Volume 4, Issue 4
Apr. 9, 2008

The Latest

BayCon, San Francisco Bay Area's Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention, is May 23-26. We'll be there, displaying a ton of low-priced books as well as some surprising collectibles. Hope to see you there.

In addition to BayCon preparations, we've added a couple hundred photos to our listings, attended ten signings (see our Just Arrived page), and posted countless new items to our inventory.

We now have over 13000 items available through Biblio and over 7000 through Amazon.

What Scott's Been Reading

Paolo Bacigalupi was a guest at SF in SF a couple of months ago. Night Shade Books had just brought out his first collection, Pump Six and Other Stories. Bacigalupi read “The People of Sand and Slag”, about a group of rock-eating post-humans who adopt a dog, a creature that hasn’t been seen in hundreds of years. It was an amazing story and I grabbed the collection as fast as I could.

High points of the book include “Pocketful of Dharma” about the Dalai Lama’s consciousness trapped in a flash memory drive, and “The Tamarisk Hunter” about global warming and water rights. “The Fluted Girl” is an extraordinarily disturbing story about a girl frozen at a young age and surgically altered by her “patron” into a musical instrument, and “Softer” is a non-sf story about a man who, upon killing his wife, begins to see the possibilities his life has to offer (don’t ask, just read the story). What many of these stories have in common, aside from being extremely well-written, is that they’re open-ended. They don’t end with the cop slapping the handcuffs on the perp and trotting him off to jail. If this were film, I’d say the camera was turned off in the middle of a scene leaving the viewer to come up with what happens next. It’s a technique that can leave a reader feeling unsatisfied, but Bacigalupi uses it to excellent effect.

I’m not sure why I haven’t read Jhumpa Lahiri. She’s a Pulitzer Prize winner, so she’s on my radar, and Unaccustomed Earth is only her third book. I’m glad I picked this one up.

It’s a collection of eight short stories. I’ve read the first, the title story. It’s about a woman’s misgivings about bringing her father into her home after her mother’s death. She’s torn between the obligation she feels toward her father and her obligation to her immediate family, soon to be increased by one member. Her dilemma is made even more difficult by her father’s seeming indifference to the possibilities and his newfound independence. This is a beautiful story not only about the relationship between Ruma and her father but also her father’s relationship with his grandson, Akash. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of these stories.

The last time I ran into Frank Lauria he spent nearly the entire conversation talking about how great a writer Ken Bruen is. Coincidentally, I’d recently picked up a few of Bruen’s books, so the next time I took the train to San Francisco I grabbed The Guards and gave it a shot. I wasn’t disappointed.

Bruen writes hard-boiled detective stories set in Ireland (mostly), but in this case his “hero”, Jack Taylor, isn’t a traditional gumshoe. Jack’s a former cop, a heavy drinker and lover of literature whose love of alcohol has virtually ruined his life. He’s hired by a woman to look into the death of her teenage daughter, a death officially ruled a suicide. In the course of his investigation Jack falls in love with his client, runs afoul of the Garda Siochana (the allegedly corrupt police force to which Jack used to belong), asks questions which result in the death of one friend and encounters the disturbing side of another.

Bruen’s style is, to say the least, spare. His plot is complex but descriptive passages are minimal and he relies on dialogue and interior monologue to tell his story. He starts with a noir cliché - the hard-drinking detective - and turns the genre upside-down. It’s a tremendous book with a shocker of an ending.

A common complaint about the comic book industry is about how little material for kids is published. Conventional wisdom goes that the Industry is killing itself by not publishing “gateway” material for younger readers who are only aware of comics peripherally from superhero movies and who’d seemingly rather get their escapist fix from movies, games and the internet. Publishers counter that when they do produce work for younger readers, it doesn’t sell. That said, Archie comics continue to sell and every once in a while one of the larger, “mainstream” publishers will make an attempt.

Andi Watson, one of my favorite cartoonists, is writing and illustrating a new series of self-contained books for all ages about a girl named Glister Butterworth. Glister lives in drafty old Chilblain Hall, with its constantly changing floor plan, with her father. Glister, her father and their house are magnets for strange occurrences, though as Glister has lived with a constant stream of weirdness her entire life, she takes it all in stride. In the first book, The Haunted Teapot, Glister discovers an old tea pot containing the ghost of long-dead writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton (for some reason renamed “Philip Bulwark-Stratton”). Bulwer-Lytton, now almost universally derided is now known mostly as the coiner of such phrases as “It was a dark and stormy night”, “the pen is mightier than the sword”, “pursuit of the almighty dollar” and “the great unwashed”. In Watson’s book he desires nothing more than to complete his last novel, the publication of which he believes will restore his reputation in literary circles. Being a nice person Glister agrees to help but soon learns that the book, and the job, doesn’t seem to have an end.

Watson’s a tremendous artist and he’s adopted a more illustrative, less angular style than in previous work such as Love Fights or Little Star. His writing is also very good (though I wish he’d find a good proofreader) and his characters are delightful. These are perfect for introducing anyone over eight to comics. Along with Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting, they're the best all-ages comics being published today.