someone says it good

Don't you just love it when there's a book on your TBR list or in the pile and you come across something that instantly moves it to the top? Well, Melymbrosia just read Haruki Murakami's After the Quake, something I've been meaning to do for a couple of years now. And she writes well of it:

The stories are hard to describe--not slow but very careful; lucid; details and disconnected moments building up to something extraordinary at the end, some silent epiphany of connection or disconnection, some discovery of hope or despair, some surge of humor or joy or sorrow. The collection reminds me, oddly, of Edward P. Jones' Lost in the City, because despite different styles and subject matters, at the end of each collection, I feel like the separate stories combine to create a greater whole; at the end of each collection, I feel a great sense of peace: as if the world just got quieter and closer, or I just got bigger and wiser. Oh, I think, so this is what it feels like to love the world; not with vague altruism or any sort of blindness to faults and flaws, but with the most particular, knowing, and tender affection. Oh. Oh.

The pile just got reordered.

Also, unrelatedly, Clarion East is ending (has ended?). One of the students kept a remarkably detailed journal, on the teaching of the instructors and his specific story experiences while there. If you're a writing instruction voyeur, check it out. Instructors have been Nancy Kress, Kelly Link (and sometimes Gavin Grant), Jeff Ford, Andy Duncan, and Gordon VanGelder (and possibly some people I'm forgetting). For those of you who don't know, Clarion is the SF short fiction boot camp and there are East (East Lansing, for now) and West (Seattle) divisions.

worm "Blue," Lucinda Williams

namecheck Christopher "No Makeover" Barzak