japan-centered stories -- "Needing Ice" and "Being Japanese" -- are equally strong, as are the ones set in Singapore -- "Tiptoe," "Strays," and "Singapore Sting." Having lived in both Japan and Singapore, Lester displays a facility for pointed cultural observations and wonderful descriptive details of both places and people. The viewpoint of the Western white woman in an Asian locale is pretty much the same in all the stories (with the exception of two), though each character is unique in her own right, sometimes with children and sometimes without, but all struggling to find herself in the strange land she's landed in.

And so it makes a certain amount of sense that the only misstep is "The War of the Worlds," which takes place in 1940s Germany and is told from the point-of-view of an adolescent boy. A fine enough vignette, but it doesn't seem to add anything to the overall cumulative narrative of the collection, and its very different locale and viewpoint from the rest of the stories makes it stand out as an odd duck.

(The other non-white-woman-POV story is "My Thing," a short-short rather than a vignette, but one packed with detail that hints at an incredible backstory, possibly fantastical in nature. It's compelling and beautifully painted, everything that "The War of the Worlds" is not.)

Lester's observations on East/West cultural differences and female/male sexual politics make Locked Out a fascinating and entertaining read. Her prose often reminded me of Aimee Bender or Samantha Hunt, spare but crammed with meaning. At only 200 pages, the book had me wanting more, and I do hope this is only the beginning of this talented writer's career.

In my continuing quest to become familiar with the Singapore literary scene, I'll occasionally be reviewing books either by local authors or published by local indie presses. The following book was released by Singapore publisher Monsoon Books, which has an impressive catalogue of both fiction and non-fiction titles.

Disclaimer: the following book deals with material of a sexual nature. If you're offended by frank discussion of sexuality, best skip this one.

In Lust We Trust by Gerrie Lim [ Select Books | BookSense | Amazon ] is an amazing behind-the-scenes tour of the American adult film industry. Lim, better known in print as Drew McKenzie (everybody in porn, it turns out, has a fake name, even the writers), made his name in the industry as the "Cinema Blue" columnist for Penthouse Variations, and the book collects essays that he originally wrote for that column, as well as for publications as varied as AVN Online, BigO, Guld Rapport, and The Wall Street Journal. When he started in the business, he was only one of two Singaporeans represented (the other was Annabel Chong), and came from a country where pornography was, and still is, banned.

Lim states right up front the immensity of the adult film industry in America, which at the end of 2005 "generated an unprecedented US$12.6 billion, in a year which a record-high 13,588 hardcore titles were issued by the various production companies. Such numbers were surely countervailing forces against the conservative views of the George W. Bush administration" (11). (And with those kinds of numbers, don't believe for a second that conservatives aren't participating heavily in the pornographic economy.) Porn is now part of mainstream American pop culture: Asia Carrera (whose image adorns the book's cover) and Jenna Jameson are household names, and television sitcoms like Friends and Will & Grace have presented it as just another part of American life. Violet Blue is an internet superstar. Boogie Nights grossed over $40 million internationally, and was nominated for three Academy Awards. With so much interest in an industry that rose from the underground to the heights of regular features on Fox "News", Gerrie Lim's memoir/travelogue arrives at an auspicious time.

The most important thing that In Lust We Trust does is to humanize the women who are the stars of adult film. Many of his "journalistic" assignments were to interview various porn stars and write up the accounts in cinéma vérité style. But beyond the subjects of favorite sexual positions or fellatio techniques or the challenges of the Reverse Cowboy, Lim got to know the women themselves, counting among them some of his most treasured friendships. They aren't all empty-headed bimbos desperate for money; some of the most successful porn stars are incredibly business-savvy, often moving behind the camera to direct the action as well.

For example, in Appassionata, Asia Carrera wrote the script, directed the performers, produced and starred in the film, scored the music (in which she performed on piano), and wrote and programmed the digital authoring for the DVD; she's also a member of MENSA and a piano prodigy who twice played at Carnegie Hall, a smart cookie. For another example, Jenna Jameson's autobiography and development of Club Jenna (created to control the films she wanted to make and direct) led to a feature story in Rolling Stone, a VH-1 special, the top spot of Most Popular Celebrity on WomenCelebs.com (outranking Paris Hilton, Angelina Jolie, Pamela Anderson, and Hillary Duff), and the Forbes "Celebrity 100" list.

However, the most interesting chapter in the book for me would have to be "Lust on the Orient Express," which examines the exoticization of Asian women within the adult film industry. The performers Lim talks to and about (Asia Carrera, Annabel Chong, Tera Patrick, Gwen Summers, Stephanie Swift, Kira Kener, and Kobe Tai) are some of the best known in the business, in no small part because of their race. Unfortunately, Lim doesn't go much more into the subject than this, choosing to stick more to the women themselves than to societal images and influences that caused this type of fetishization in the first place. Often, these women will be partnered up with white men in their films, furthering the idea that interracial sex is okay, as long as it's between a white man and an Asian woman; yes, I'm grossly generalizing, but the fact that these women have become so well known in an industry dominated by white blondes is saying something, and it's an issue that interests me (the white guy / Asian girl dynamic has been discussed quite a bit at Hyphen, a periodical I recommend).

At times, the writing in In Lust We Trust becomes little more than objectification, reducing a performer down to her measurements, or her smooth skin, or her falling tresses, but thankfully, the majority of the book is not dominated by this type of description. Lim's penetration into the porn world (please forgive the pun) has allowed him incredible access to all facets of the industry, and his insights and observations make for fascinating reading.

In my continuing quest to become familiar with the Singapore literary scene, I'll occasionally be reviewing books either by local authors or published by local indie presses. The following book was released by Singapore publisher Monsoon Books, which has an impressive catalogue of both fiction and non-fiction titles.

Singapore Girl by James Eckardt [ Select Books | BookSense | Amazon ] is a memoir of an American's visit to Singapore in 1975, when he fell in love with a pre-operative transgender (M2F) Tamil prostitute named Milly. Compelling despite the overly macho tone, a classic western-guy-meets-eastern-girl-and-wants-to-save-her-from-herself story. However, the odd structure, and shift from first person to third then back to first, has the effect of jumbling the narrative.

The overly long prologue has all the tone and context of a "So, no shit, there we were" bar story, describing an LSD trip that has no relevance to the rest of the book, and the sailboat trip with Eckart's friend Erik that ends them up in Singapore, where the story properly starts. The whole purpose of the prologue seems to be to announce, "Hey look what a wild bad-ass I was in my youth!" but it's extraneous material, and at the very least could have been compressed to a paragraph or two of set-up.

The narrative proper, split up into three parts and an epilogue, deals with the love affair, and of the transsexual scene on Bugis Street in the seventies. Among the many lovingly-described scenes of intense sex, Eckart has to reconcile his feelings for a 21-year-old girl who is still biologically a boy, when he has previously established himself through his exploits in the Peace Corps and elsewhere as a staunchly heterosexual philanderer. It is clear that he falls for Milly, but even as he describes Milly's driving ambition for gender reassignment surgery so that she can fully become a woman, physically and legally, and her constant preening in front of the mirror, it's never clear that he understands her as a real person and not just as the projected image of the girl who has ensorcelled him. Being a memoir, the reader can only experience the events through Eckardt's viewpoint, and though the prose flows much more descriptively than in the prologue, Milly never becomes more than a two-dimensional character, a person in her own right. When she dumps him for a Frenchman who has pledged to support her, it feels less like a tragedy than yet another anecdote that he could tell over a pitcher of beer one day.

But that's not all. Two more chapters, "Ten Years Later" and "Thirty Years Later," and another epilogue follow. "Ten Years Later" reveals that the entire previous narrative (excepting the prologue) was the manuscript that Eckardt wrote for Milly in order to win her back (which didn't work). He backfills a few descriptions and experiences in an attempt to flesh out the previous story, but by that point, the reader has established certain images and places in the mind, and the retroactive "corrections" just feel repetitive and too after-the-fact. "Thirty Years Later" brings us pretty much right up to the present day, when Eckart receives an email from the Frenchman, and finds out what has become of Milly during the intervening years, prompting him to assemble Singapore Girl properly and find a publisher for it. The second epilogue is poignant and touching, but it doesn't make up for the clumsiness that is the rest of the book.

The structure of Singapore Girl makes a certain amount of chronological sense, but the memoir form feels unnecessarily constrained in this case. Instead of giving the reader the error-filled manuscript that Eckardt originally wrote in a white-hot 36-hour heat as an unpublished 28-year-old, why not shape it with the thirty years of writing experience that he'd gained since then, tempered by perspective and hindsight? Instead, the reader is left feeling as if he's just endured an alcohol and marijuana-fueled marathon bar anecdote that has left no impression upon the mind, and will soon be easily forgotten.

Even though I'm not regularly blogging at Vagablogging.net anymore, I'll still be doing occasional reviews for them. Such as one that went up today, for Graffiti Travel Guide: Singapore.

Enjoy.

I've been meaning to post about Poppy Z. Brite's Liquor books for months now, and for one reason or another kept getting sidetracked and never got around to it. Colleen Mondor at Chasing Ray has just showed me up by doing this very thing, and for the same reason (the forthcoming release of Antediluvian Tales). Her post is a good place to start, and was a good kick in the ass for me to write down my own thoughts.

The books have been published by two houses, Three Rivers Press (Liquor, Prime and Soul Kitchen) and Subterranean Press (The Value of X, The Devil You Know, D*U*C*K and Antediluvian Tales). The two SubPress collections, Devil and Antediluvian, are not exclusively made up of stories in the Liquorverse, but a significant enough number of pages in each book is devoted to these characters that they do need to be included.

As Colleen says, the books are centered around Rickey and G-man: working-class chefs and lovers, living in New Orleans and working in the kitchens of its restaurants. Best friends since they were kids, they now own and operate (with financial support from fellow chef Lenny Duveteaux) their own restaurant, where every item on the menu has some kind of liquor as an important ingredient. Perfect for the gourmands and alcohol-lovers of New Orleans. A successful kitchen is a ripe environment for conflict and suspense, both of which Brite employs in varying degrees throughout the books. With the current popularity of celebrity chefs on TV (Jamie Oliver, Anthony Bourdain, Gordon Ramsay), and an abundance of cooking and food-related shows on The Food Network, Discovery Travel & Living, and the Asian Food Channel (among others), Brite's current oeuvre should be making her a literary superstar, flavor of the month (pun intended), invited to read and talk all over the US, but sadly it's not quite working out that way (more about that in a moment).

The books don't necessarily need to be read in order, but I highly suggest reading Liquor first. It provides the tone and background for the main characters, and it makes sense to start at the beginning, right? It's certainly what I did. I then moved on to The Value of X, which recounts the story of Rickey and G-man falling in love as teenagers and how the relationship almost crashes after it's barely started, then to the stories in The Devil You Know (there are some other really excellent non-Liquor stories in the collection as well, including the title story, which revisits the giant demonic cat from Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita). Then Prime and Soul Kitchen, which follow the events from Liquor, but are ingeniously constructed so that you aren't required to read the books that precede them in order to understand or enjoy what's going on, finishing off with D*U*C*K (short novel) and Antediluvian Tales (collection of mostly Liquor-related stories). It's the order that I've taken, and it has kept me interested in the characters and situations enough to continually crave the next volume.

It's unclear whether Dead Shrimp Blues, the next book in the 'verse (I hesitate to call it a series, as that implies causality and consequence, where Brite's books are more like the varied squares of a narrative quilt), will be coming out, and this fills me with disappointment. According to Brite's LJ (docbrite), she and her New York publisher (Three Rivers) have strong disagreements on the direction of the books and their characters; Three Rivers has tried to pigeonhole the novels as mysteries, which isn't exactly an accurate genre representation. Crimes occasionally inform the plots, but the books are about so much more than that. Rickey and G-man are pretty much an old married couple at this point, even if they're only in their early thirties, and the dynamic of their relationship as it continues to evolve through each book has me constantly coming back for more. And every page is infused with a deep and abiding love for food, cooking, and the city of New Orleans. However, Three Rivers' editorial decisions have adversely affected the success of the books, especially in terms of advertising and promotion, which could have brought an even bigger audience to Brite's fiction.

Brite has not yet dealt with the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on her hometown in her fiction (this, I believe, is supposed to happen with Dead Shrimp Blues; D*U*C*K actually takes place around that same time, but in an alternate universe, where the hurricane never touched the city), with the result that we are shown a historical snapshot of a city that no longer exists in the same way. For those of us who only know the place through stories of Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street, or news footage of thousands of African Americans stranded outside the Superdome, the city comes alive through an insider's view. I'm not sure I've read any other fiction set in New Orleans, but Brite's portrayal of the city feels incredibly honest, depicting the good alongside the bad.

You could do much worse than to seek these books out and support Brite's continued exploration of Rickey and G-man, her food-loving hometown, and the ongoing struggle to keep out of life's weeds. Brite has blogged lately about feeling unable to write much fiction at all these days; some of the blame falls on the federal government and their inability to restore the city even after all this time, and some is a result of the frustration in struggling with Three Rivers as well. Like Colleen, I do hope this is only a temporary hiatus, as Brite's literary writing continues to entertain, enlighten, and provide solace. Rickey and G-man feel like family at this point, and I'd hate to see them go away.

In my continuing quest to become familiar with the Singapore literary scene, I'll occasionally be reviewing books by local authors, typically published by local indie presses.

Recently, I received an email from Phil Tatham, the publisher of Monsoon Books, mentioning that he'd found my blog and would be interested in sending me copies of fiction and nonfiction that they've published for review and examination. I checked out their website, and discovered many titles that I'd seen in the bookstores here, which I hadn't realized were published locally.

And once he sent several of them to me, I was again taken with how nicely put together they were. A good eye toward design and composition, very professional, the equal of any large house in the US or UK. I believe they only publish trade paperbacks, sized perfectly to fit in your hands (about 5" x 7-3/4"), using cream colored paper easy on the eyes, with both glossy and matte covers. Their books typically have some sort of connection with Singapore (makes sense; why bother to establish an indie press here if you're not going to support the lit scene?), whether it's the author, the subject matter, or the themes explored. However, they aren't limiting themselves just to Singapore readers, as they distribute in North America, Australia, and all over Asia, and can be found on Amazon.com.

First selection from the pile was The Lies That Build a Marriage [ Select Books | BookSense | Amazon ], a collection by Suchen Christine Lim, who has previously won the Singapore Literature Prize. Ten stories tackling controversial subjects: homosexuality, abortion, transvestitism, infidelity, stripping, abandonment, child abuse, and prostitution. Things that perhaps polite society would like to forget about, but which remain nevertheless. For a Western reader, these topics may seem like no big deal, but it's a remarkable feat in conservative Singapore, and is a telling detail in the efforts to open up the society. The fact that the book was co-published by the National Arts Council is significant.

The stories themselves are a bit uneven. If the contents of an anthology are like a mix tape, then the selections for a collection are like a single artist's album, though both must adhere to principles of ordering: typically the first and last songs are the strongest of the bunch, with highs and lows in between to allow for a satisfying listening experience. And I have to admit to some confusion on the order of stories in this book.

The first three were originally written for church congregations, their messages too didactic. I prefer not to be lectured at in the fiction I read, and while the messages of tolerance are ones that I agree with, the execution is heavy-handed and obvious. It may be that this approach is necessary for Singaporean readers (or audience members, as they were originally read aloud), but Lim approaches other topics later in the book with more subtlety and grace, which made me wonder why these were all piled together at the front of the book. Based on the these three stories alone, I might not have continued reading, but I'm glad I did, since it does get better as the book progresses, where we get stories like "The Tragedy of My Third Eye," which is heartbreaking in its portrayal of a young girl struggling to learn English in school, and berated at home by her put-upon stepmother; and "Retired Rebel," which examines the life of an old soldier stuck in the glory days of his youth, and suffering a crush on his daughter's Filipino maid.

The Lies That Build a Marriage reads extremely fast. Lim doesn't slow down her prose with a lot of description, with the result that her fiction might not resonate with non-Singaporean readers. Without knowing where certain landmarks are, or the attitudes toward family life, or understanding the Singlish peppered throughout the dialogue, the reader unfamiliar with the context could feel lost. The prose is also occasionally clunky, especially when trying to explain Cantonese words or concepts in English. Compared to Catherine Lim (no relation), whose stories are lush and provide context through clear inference, and who also deals with such controversial topics in her fiction, Suchen Christine Lim's writing doesn't quite match up.

But there are also moments of beauty. The last story of the collection, "Ah Nah: An Interpretation," presents an older man talking at a banquet table to an older woman, and it is revealed that she is the man's one unrequited love, carried throughout his life since he was a boy. Ah Nah was a pipa girl, becoming a prostitute at age 14 to bring in money for her adoptive parents, and though the older man hasn't seen her since they were young, his rediscovery of her so late in life becomes both poignant and full of hope. And the writing in this piece really shines.

So, uneven on the whole, but worth the price of the book. If nothing else, it provides a unique window into the unsaid preoccupations of life in Singapore, and presents characters normally silenced by the social restrictions of living in such a conservative society.

My current to-be-read/reviewed pile: 22 September 2007

Graffiti Travel Guide: Singapore
Anxious Pleasures by Lance Olsen
The Lies That Build a Marriage by Suchen Christine Lim
Best American Fantasy ed. by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Dance Dance Dance (library book) by Haruki Murakami
Not Flesh Nor Feathers (ARC) by Cherie Priest
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett
A Public Space no. 3 & 4
The John Varley Reader by John Varley

I actually finished the Olsen and Lim, and will be blogging about them soon, and just this afternoon finished BAF, and will be reviewing it (hopefully) either for IRoSF or Bookslut, depending on who gets back to me first. The Priest and Burdett are for review as well. The Singapore guide will be getting a write-up for Vagablogging. The rest are for pleasure, and I may or may not blog about them.

The Seas
by Samantha Hunt

Gorgeously lyrical and wonderfully original, a grand culmination to Hunt's water-based fascinations (cf. "Famous Men (Three Stories)" in Trampoline, which first exposed me to Hunt's fiction). Reality and fantasy blur in this psychological examination of a remote seaside town plagued by alcoholism and depression, and of the young female narrator convinced she is a mermaid. Beautifully and unreliably told, full of wit and trenchant observation, a master class in minimalist slipstream. Highly recommended.

I was so jazzed to find out about this novel (thanks to a review from buymeaclue), and doubly so to be able to find a "used" copy (in new condition) at The Strand. I'm further excited to see that Hunt has a new novel coming out early next year, The Invention of Everything Else, about the last days of Nikola Tesla.

Theme anthologies are tricksy beasties; I say this having read a metric ton of them, as well as co-editing two (my name may be on the cover of Scattered, Covered, Smothered, but Janet played a much bigger part than book designer and illustrator; this oversight will be certainly be remedied with A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, where we will visibly share the editing credit). I've often compared a good anthology to a good mix tape: there are highs and lows, variation in story lengths and themes and styles (you don't want clumping of any of the three), and enough to pique your interest all the way through. Theme anthologies have the added difficulty of making sure all their stories are constrained within the theme; the looseness or tightness of this constraint depends on the editor's preference, but a story must still fit, otherwise readers may ask why it's even in there.

Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss had one more layer of complexity in their editing of Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing: making sure that all the stories fit their definition of "interstitial," which is itself very slippery and hard to define. Interstitialism is not a movement; the Interstitial Arts Foundation has made it very clear that the term is meant as an umbrella, to give a home to artists and writers whose work doesn't easily fit into any one genre. And so I appreciate that there wasn't too much space in the anthology given to the whole idea of what "interstitial writing" really is; I frankly could have done without Heinz Insu Fenkl's introduction, because it rehashes much of what he (and others) has said many times before, but I could see how it would be useful for people not familiar with the IAF. The back cover copy says it all for me, and the stories inside do a much better job of explaining what the whole interstitial thing is about by their very nature.

(I also appreciate that the subtitle is An Anthology... rather than The Anthology...; it reinforces the idea that they're not trying to establish concrete definitions of what an interstitial story is, and leaves room for similar such books.)

However, if you're like me and have an allergic reaction to any kind of genre definitions (or "non-genre" definitions), or even discourse that plays in this sandbox, Interfictions is still a damn fine book. Sherman and Goss both did an excellent job gathering a group of stories that stand alone but also contribute to the impetus behind publishing the anthology in the first place. Of the nineteen stories published, a good majority pushed my "good literature" buttons; you're never going to please everyone, but the fact that I really enjoyed two-thirds of what was published is a good sign. I won't mention which ones I did or didn't like, because I simply don't have time to analyze all of them, but I will talk a little further about two selections that are the standouts of the anthology for me (your mileage may vary): "Post Hoc" by Leslie What and "Emblemata" by Léa Sihol (trans. from the French by Sarah Smith).

In "Post Hoc," Stella is pregnant by her ex-boyfriend, and he won't return her calls. So she decides to mail herself to him. An unusual concept, although it has been done in real life, and was an idea used to somewhat different effect in John Schoffstall's "Fourteen Experiments in Postal Delivery." However, unlike Schoffstall's story, where the items being mailed become surreal in their extremes, "Post Hoc" treats mailing yourself like mailing anything else; Stella has to fill out all the right forms and make sure she's labelled properly. The conflict comes when her ex isn't home to sign for her, and doesn't show up at the post office to pick her up.

The whole tone of the story is very matter-of-fact magic realism, similar to the writing of Borges and Calvino, or more contemporarily to Kelly Link and Aimee Bender. Stella remains optimistic that her ex will pick her up, and so she decides to stay at the post office, waiting and waiting and waiting, putting her entire life on hold on the off-chance that he turns out not to be a total dick. She bides her time in the storage room, interacting with the other lost people there. There is such a wonderful simplicity to the whole story that makes it so easy to believe that this could actually happen. I've liked What's other stories (I read a whole mess of them before she taught the third week at Clarion), but this one absolutely charmed me.

There are a lot of things that she's working with here: what seems like a completely passive female protagonist who seems to not be able to survive without a man, the absurdity of the situation, the friendships that Stella strikes up with the postal carrier Joe and the retired postman Bart (who refuses to leave), and the interstitiality of the post office itself, what Dora describes in the afterword as "an ultimate liminal space -- always between destinations, never the destination itself. We send mail through, not to, the post office." A character who starts out as "weak," the stereotypical pining ex-girlfriend, turns out through her circumstance to find more happiness than she would have received through getting back with her jerky ex-boyfriend. It is a completely bizarre situation, and yet it totally works.

"Emblemata," subtitled "Reciting the Heart Sutra" grabbed me right away with its title; Buddhism has still not been greatly explored in literature of the fantastic, so when I see a tale that deals with Buddhist themes, I'm automatically interested; this does not mean the story will always be good, but the writer does get my attention right from the start. The protagonist, Alexandre Iacovleff, is a Russian Frenchman entering Afganistan of 1931, a dangerous place but also one of immense hospitality. He is drawn to the giant stone Buddhas of Bâmiyân (the ones very recently destroyed by the Taliban), and there meets a Mysterious Stranger. What follows is a recitation of the Heart Sutra as a discussion of Iacovleff's purpose in being in Afganistan in that time and his compulsion to draw and describe everything around him for posterity. The existential and basic questions that are explored, about attachment, about nothingness, about the nature of existence, take on some very complicated concepts but do so in a way that is compelling and easy to understand.

Although I'd be interested to struggle through this story in the original French, the English translation by Sarah Smith (I almost wrote Sarah Jane Smith; sorry, Doctor Who on the brain) is full of flavor and nuance, and itself a wonderful achievement. The language is subtle and complex, but never dull. Readers may complain that there is no action in this story, just talking, but it is fascinating conversation. The Mysterious Stranger, who never reveals exactly who he is (although we are told he is very old), notes that a sutra is not explained, only recited, so that the listener must come to his or her own conclusions, and the conclusions that Iacovleff comes to completely change the way he sees the world.

Like I said, these were the two stories that really excited me, but there is lots to enjoy in the anthology. The book itself is just the right size at just under 300 pages. The IAF is officially the publisher, although Small Beer Press had a big hand in production and distribution, which you know is a sign of high quality. In the grand scheme I don't know if Interfictions is an "important" book, but it's certainly worth checking out; you're bound to find something to blow off the top of your head.

I'm pretty late to the party on this book. It was originally published about a year ago amid much hype and pomp, and I figured I could wait a bit to pick it up. Being the first novel of a projected seven-book series also didn't really do much to entice me; I seem to have an almost allergic reaction these days to seeing "Book X in a Y-book cycle" or somesuch, mostly because I read a lot of books and no longer have the patience for long extended series that will take up time that I could have spent on other books. I only started reading the Harry Potter books after the fourth was published, and gulped them all in one go; I haven't gotten to the last two yet. Same with The Sandman; all ten volumes were already out when I purchased the first one. So finding out the next two or three or seven books in a cycle will be coming out in intervals of a year or more from the first book makes me a bit twitchy.

However, when Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press announced that he had Advance Reader Copies of the limited edition of The Lies of Locke Lamora, I immediately emailed him with a "Yes, please!" Mostly because Bill has great taste, and if he was willing to put the time and energy into producing a limited of an already published (and, from all accounts, successful) novel, then it was probably worth taking a look at. Edward Miller, one of my absolute favorite cover artists, also painted a new cover for the book, as well as several interior illos, more positives. And hey, free book.

Bill mailed it to me right before I moved to Singapore, and as I didn't have room to bring it with me, I shipped it surface mail along with some other books, and it arrived about two months later. I finally cracked it open exactly three weeks ago, and breathlessly turned the last page two days later. This is no small detail, especially as the book is around 550 pages long.

I love stories about con artists, even though what they do is fundamentally criminal. At heart, they trick people and steal from them, two things I'd feel horrible about if they happened to me or anyone I care about. However, books and movies about confidence men usually pit them against those whom we don't mind seeing duped, usually the wealthy and powerful, those people who made their fortunes on the backs of others and feel entitled to their elite status. (Ocean's Eleven was seven kinds of awesome, for the attention to detail, for the extremely elaborate long con that was performed, for the writing, for the acting, for the clothes, for the music. The next two sequels: not so much.) It's about surviving by intelligence and charm rather than brute force.

Locke Lamora, the titular protagonist, is a con man and a master thief, accruing massive amounts of coin with the help of his fellow Gentleman Bastards. Life in the duchy of Camorr is a hard one; crime is rampant, but there is an understood peace between the nobility and the criminal underworld of the city, a peace that Locke and his gang willfully and gleefully flout at any opportunity. The novel opens with a long con, perpetuated on Don and Dona Salvara to relieve them of half their great fortune. The extents that Locke goes to in order to convince his marks of his connection to the famous House of bel Auster -- a total change in clothing, attitude, accent, and personality -- are impressive and completely believable. And it looks as if the Gentleman Bastards may actually succeed in their biggest score yet.

But the arrival of the Grey King disturbs all of that. He begins killing the leaders of criminal gangs all over the city, with the effect of making Capa Barsavi -- Camorr's mob godfather, if you will -- a very nervous man, especially since the Grey King has ambitions on becoming the new Capa. Even worse, the Grey King has decided to make Locke integral to his plans, whether Locke wants to be or not.

The tone of the novel shifts at that point. At the beginning, it's clear that we'll not be seeing rainbows and puppies; slavery, prostitution, and murder are a way of life, and one must do whatever one can to survive in such a hostile place. But within this context, the planning and preparation and execution of the long con are exciting and fun. Will they get away with it? is the suspenseful question to the reader, and Lynch could have easily contained his narrative to this storyline; it would have been a much shorter book, however, and much less fulfilling. The Grey King disrupts all of Locke's plans, and suddenly he, and much of the city, is in very real mortal danger. Brutalities are painstakingly described from here on, and the tone becomes darker and more desperate. Now it's not just a question of whether Locke can con the Don and Dona out of their money, it's wondering whether he will be able to use all the tricks up his sleeve in order to even survive the day.

However, among this intense and fast-paced narrative (I wasn't kidding about being out of breath by the end), there is a lot of humor. Locke and the other Gentleman Bastards -- Jean Tannen and the twins Calo and Galdo Sanza -- have grown up together, and have an easy relationship that includes lots of verbal ribbing. The wordplay between these men, and their new recruit Bug, was clever and funny enough to make me laugh out loud at times. It's a smart move on Lynch's part, to give the reader a bit of relief through laughter before plunging one back into the fantastic events.

I honestly can't remember the last time I had so much fun with a book. The plot is twisty without getting confused, the characters are compelling and honest, and the Venice-inspired setting feels lived in and real, even amongst the secondary-world fantastica. The Lies of Locke Lamora is an incredible thrill ride, and it managed to steal two days from me without me even noticing.

Sadly, the beautiful SubPress edition of the book is sold out. However, a mass-market paperback edition is now available at a very affordable price.

Last week, when coalescent was in town, we browsed a Kinokuniya, and I noticed that the next book in the series, Red Seas Under Red Skies was already out. Niall assured me that if I liked Locke Lamora, I'd love the sequel. I'll have to see if I can persuade Bill to send me an ARC of this one as well. :)

Jonathan McCalmont, co-editor of Scalpel Magazine:

A new and, I suspect, final update on Scalpel’s status.

As of Thursday morning, it became clear to me that not only had Gabe yet again failed to provide the promised update, he had actually decided to pass material originally destined for Scalpel onto other websites without telling me. I emailed Gabe asking for clarification and, as no answer was forthcoming, I contacted Scalpel’s contributors and informed them that if Gabe is taking his material elsewhere, then it is probably a good sign that we should do the same. If you contributed to Scalpel then you should have received an email from me by now. If you have not then I can only apologise.

I decided to wait another day in case Gabe should contact me but as of this morning there was no response and as a result I am resigning from what remains of Scalpel. From this point onwards I will have nothing to do with Scalpel.

Many many thanks to all of you who supported Scalpel either by talking about us, pledging work or actually helping us provide the content that we did manage to put up. You are all superb people. As for the people who received ARCs but didn’t get round to writing for us, I would only request that you do write about the works and find good homes for them.

I will also be writing up my account of what happened and publishing it on my site in the hope that it serves as a clear and easily retrievable record that’ll stand as a warning to others.

Thanks for all the support.

I guess it's lucky that my review of The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate went up with the first issue, although I notice that the link is now dead, and the page has disappeared into cyberspace. Dammit.

My review of Pico Iyer's travel book Video Night in Kathmandu went up today at Vagablogging. Though it's been almost 20 years since this was written, it's still relevant, and is a fascinating snapshot of Asia in the 1980s.

Scalpel Magazine, that brainchild of gabe chouinard and Jonathan McCalmont as a repository of "street-level criticism" of genre fiction, is now online, with a contribution from yours truly. The first batch of content is now up, including a guest editorial by Pat Cadigan, an interview with Charlie Stross, and looks at Rush's 1976 album 2112, and three long fictions: Ink by Hal Duncan, Gradisil by Adam Roberts, and my review of The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang.

Go give it a look-see. A new quality review magazine, especially one headed up by the gabester, is a thing to behold. If you'd like to write for Scalpel, check out the reviewerfesto and books received.

Six more recent books, presented in micro review format:

A Scattering of Jades by Alexander C. Irvine
Incredible wild ride through mid-19th C. New York, with an elaborate conspiracy concerning ancient Aztec gods, dead men brought back to life, Aaron Burr, and P.T. Barnum. Irvine channels Tim Powers a bit here, but makes the story incredibly unique and fascinating. I stayed up until 2 a.m. one night while at my grandmother's to finish it, and some of the imagery still stays with me. Brutal and violent at times, but compulsively readable, and smart. It's difficult to believe this was Irvine's first novel, because it is so accomplished. Winner of the Crawford Award.

Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler
Another first novel, taking place in a similar time period, but the tone couldn't be more different. Chin's journey as he tries to help the incomprehensible white woman, later dubbed "Sarah Canary" for the sounds she makes, beautifully illustrates the plight of those living and working on the west coast of the US at that time. A bit shaky in parts, and weaker than her subsequent novels, but it still presents how everyone who meets this strange woman is changed by her. It's also interesting how each of the characters assigns her a different identity depending on how they see her.

The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges
Fun and diverting encyclopedia of fictional and mythological creatures from stories of all kinds, ably assisted by the illustrations of Peter Sis. I raced through this book in a single afternoon. Most of the creatures I was already familiar with, but a few, such as the catoblepas, have stirred the creative juices a bit. The Fish in the Mirror, presented herein, was the inspiration for China Mieville's The Tain.

The Limits of Enchantment by Graham Joyce
Hedgerow magic and midwifery in a small English village in the 1960s. Joyce's prose shines as always, though the story itself is not as strong as his previous work, particularly The Facts of Life. Much more of a mainstream novel, though magical-seeming elements -- such as the ritual of the Asking -- do occasionally pepper the plot as a young midwife fights to stay on her land. A minor work, but one with lots of heart.

Stay by Nicola Griffith
Astonishing and heartwrenching sequel to The Blue Place. Aud Torvingen's grief as she deals with a death she can't stop thinking she caused is a palpable thing, and her ways of coping provide for fascinating reading. An incredibly capable and seeming invincible female protagonist, and she is turned vulnerable and human with the absence of her lover. Griffith's prose has never been more mellifluous, and Aud's gradual recovery as she helps a friend find his fiancee breaks my heart on every page. I eagerly await the next Aud book, Always.

You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem
Short and slight, and perhaps my least favorite Lethem novel. Though he populates the book with quirky characters, I find myself not caring about a single one, even Lucinda, the protagonist, who does everything she can to keep her band together. I don't know if it's the setting, the incredible egocentrism and narcissism, or the obvious cleverness, but my impression after turning over the last page was: enh. It does a good enough job of chronicling the nascence and potentiality of a rock band and their big breakout performance, but Scott Westerfeld does it better in The Last Days and also makes me root for the characters. Occasional moments of brilliance almost peek through, but although I'm a big fan of Lethem's writing, this one just doesn't do it for me.

The latest issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction is now online, and includes my review of Cherie Priest's Dreadful Skin. The review does include some plot spoilers, because it was difficult for me to even approach the review without discussing some of them, but knowing them will hopefully not take away from a reading of the text; however, if you're a purist about these things, feel free to just skip the review and go snag the book.

The full contents of the issue:

Editorial
* "Science (Fiction)" by Bluejack

Obituary
* "Robert Anton Wilson" by Ursula Pflug

Interview
* "An Interview with Mark Finn" by Dotar Sojat
* "An Interview with Elizabeth Bear" by Lyda Morehouse

Feature
* "Telling Stories of Your Life" by Ruth Nestvold, Jay Lake

Con Report
* "Boskone 44" by K. A. Laity

Essay
* "Captain Video" by Steven Utley
* "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future" by Daniel M. Kimmel

Review
* "February Short Fiction" reviewed by Lois Tilton
* "Carnival by Elizabeth Bear" reviewed by Joe Tokamak
* "Dreadful Skin by Cherie Priest" reviewed by Jason Erik Lundberg

I just finished Charlie Anders' novel Choir Boy, and it was quite a rollercoaster ride. Berry, a thirteen-year-old choir boy, wants nothing more than to keep his high choral voice. With sopranos cracking into puberty all around him, Berry grows desperate, and ends up with access to hormone pills. When he begins growing breasts, he must decide how much to sacrifice in order to remain a choir boy forever.

This is complicated by wildly dysfunctional parents (often leaving him home alone to fend for food and company), a transsexual whore who wants to remake Berry into a woman, and the boys around him at school and in choir who fear change, especially when it relates to gender.

The prose moves quickly (at times, a bit too quickly, such as transitions from place to place without any such visual indication), with the first half of the book dealing with Berry's own reaction to his new physical assets, and the second half exploding as his secret is revealed to those around him. Anders' evocation of Berry's plight as he is pulled in eighteen different directions -- is he still a boy? does he want to be a girl? is he gay? straight? lesbian? -- is heartwrenching, and you just wish everyone would leave him alone to figure out his own decisions. The poor guy's just thirteen, and yet he has to make gender decisions that will last the rest of his life.

This sort of leads to my one problem with the book, in that Berry never feels thirteen. With everything going on around him, as well as his behavior and maturity, he always reads at least sixteen years old. Conversations are just a bit too smart, cultural awareness is just a bit too spot on. There are plenty of pubescent boys who are mature for their ages (I was one of them), but this went beyond that. Every time his age came up in the text, it was a shock, as I kept forgetting that he was not even in high school yet.

Still, Choir Boy is a funny and compelling read, and Berry's experiences as both a boy and a girl are a fascinating window into the life of a young transsexual.

I've been furiously trying to read a last batch of books so that I can put them up at Second Chance Book Adoption, and I realized I hadn't done any capsule reviews here in a while. So the following are tiny reviews of the last six books I've read, not even capsule, but smaller, quicker, right to the point, micro, with the most recent read book (finished only an hour ago) first:

The Facts of Life by Graham Joyce
Charming and beautiful coming-of-age story in post-blitz Coventry. Cassie, the youngest daughter of seven, can't raise her new son Frank, and so her mother elists the aid of her sisters. Frank's brief bit of time in each household -- an idyllic family farm, an austere spiritualist gathering ground, a syndicalist commune in Oxford -- teaches him new and different things about living in a country ravaged by world war. Incredibly written, with a tremendous amount of heart. Books like these are why I keep coming back to Graham Joyce's fiction.

Wings to the Kingdom by Cherie Priest
Phenomenal follow-up to Priest's debut novel Four and Twenty Blackbirds. Eden Moore is dragged into a supernatural mystery at the Chickamauga battleground, and must deal with the public reaction to her ability to speak with the dead. Incredibly written, with a fast-paced storyline that still takes time to fully develop character. Priest cements her place in the Southern Gothic canon. Highly recommended.

Gospel by Wilton Barnhardt
A tour-de-force, a contemporary epic to rival Ben Hur. Part theological crash course, part suspenseful travelogue, part erudite scholarship, part hilarious character examination. Rumors of a lost gospel of Matthias, the thirteenth Disciple, leads to an international chase through England, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Africa, and the Holy Land. Catholic grad student Lucy Dantan must accompany the surly Dr. O'Hanrahan to find the gospel before it falls into the wrong hands or is destroyed. Witty, dense, and fiercely intelligent.

Octavian Nothing, Volume 1 by M.T. Anderson
An incredible historical novel set in Boston during the days just before the Revolutionary War, where Octavian, a young slave, along with his beautiful mother, are the subjects of the experiments of the Novanglian College of Lucidity. He is gifted with the highest level of schooling and music, but when the college falls on hard times, his life takes a radical change. Gorgeously told, with incredible detail to historical accuracy, and an unflinching eye to the issues of the day. Winner of the National Book Award.

Vagabonding by Rolf Potts
Subtitled "An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel," this book of practical and philosophical travel advice is a breath of fresh air, emphasizing the importance of traveling light and not placing too many expectations on your experiences. A very Buddhist way of looking at travel, and of applying these values to your home life. And Potts' insistence that long-term travel is obtainable for anyone is a welcome one.

98 Reasons for Being by Clare Dudman
Fictional account of the birth of modern psychiatry. Dr. Heinrich Hoffman, author of the children's book Struwwelpeter, runs an asylum in 1850s Frankfurt, and decides to treat a new patient, a Jewish girl named Hannah Meyer, in an unusual way: talking to her, and then listening to her. Dudman's evocation of the time and place, and of the inner workings of Hannah's mind (in the form of hallucinogenic semiotic waking dreams), resonate with remarkable poesy, and her writing sings; she is the Theodora Goss of historical fiction, and the book is even more accessible than her previous effort One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead.

From Bill Schafer at the SubPress blog:

In the past few weeks we’ve received a number of Advance Reading Copies for forthcoming titles. If you review for someplace of note, or have a heavily trafficked blog, by all means drop us a note — our email’s at the bottom of this page — and let us know what titles you might be interested in reviewing.

The ARCs include:
New Amsterdam (Elizabeth Bear);
D.A. (Connie Willis);
The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate (Ted Chiang)
To the Dark Star (Robert Silverberg);
Dreadful Skin (Cherie Priest);
The Shadows Kith and Kin (Joe R. Lansdale);
Getting to Know You (David Marusek);
and You’re Not Fooling Anyone… (John Scalzi).

A good chance to get a sneak peek at some forthcoming books, all of which sound interesting. Bill already sent me the Willis and the Chiang without prompting, and I just requested the Scalzi. If you're interested, just shoot Bill an email at subpress (at) earthlink (dot) net.