I’m not so clear on this whole Pushcart Prize thing. I know it’s prestigious. I know there’s a book published every year. I’m not clear, though, on the whole nominating and awarding side of things. Nonetheless, I was delighted to see an announcement over on the Conjunctions website that Jonathan Carroll had been awarded the Pushcart Prize for his story “Home on the Rain” (I’ve not seen any other reporting of this, but I’m looking for it). I’m not simply delighted that Carroll won because I like his work (which I do), or because I like this story (which I also do). I’m delighted because this was a crisis of confidence story for me. I read it online, as you can do by following the link above, and wanted to include it in Fantasy: The Best of 2005. Unfortunately, while I loved it, my co-editor didn’t, and we left it out of the book. Every time I thought about the stories we were and weren’t using in Fantasy: The Best of 2005 I kept going back to “Home on the Rain” and to Geoff Ryman’s “The Last Ten Years in the Life of Hero Kai” from F&SF. If I could have added two more stories to the book, those are the stories I would have added. I felt, I don’t know, vindicated when I heard about the Pushcart. I should add that it was disappointing that I didn’t have the time to add “Home on the Rain” to my forthcoming solo anthology Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005, but if you read it now, consider it as being a part of that book. It should have been.

Later this year HarperCollins in the US will be publishing Neil Gaiman’s second collection of short fiction, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders. It’s a book I’ve been looking forward to for more than a little while. I think Neil’s short fiction has been getting better and better over the past few years or so, and some of it is just terrific, so I’m expecting the collection to be something special (I’ve also had an advance look at one of the stories in the book, which I think is wonderful, and worth the price of admission all by itself). Anyway, while we’re waiting for galleys and final copies and all of that, I came across a note in the Hill House catalogue. Hill House are some nice guys who do crazy expensive books – I don’t think I’ve even seen one, never mind bought one – but I am interested in their announcement that they’re doing a signed limited edition of Fragile Things. If you’re a Gaiman fan and might be interested, you can’t pre-order it quite yet, but you will be able to soon. This has been a head’s up.

The last time I saw Howard Waldrop was in Seattle in July of 1997. I was in town with Marianne and some other friends, buying huge bags of cherries, strolling along the waterfront, checking out the Pike Street Markets and generally enjoying the place. Howard had come down from Oso, abandoning the fishing for a weekend, for a convention we were all attending. Somewhere in there I made a run across town in a cab to Lucius Shepard’s place to get some books signed, and I distinctly recall going to a party and John Berry and Eileen Gunn’s place, which I think Chip Delaney was supposed to attend.

Anyhow, I saw Howard a couple times, he read a great story, I gave him a framed copy of the cover of the collection of his that I’d published, and then the curtains of time closed on that period in my life. Between then and about a month ago I did stuff that I’ve talked about here before, and Howard moved home to Austin, published a bunch of stories and a couple books, and the world was ok. Happily, in assembling my two year’s bests for CHARLES and Liza at Locus Press gave me reason to get in touch with Howard again, so I called him in Austin and we had a good long chat. As it turned out, he wouldn’t be going to LA for WorldCon and I wouldn’t be going to Austin for World Fantasy, but he was writing a Robert E. Howard story and life was fine.
Continue reading The Best of Howard Waldrop →

There are a lot of energetic bloggers out there. I, on the other hand, am an at best occasionally energetic blogger, and mostly just a slack as hell blogger. The reason I mention this is that I have on a number of occasions considered adding a Book of the Week feature to Coode Street. Something where I highlight a book I like, talk it up, and maybe interview the author. All that kind of promotery goodness. But, I’ve been reluctant to do it because I’m running late on other things, feel I should actually read the books, and because other energetic people like Jeff VanderMeer have been doing it for ages. It seemed like stealing someone else’s idea.

Anyhow, the latest person to stick his hand up and get involved with this stuff is sometime Coode Street reader John Scalzi who, in addition to writing some nifty novels of his own, has started a series of short author interviews/profiles on his AOL blog. This is a cool thing to be doing, and should be interesting to watch evolve over time. The first author to walk the ScalziPlank is Monkeybrain Books proprietor, editor, author and all-round good guy, Chris Roberson, who talks enthusiastically about his new novel Paragaea: A Planetary Romance. I’ve not read the book, but he describes it like this: “It’s the story of a Soviet-era female cosmonaut who falls through a hole in space and finds herself in a strange new world, one filled with jaguar men, ancient androids, pterosaur-riding pirates, and talking metal trees—in other words, the same old, same old.” And if that’s not too cool for school, I don’t know what is.

If it sounds cool to you too, you can:

• Read the interview with John Scalzi (it’s only short, it won’t take long, and you might like it)
• Read some of the book (there are three chapters online, which is more than enough to know you want to buy the book)
• Check out the official Paragaea website (you can read a whole novel!)
• Actually, you know, buy Paragaea: A Planetary Romance.

And Chris? Well, I’ve met him a couple times at WorldCons hither and yon and we’ve had dinner a few times: if his writing is half as much fun as hanging out with him is, then this is the kind of book that I want to be reading.

Just in case Coode Streeters think I have any kind of impulse-control at all, I mentioned in a post on Monday that I’d just received a copy of Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett. This was around 4pm on Monday, I think. I finished reading it at around 1pm on Tuesday. The only reason it took that long is my superhuman powers of self-control, which allowed me to put it down at around 12.30am and go to sleep. Were it not for that I would have consumed the entire book in a single sitting.

What did I think of it? It was terrific: smart, moving, and occasionally funny. I think whether you’ll enjoy the book depends on whether you like Pratchett’s writing voice (I do) and whether you like Tiffany Aching (I do).  Many thanks to Jack and everyone at Harper who arranged the copy. I’ll try to run a proper review here, and maybe even in Locus (the sound you just heard was either CHARLES falling over or laughing his ass off, one or the other). In the meantime, pre-order!