Word Blur

TV reading

Finally finished Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, falling hard for the title story, which is about a group of teenagers living in a small town in Vermont who are drawn together by their love of a television show called The Library, which may or may not be real and may or may not be magic and is sort of like a cross between Buffy and the works of Rumiko Takahashi.  I'm pretty sure that Kelly Link wrote this story just for me, maybe without knowing it, and that is really is magic.  Also, if anyone knows where to get any episodes of The Library, that would be really, really good.

More Screw

I forgot to mention how much The Turn of the Screw reminded me of Kelly Link's amazing short story, "Stone Animals."  Not an accident, I'm sure.

Also, if memory serves, the fabulous Edward Gorey also nurtured a distaste for Henry James.  As Gorey also liked Trollope and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I feel I'm in excellent company.

Rabbit Ears

cHave been squirreling my way through Best American Short Stories 2005 for awhile now and finally read Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals,” originally published in Conjunctions. Believe the hype! Beautiful, funny, unsettling, haunted. Part ghost story, part Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, part family drama. Perfectly captures the mayhem, chaos, and weird systems (children performing inventories of grass and burying armadillo purses full of precious objects; all the things you come to believe together about objects and stories that no one else sees) that make up family life. Plus, impossible not to fall in love with a piece that as Link writes “owes a debt especially to the short stories of the late Joan Aiken.” It’s the sort of thing you finish, then pick up and start all over within the hour.

Brain Float

I started reading Michael Chabon's Werewolves in Their Youth (collecion of short stories) last night.  Gosh dang it, he's just so darn talented...It's something.  But mostly, after reading a bizillion short stories for my class,  and trying my hand at writing one, I'm looking forward to watching lots of TV.   If you want to do some reading about the TV I'll be watching, check out whedonesque.com which is ablaze with updates about Serenity, the movie based on Joss Whedon's  (Buffy creator) brief-lived space western  Firefly, that's due out on Sept. 30th.

Short

I've been reading lots of short stories, because I'm in a fiction writing class these days.  We're required to read things out of the 2005 Pushcart Prize anthology.  I also just read "Hills Like White Elephants" by Hemingway, because someone in my class wrote an homage.  I don't like Hemingway very much.  If anyone has any suggestions about good collections, please let me know.  It looks like Michael Chabon edited Best American Short Stories 2005. (due out next month).  Short stories are very hard to write, alas.