Kelly Link is a rock star. That is all ye know and all ye ever need know.

(Yay!)

Short on time this morning, as I did the unthinkable and actually responded to some e-mail this morning. I'm finally reading the first Zoetrope All-Story anthology, which originally came out in 2000. The first story by Sarah Powers is quite good, there's a sedate loopiness to her style that I find myself liking quite a bit. The ending of The Baker's Wife didn't quite work for me. I felt it copped out in several ways, but then, I enjoyed the beginning and middle more than the end. Like a lot of quote-unquote-no quotes mainstream stories, this one based around a fantasy concept put forth by Coppola as a commission to Powers, things are explained a little too much. I would have preferred the mysterious tension that carried me through the story to actually carry me all the way through it, out the other side. Ah well. Still, one of the most well written stories I've come across in awhile.

The idea, the commission for the story, was a love story about people who are dreaming the same dreams. (Great idea.) It reminds me of that Suzanne Vega song from 9 objects of desire about the hotel room in France. (Great song if you haven't heard it.) Of course, that's a love story about people who don't have the same dream.

Two stories of interest from yesterday's Washington Post. The second in Anne Hull's shaping-up-to-be-a-Pulitzer-contender series on immigrants in the South and a dispute over when the Mayans learned to write.

Stay warm.