I loved this essay. Jessica Kane, thank you. I love (good) historical fiction and I love the blurred lines between history and memoir and interpretation and biography and fiction and I, too, am ” missing the gene others seem to have that makes them worry, when they read a novel, about what is true. ” I also have concerns about the maligning of historical fiction as some sort of sub-genre, as if all history weren’t fiction, as if all history weren’t interpretation, as if anything other than a rote recitation of dates and names and places was could be other than subjective, spun, partly conjecture.

Celebrate Pushkin’s birthday with Melville House! This offer makes me outstandingly happy:

To help you get into the spirit of the thing, Melville House is offering all of our Russian novellas at 50% off the retail price—for one day only. That includes Pushkin’s own Tales of Belkin, Tolstoy‘sThe Death of Ivan Ilych and The Devil, Dostoevsky‘s The Eternal Husband, Gogol’s How the Two Ivans Quarrelled, Turgenev‘s First Love, andMy Life by Anton Chekhov. Clicking on the titles above will take you directly to the book page.

I love this piece by Sarah Rose Etter at Matter Press. Love, love, love.

Have you been reading Everyday Genius this month? No? Shame on you. Go back and read, every single day. Genius abounds, just like the site promises.

Your collection doesn't have to look like this. Though I wish mine did.

Surprise! Having books around makes your kids smarter. They do better in school. They’re more empathetic human beings.

After examining statistics from 27 nations, a group of researchers found the presence of book-lined shelves in the home — and the intellectual environment those volumes reflect — gives children an enormous advantage in school.

It’s so sad that it takes a study to tell us having books around makes a kid a smarter, better person. I don’t know very many people I respect who admit to never, ever reading a book. I know a few. They have their reasons. But the smartest, best people I know all read.

I have a little nephew, my husband’s nephew, actually, and his mom recently posted pictures of him “reading” books on Facebook. His parents read all the time. They say that although he’s not even two, he loves books already–loves to look at them, touch them, hold them. I’m sure he’ll love to read, when he’s ready. I’m sure he’ll be a smart kid who’ll love learning, because he’ll have grown up in an environment when reading is valued. I feel sorry for all the little kids who haven’t got a single book in their house to inspire them toward the intellectual life themselves, toward a wonderful second life in books that can’t be replicated anywhere else.

This terrifying picture was taken by Peter Hinson, and you can buy it from his sister on Etsy if you click here.

One of my favorite books that I’ve read this year so far is Ethel Rohan’s wonderful debut, Cut Through the Bone. I finally had the chance to review it over at Vouched.

xkcd put together this chart that breaks down how much radiation we’re exposed to normally, how much the Japanese around the power plant and elsewhere are being exposed to, and what exactly that means in terms of health and safety. Really interesting stuff.

I’m reading this weekend in DC with Joseph Riippi, Laura van den Berg, and Paul Zaic at the inaugural reading of the Three Tents Reading Series, put together by the folks at Big Lucks.  If you’re here or close, come on over at 7pm Saturday the 26th, to the Big Hunt in Dupont Circle, and watch some good people read. This should be a very fun event.

Over at Fiction Writers Review, Tyler McMahon reviews Alan Heathcock’s short story collection, Volt. I’ve been very much looking forward to reading this one, and even if I hadn’t been McMahon’s review would have sold me. Love this:

Heathcock’s third-person narrator has the big heart and bright socks of a Garrison Keillor, but the bad liver and hard knuckles of a Raymond Chandler. The prose moves like an old flatbed down a one-lane road: with confidence, with wisdom, and with a trail of meaning drifting skyward in the mind’s rear-view mirror. It is the poetry of bowling balls through shop windows—of freedom, of consequences, and of beautiful sounds.

The reliably excellent Roxane Gay has a sharp (ha, ha) story over at the Good Men Project about a knife salesman and his would be customer. I won’t give too much away but I absolutely loved this story and guarantee that you will, too.

A del Toro monster is as connected to a succubus in a Fuseli painting as it is to the beast in “Predator.” His films remind you that looking at monsters is a centuries-old ritual—a way of understanding our own bodies through gorgeous images of deformation.

I’ve watched Del Toro’s movies again and again and again, marveling at the worlds he creates but especially at the creatures that inhabit them. They’re unlike anything else. Yet we know them like ourselves, in a strange way. They’re the insides out of us. This sort of explains why that’s so.  Read read read.

It was all very different in the times of the old smithies. Then the village blacksmith never felt above doing some work on the perpetuum mobile. But that’s an old tradition vanishing with the new order of things: The old dream of a boundless wonder, created with his bare hands by some cog-wheel mystic who never gave up. I feel greatly for those things. There’s faith in the spirit of the solution, a superstitious belief in the shrewdness of cunning fingers. The blacksmith as Hamlet. “The time is out of joint”; but if I could only get back the knack of the wheel, I would be able to set it right.

I’m working on a set of writings about futuristic old-timey machinery.  A little like steampunk–but something more like magic by machine.  So reading this was like drinking in spiked honey. The maker out of his own time. The time where hands no longer make things, even if the hands outrace the mind. It gives me shivers.

By the way, I’m trying to get my hands on a copy of Martinson’s Aniara, which I am so excited to read I can hardly stand it.  But.  It seems to be out of print–any ideas? I see it’s on Amazon’s marketplace but don’t want to pay an arm and a leg…and I’d rather buy from a small press, of course.

Maybe it’s time to admit that the people at the top of our political/media heap just aren’t very bright.

I went to grad school for political management. And from what I saw there, and from what I see everyday working and living in Washington, this is absolutely true. Not everyone, of course. There are some brilliant people working in politics and media. But I think the flashes of brilliance are far and few between.

It’s not a system that attracts the best and brightest. It’s a system that (nowadays) attracts attractive broadcast journalists who can sound halfway intelligent, and on the political side people with lots and lots of money and minds made lazy by lifetimes of not having to work very hard for anything. Think I’m generalizing? Look at the incoming freshman Republican Congress: it’s the richest group of people yet. Twenty-five percent of them are millionaires.

You need money to run. You don’t need brains to run. (Hello, Sarah Palin.) In fact, if you have brains, you’re more likely to run from politics–as far and as fast as you can. Poor Obama–he probably wishes by now that he had done the same. (And yes, I can still be angry at Obama and sorry for him at the same time.)

We can’t get anything done in this country, all right, but not just because of partisan bickering. I think DougJ is on to something. It’s because many of the people working in politics are just. not. that. smart.  When they rise to the top, they’re simply swimming okay in a shallow pool.

We’d probably be far better off to fire the lot and hand the sheaf of issues to deal with to the winning American team of Future Problem Solvers. Seriously.

Seriously–check out this lineup of all stars:

Broken Boxes
Mel Bosworth

Country of the Assinipoels

Jeff B. Willey

Discount Paint For Houses

Sheldon Lee Compton

It Made Him Stronger

Kevin Catalano

She Who Subjected The Sun

xTx

Sparkles. Chameleons. Transparents.

Mindela Ruby

Some Tips For Your Presentation

Matthew Kirkpatrick

sui generis cognoscenti innovation unbelievability

Barrie Walsh

Summer In A Glass

Christy Crutchfield

Waltzing Birds

John Minichillo & Katrina Gray

What Hank Jr. Wishes He Could Have
Said to Hank Sr.
Mickey Hess

and last but certainly not least,  Featured Writer Matt Bell:  story here and interview here.

Mel Bosworth‘s Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom is back and buyable from Brown Paper publishing. Yay! I LOVED this book. Such an enjoyable (and uplifting, for once!) reading experience. Stay tuned for a review any day now.

Ethel Rohan‘s story collection, which is going to be spectacularly good and is titled, “Cut Through the Bone,” is available for pre-order today and ships December 1st and thereafter. So it would make the perfect gift for the lit lover in your family–or maybe several lit lovers. Click here to pre-order, and to see the second book trailer.

I’ll be reading the Queer Issue of PANK this weekend. Curated by Tim Jones-Yelvington, with all his creative power and honesty plus a host of great writers and the always good goodness of PANK, this one is sure to be terrific.

We, the staff at Emprise Review, are thrilled and proud to announce our nominations for BOTW, BOTN, and the Pushcart Prize.

DZANC Best of The Web 2011

♦Map of Heesakker Park and Woods, Little Chute, Wisconsin – Callista Buchen
♦The Knife Act – Ben Loory
♦Numbers and Letters – Hannah Pass

Pushcart Best of The Small Presses

♦Map of Heesakker Park and Woods, Little Chute, Wisconsin — Callista Buchen
♦Birthing – Diya Chaudhuri
♦Go Get Your Honor – Sheldon Lee Compton
♦The Small Tragedies of Children — Roxane Gay
♦A Ramadan Tale — Rion Amilcar Scott
♦Vox Clamantis In Deserto – Snowden Wright

Best of The Net 2011

♦Model Airplanes –Eric Beeny
♦Calamity Comes Home – Steve Himmer
♦Return to Cold Mountain – Miriam Sagan
♦Marion, IN: Site of The Last Public Lynching – Matt Ryan
♦The Glowing Pig Speaks – Kathy Weihe
♦Index of Last Lines – Cesca Janece Waterfield
♦Woman Unfinished — JP Dancing Bear
♦Thoughts While Swimming Laps – Sami Schalk

Congrats to all nominees!

By the time I finished reading Miéville’s novels I had come to understand that what matters most about fiction is not somebody else’s idea of what’s great, what’s good or, worse yet, what’s good for you. What matters is a writer’s ability to create a world that comes alive through its specifics and then leads us to universal truths. Miéville engages me with his writing because he is brilliant and because he cares about me as a reader, and this, I’ve come to see, is far more precious than a book’s classification, its author’s reputation, or the size of its audience. As the late Frank Kermode said of criticism, Miéville understands that fiction has a duty to “give pleasure.”

Read the whole thing here.