Heehaw, the Book
What’s the funniest book you ever read? May not necessarily be the book that made you laugh the most.
Justin Taylor—
Where I Write: Fantasy & Science Fiction Authors in Their Creative Spaces (via Michael Hemmingson on facebook)
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Power quote: Seduced By His Touch, by Tracy Anne Warren
Let's just be friends, okay?
She lifted an eyebrow. “You want a truce, do you?”
“Yes, most particularly in the bedroom.” His fingers inched toward the small of her back, pausing to draw clever little circles over a spot where she was extremely sensitive.
Damn him for knowing about that spot, she thought as she arched involuntarily beneath his touch. Her heart hammered, telltale moisture gathering between her thighs.
“It’s not as if we’d be breaking any rules,” he pointed out with husky persuasion. “Quite the contrary, in fact, since our union is sanctioned by the laws of both God and man. So why deny ourselves? Why not enjoy what pleasure we can find?”…
In a devastating move, he stroked his hand over her naked bottom., then slid a pair of fingers deep into her aching core. Her spine arched, instant bliss flooding her system.…
And he was right, she did love it. And she would be devastated if he stopped. But he had to know that already, since her body was quite literally weeping from the ecstacy he’d given her, and was giving her still.
The Interview Awards: Rivka Galchen
Interviews with novelists seem to always run the risk of being completely inane. (So…. how’d you come up with the plot of your book? Your protagonist is craa-aazy! How ’bout that? ) A lot of interviews have the same confused, polite tone. If you haven’t read the book they’re talking about then the interview might not make any sense but if you have read it, the interview might be boring. Either that or the writer ends up just talking about their “process” (3 hours every day, only after midnight, in the bathtub… blahblahblah…) which can be interesting sometimes but is often dull.
Somehow, though, I like reading these interviews despite having a lot to complain about. Rivka Galchen gives particularly good ones so I’ve decided to give her three highly arbitrary HTMLgiant awards based on one interview in The L Magazine.
Best alternative to just saying “Um, No.”:
The L: The omnipresent character Tzvi Gal-Chen is named after your father. Is there significance behind the names of any of the other characters?
RG: If you take all the letters of the names of the different characters, shuffle them, then transpose their value an X increment, it reveals the terrifying and silent name of the God of our divine disorder.
READ MORE >
Bye America
Taking a random, spur of the moment trip with Ken B. to Paris, Turin, and wherever else things decide to tell us to get. Hopefully will still be chiming in on some of y’alls during that time, from Saturday to 8-10 days or so abroad.
Since I have the night to decide what books I’m going to bring with me on the two 14 hour flights, maybe I could use some help. I have a lot of books to choose from. If you feel like it, take a peek at the books I haven’t read, and make suggestions from the archives of which ones should come along in my bag?
Right now the arm of my sofa is placeholding The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud, The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic. Not married to those selections, so any ‘Dude, read this, man’-ing would be most rad.
As well would any recommendations of must-see places in Paris, Turin, or the local outlying regions thereabout.
Bye!
What We Talk About When We Try To Talk About What To Call The Stuff We Write: Notes Toward an Answer to Sam Pink’s Question from Yesterday
>>is there any definable characteristic that separates what is called “flash fiction” from what is called “short story” or “novella” or “novel.”<< (click thru for Sam’s whole post)
When I was younger I was obsessed with word-counts. I always wanted to know how long a book was “supposed” to be. No writer I have ever asked about this has ever wanted to give a straight answer to this question. I used to think it was because they were fussy and protective over their secrets, but now that I am older and wiser I understand that it is because they don’t actually know. Nobody does. When Amazon put in that feature with all the book stats, it was one of the happiest days of my life. I spent hours looking up every book I could think of, to see how long they all were. A few months ago, when I switched to a Mac, I was delighted to learn the Pages gives me a running word-count at the bottom of the work-window, and that if I highlight a section of text, I instantly get the word-count for that section. (This blog-window does the same thing, btw.)
But many years before the machines came to the rescue, there was one man who attempted to give me the answers I sought. READ MORE >
Still going with Calvino, fella.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqHU9oh0hMA
BOMBlog: Russian Avant-Garde
Those who are following my year-long Russian lit journey might be interested to glance over at the BOMBlog, where Kevin Kinsella has an essay about the Russian Avant-Garde, particularly the photos of Aleksandr Rodchenko, whose portraits of Lilya Brik, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Osip Brik have shifted through various meanings/uses: photographic evidence of the threesome’s close friendship, symbols of the Russian Avant-Garde movement, and state propaganda posters.