Do you read YA fiction?  If not, why not?  Did you read it when you were younger, and then stop?  On some level do you consider it “less respectable” to read or write it than to read/write literary fiction for adults?  Can you define the difference?  If you wrote a novel intended for adults with an adolescent protagonist and a publisher said they’d take it but only if they could market it as a YA novel, would that be cool with you?

Some of us like HTML Giant contributor Mike Young. So we wrote birthday sestinas for Mike Young. Happy (now belated) birthday, Mike Young!

In celebration of Mr. Kimball’s & Mr. Devine’s appearance tonight, I’m giving two copies of WORDS away. Make a sentence out of these words: a, and, it, dog, runs, mother, blood, diamond, tired, heavy, wall, takes, glimpses, eats, burnt, opaque, crams, the, him, her, dead, fall, yes, their. Add your email. I’ll pick two favorites by the 9pm PST.

“The hallucinatory twilights, the nightmarish birds, the exquisite putrefactions of the mangrove swamps seemed the cherished memories of a past he had not lived.” –Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons.

Write the cherished memories of a past you have not lived in 13 words or less.

What’s the last thing you read that really bit your head?

1. Please welcome the newest Giant contributor, the radical Kristen Iskandrian, who rules.
2. Don’t forget tonight at 9 PM Eastern (again, 6 PM for you west coast freaks) Michael Kimball will read live here on HTMLGIANT, with a guest opening reading by Andy Devine. See you there!

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPxgi-PiNFE

To whet your appetite even more…

SPD is offering 40% off on all poetry books from the 20th century through the end of April, they have included a list of choice choices, anything else hot come to mind to pick up?

Yesterday, it snowed. But today, this.

There’s a nice reading log of Ander Monson’s Vanishing Point up at the NYTimes book blog, Paper Cuts. It asks about the future of the book, where the book is a, uh, book.