Elsewheres

• The new issue of Strange Horizons has been posted, and includes a new story by Gavin J. Grant, a poem by Sherree Renee Thomas, some reviews, and perhaps the strangest (or most pretentious) column I've yet written.
  
  
• James Patrick Kelly's Hugo-nominated novella Burn is now available as a free download in all sorts of different electronic formats. Thoreau would not be amused.
  
  
• Business Week on small press publishing.
  
  
• Linguistics and science fiction in The Embedding by Ian Watson.
  
  
• "Permeable Membrane" by Adrienne Rich.
  
  
• The reckless art of book blurbing.
  
  
• A conversation with D.J. Waldie, who wrote a marvelous book I read a few years ago about suburbs, Holy Land.
  
  
• Manholes of Japan.
  
  
• An interview with George Saunders (whose writing seems to be becoming a rather stale and predictable parody of itself, but his interviews remain interesting).
  
  
• Sonya Taaffe compares James Bond and Gor.
  
  
• "And what have we here? A boy, or a girl?" (The discussion in the comments is particularly interesting.)
  
  
• Giovanni's Room: The gay bible of a straight guy.
  
  
• KGB Bar Lit.
  
  
• Alberto Manguel, "With Borges".
  
  
• Gustave Dore links.
  
  
• Lots of people are doing the abecedarian meme, but I was particularly taken by Clare Dudman's "X by Dr. Grump".
  
  
• queer.
  
  
• Podcasts of the Dead.
  
  
• Over at the LBC, Jeffrey Ford Week ended with a podcast and Gina Frangello Week has begun. (What did I think of Frangello's book? An interesting story, with an interesting take on Freud, but the actual writing bothered me for some reason -- it felt amateurish in spots. Nonetheless, I preferred it to a couple of other books, including the winning selection. More on that later, though.)
  
  
• Early Bengali science fiction.
  
  
• Why Dan Brown's writing is very, very, very bad.