Are You There ILB? It's Me, Scott.

Bloody Seward, i curse him when I look at the Scott mixtapes taking up all that space on my hard drive. Good to see you, and pleased to hear about Rufus as well.

I go to Lithub and The Millions now too. Do you guys go there? Where else do you go for Lit stuff these days? Maria also got me a print subscription to the NYRB.

more and more i'm just going to the lists of contemporary small publishers. one of the things that's happened during lockdown is that I've been reading contemporary stuff from small publishers - as a number of people on here will tell you, the Dostoyevsky Wannabe list is variable, but their approach encourages innnovation and has produced some really interesting writing.

Hey Scott!

I follow a few small publishers on twitter, for when I'm after newish stuff - Tilted Axis and Silver Press spring to mind straight away.

Hey!

I forgot to mention, the SF and Fantasy writer Kelly Link got an arts grant and bought a book store that was for sale near me in Easthampton, Ma and now its filled with weird cool new stuff. She also runs Small Beer Press which is a cool indie:

https://smallbeerpress.com/

also, i mentioned Open Letter Books up top, and they are really worth checking out for international writers that probably never would have been translated here otherwise:

https://www.openletterbooks.org/

Cool. Didn't know she ran Small Beer. Or maybe I did and forgot.

Kelly link rules

nell zink and jenny offill are both wonderful. i'll try not to fill another thread with my negative thoughts about t*lentino's work

anyway hi skot you've been missed!!!

Kelly Link's 2014 Get In Trouble=can't-bust-'em short stories: punk, never mind the cyber. It's like she scarfed down the best issues of RAW as a child, for one thing. Also ace: "The White Cat's Divorce," in 70th Anniversary Issue (September/October 2019) of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (orig. commissioned by an art museum for exhibit "Dread and Delight," prev. appeared only in their catalog).
Think her husband runs Hard Case Crime?

Maybe. Almost said no, but was thinking of a different power couple in that circle.

Seems he’s married to Naomi Novik.

Oh yeah. Link's hub is her partner in Small Beer. Really enjoyed Novik's fantasy novel Uprooted.

Think what I was thinking of was the Hard Case Crime guy's day job boss was married to somebody with whom I had some passing familiarity.

Scott did you ever read Zazen by Vanessa Veselka? I thought it was really cool and might fit in well with some of what you've been reading. I feel like I've heard good things about Flowers of Mold elsewhere but can't remember where.

i have not read that.

there is a big wave of cool Korean and Japanese and Chinese women writers (and men too) and I try to write their names down when I see them.

i bought this recently:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/315kmOgK7yL._SX308_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

got this too. speculative Chinese stories:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/715Y%2BByQMaL.jpg

In this first book in the brand-new Calico Series, we bring you work by some of today's most exciting writers from China and Hong Kong, including Dorothy Tse (tr. Natascha Bruce), Zhu Hui (tr. Michael Day), and Enoch Tam (tr. Jeremy Tiang). Lightly touching on issues of urbanization, sexuality, and propaganda, the collection builds a world both utterly disorienting and disturbing familiar, prompting the question: Where does reality end and absurdity begin in a world pushed to its very limits?

those are some good covers

I thought Ha Jin's novel Waiting was remarkable, got into it like a Gong Li-Zhang Yimou movie. Entranced/unnerved by Tang Fei's "Broken Stars," title story of Ken Liu's latest anthology. Will have to try again with some of the others. Tang Fei! Remember the name.

Vanessa veselka has a new novel coming out later this year.

Hey Scott, hey ILB
Good to see you last summer. Thanks for the list! Thanks for starting ILB! I remember that. I loved The New Me by Halle Butler too, and also I’m about a third of the way through Ducks, Newburyport and love her, she makes me laugh every couple of pages… when she’s not freaking out about something ELSE. Yes Erma Bombeck. I’ll give Rachel Kusk another try. I liked Toxology (first part) too. Novels I liked: Recent Work by Andrew Martin, about recent MFA grads trying to find their way; A Terrible Country by Keith Gessen about spending a year with his grandmother in Moscow. Cassandra At the Wedding, from 1962, by Dorothy Baker, who wrote The Golden Arm, she’s like Hemingway. Natalia Ginzberg’s Happiness, as Such. Sally Rooney.
Crime: The Smack by Richard Lange

some summer reading. i don't want to blab up your seasonal thread:

Doxology – Nell Zink (Even better than Nicotine. A lot of fun. I love the problem-solving she does with people’s work/living situations. Such a weird thing to like about a writer! But she did that in Nicotine too. Everything gets wrapped up in the end in a way that doesn’t often happen in real life, but I’m good with that. It’s satisfying. I’d like to read essays by her. About culture/politics/etc.)

Radio Free Vermont – Bill McKibben (Very funny and wholesome. The climate dude should write more novels.)

Blue Moon – Lee Child (I can’t believe that Lee Child’s brother is going to write his series from now on! What a world we live in. I hope he has fun in retirement.)

Tear It Down – Nick Petrie (PTSD crime novels are all the rage. This series is a good one.)

Temporary – Hilary Leichter (This was great. It really was. So funny and goofy.)

Japanese By Spring – Ishmael Reed (I feel like the joke went on for too long and he doesn’t really “skewer” people/attitudes as ruthlessly as I might have liked. Definitely a book that could have only been written by one writer.)

The Demon Breed – James H. Schmitz (I loved this. I didn’t know J.H. Schmitz at all. This is my kinda non-epic SF.)

Portrait Of Myself – Margaret Bourke-White (Stalin! Gandhi! Stalin’s Mom! MB-W got around.)

Home : Social Essays – LeRoi Jones (That Cuba essay at the beginning is my fave. So evocative. There’s other good stuff in here too though.)

Heartbreaker : Stories – Maryse Meijer

The Savage – Frank Bill (I read half. That seemed like enough. A book in search of a streaming t.v. show. Not bad though. I just have a lot to read. I think its funny for some reason when people in a feral future speak in some olde-tyme William Faulkner way. Or Cormac McCarthy way? It must be fun to write.)

The Unpassing – Chia-Chia Lin (Sad and beautiful. That feeling of being so alone. In your house. In your town. Among other people. Stranded.)

The Topeka School – Ben Lerner (I read half. That seemed like enough. I wanted to read it because of all the ravings by other writers, but I just didn’t really care about it one way or another. It wasn’t compelling. He obviously knows how to write. It kind of reminded me of that marriage movie that everyone loved with ScarJo and his generations’s Adrian Brody, Adam Driver. I really didn’t get it. Sometimes I think people can be too young for their material. But, it’s good to give it the old college try, I guess. Maybe Noah Baumbach and Ben Lerner can work on a sequel to The Squid & The Whale together. Maybe American critics really want a new Franzen to love. I really don’t.)

The Mountain – Paul Yoon (Again, half. Again, that seemed to be enough. Again, the old college try. Again, yes, he can write for sure. Again, maybe too young for his material? I have a couple more by him, and I will try those. I obviously don’t know what Ben Lerner and Paul Yoon have done in their lives, but it seems like they went to school a lot. Which is great! I love over-educated people. I just want them to either be way smarter than me or have an off-the-charts-fantabulous imagination/style.)

Underland – Robert Macfarlane (This is exactly what I needed to read after two books I couldn’t finish. So good. Some of the grooviest sentences in the world. I wish I had written them down. Some of the best words too: bleb, ruckle, scarp, karst, crustal, kist, gryke, neap. Not fiction though. Highly recommended!)

i'm still occasionally reading ducks, newburyport. it's good to dip into. i should finish by winter. also doing the same with The Bible. my fave part so far is when God asks Moses to get someone to make God pancakes.

Think I may finally get to Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, a Scott pick from way back, maybe one of the first times I came to ILB. Recently uncovered an ancient thrift store purchase, the 1965 edition, with intro by Randall Jarrell. Much bigger than I remembered, but that should be okay.

Scott! I had to drive up your way today for a nasal swab (!) and passed your store, craning my neck to see if you were open (?) and inside

Glad to see you here though and know you're doing alright....

The Man Who Loved Children is a baggy monster but hell, it's good - and that Jarrell intro is excellent.

The Demon Breed – James H. Schmitz (I loved this. I didn’t know J.H. Schmitz at all. This is my kinda non-epic SF.)

Hi Scott, I have read a few Schmitz short stories in the not too distant past - the much-anthologised 'Grandpa' in Penguin SF Omnibus selected by Brian Aldiss, 'The Second Night of Summer' in Oxford Bk of SF Stories selected by Tom Shippey, 'Balanced Ecology' in Norton Bk of SF selected by Le Guin & Attebery. Good clean prose and inventive world building etc - a lot of his stuff seems to have young adult protaganists, tho the stories I read didn't exactly feel like YA SF à la the Heinlein of Podkayne of Mars etc - thank god, maybe.

I also have this nice old Ace pbk waiting to be read - the following in the blurb on the back made me laugh - "The story of Telzey Amberdom, the one in a million mentalist..."

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327701452l/6446532.jpg