Best Twilight Review Ever

From respected fantasy writer Elizabeth Hand, published in the Washington Post. (And thanks to Hal Duncan for posting a link on his blog, where I found it.)

Awesome Video

Dr. Who Meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOuOTOl-3gA

(Since I can't figure out how to embed video, you must go clicky on the link.)

Kenzaburo Oe

I have found a new adorable old-man author for my collection. This is Kenzaburo Oe, a Japanese author whose fiction revolves mostly around the Post-WWII years (and especially post-Hiroshima) in Japanese history.

My favorite of his novels is Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. It follows a group of young boys (juvenile delinquents, if their paranoid elders can be trusted) as they are shunted from one village to another, seeking shelter from the elements and the air-raiding armies. They are finally abandoned by their adult supervisors in a mountain village and left to fend for themselves for a few days, only to be punishedfor finding ways to survive when their supervisors return. I won't give away all of the surrounding circumstances or the conclusion, but I can say that I defiantly recommend the novel. It's a short read- I read it in about a day, and it's not even two hundred pages long. It's a bit of a mix between Battle Royale and Lord of the Flies without the campy flavor of the first or the...well, actually it's almost as disturbing as the latter, and it's a good study of the tension, paranoia, and social insecurity caused by war and the mistrust of youth.

I've also got a copy of his Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, which contains four short novels including a semi-autobiographical story about a man coming to grips with having a mentally challenged son (that is the PC term these days, isn't it?) and another story following the dying days of a man with liver cancer (which he's probably imagined).

Latest Fangasm

Guess what?!?!?!?!?! Guess what?!?!?!?!? Guess what?!?!?!?!

Eeek! There are TWO Gundam 00 mangas coming out this year, and those are just the ones that have been announced so far!

Also! Also! There's a lite novel due for release this December! Squee!

And I'll be able to figure out what the difference between these season one box sets is once they've been released this summer...all I can really tell is that they've got different cover art, and I have NO IDEA why one is more expensive than the other...

This show is my new Gundam Wing, and I'm having ISSUES, in case you haven't noticed. I have a feeling I'll be collecting everything 00 related like I do with Wing...and yes, I've definitely been lusting after those Gundam figurines. I have been for years now.

(And Flashback: I've watched the first half on Rurouni Kenshin, season two in the last two days. I'd forgotten how much I freaking love that show, and now I have to hunt down affordable copies of the other seasons.)

Latest Orders

Ummm... I'd do a "Latest Arrivals" post, but other than Gaiman's Mirrormask and Lorca's Selected Letters I can't actually think of anything I've brought home recently. So, instead, I've decided to post a quick list of those books I'm expecting to arrive soon! Also, no pictures this time, because I'm lazy.

First off is The City and the City by China Mieville. A murder mystery novel set in another one of Mieville's imaginative settings, this promises to be a great read on par with his earlier novel, Perdido Street Station.

I also got fed up with waiting for a copy to show up in any local bookstore and finally ordered Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest. I read a short story set in the same world as this novel and (as usual) fell in love with Valente's prose... which broke my will and forced me to bump this up on my reading list.

Another book I just had to have because of a short story- I read M. John Harrison's contribution to The New Weird anthology (edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer) and decided I had to have his novel, Viriconium. The book and the short story are, again, set in the same world. Roman culture meets high tech society. Sweet!

Kelly Link's Trampoline: An Anthology is also on the way. It contains stories by Christopher Barzak (see my blog on his book The Love We Share... here), Carol Emshwiller, Jeffrey Ford, Karen Joy Fowler, Christopher Rowe, and a number of other people. Link is a top-notch editor and writer, and several of the names in this anthology make me positively drool.

Speaking of Christopher Barzak, I've got his other book One for Sorrow in the mail. This one seems to be worlds away from his story collection, The Love We Share Without Knowing, and actually looks like it may have something in common with Steve Berman's YA gay ghost story, Vintage (which I have another blog on... here).

And... speaking of Steve Berman... Trysts: A Triskaidecollection or Queer and Weird Stories is also on the way. Again, I seem to be developing a fixation on a handful of certain authors. (No Hal Duncan in this week's shipment...Not even a short story. That's a first. Although I'm still stalking his blog.)