Michael Chabon's blurb on the front cover sums up this story collection well:

"A cabinet of dark wonders, and an important--no, a crucial--map of the richness and strangeness and startling range of the modern American short story."

Dark wonders, surreal and often terrifyingly handsome; beautifully quirky and so damn fun. This was my "bathroom book" for many months, but I can't recommend it as a bathroom book.The reason is that there are some long stories in here. But they ALL worth reading. 

I recommend it for the bus or train, or for curling up on the sofa, or as a before bedtime read. 

Here is a list of my favorite stories from the book:

• ​A Hard Truth About Waste Management, by Sumanth Prabhaker
  • ​Flushing your trash down the toilet will piss off whatever lives there. Bad idea. 
• The Whipping, by Julia Elliot
  • Weird parents, weirder children, and mutant neighbors. A strange girl awaiting punishment narrates this oddity.
• A Better Angel, by Chris Adrian
  • Hauntingly beautiful. 
• Draco Compestris, by Sarah Monette
  • Because dragon skeletons and strange children nobody sees (or maybe they just don't want to). 
• The Chinese Boy, by Ann Stapleton
  • A Rear Window type story with a paralyzed man and his daughter who witness a bank teller's descent to attempted suicide, a shared madness of all three. 
• First Kisses from Beyond the Grave, by Nik Houser
  • High school for the dead. But not the anime.
• A Troop [Sic] of Baboons, by Tyler Smith
  • Baboons finally gain sentience and what do they do? CHAOS THEATER. Well, that's what I call it. 
• Pieces of Scheherazade, by Nicole Kornher-Stace
  • I love Nicole Kornher-Stace's work.Her book Archivist Wasp was one of my favorite books of 2017-2018. I finished reading it at the first of the year. Her contribution to this anthology is a retelling of the Thousand and One Nights story, with tattoos. 
• The Man Who Married a Tree, by Tony D'Souza
  • I call this weird backwoods (quite literally) fiction. It made me think there should be a lumberpunk genre.
• A Fable with Slips of White Paper, by Kevin Brockmeier
  • Imagine going to a thrift store and buying the overcoat that used to belong to God. It's like that. 
• Lazy Taekos, by Geoffrey A. Landis
  • Lazy Taekos is not so good with his hands, and he is lazy, but he has a trick and a riddle or two up his sleeve. Will it be enough to win him the princess? 
• Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot, by Daniel Alarcon.
  • An alternate history that imagines a modern era where Abraham Lincoln was president and still assassinated. Lived through the recollections and grief of his male lover as his current relationship is ending. Poignant and strange. 

​This is an older collection, published in 2007. It is edited by fantasy master Jeff VanderMeer and his wife, Ann VanderMeer. 

I picked up a used copy of this book on Amazon for about five bucks, Unfortunately, there is no Kindle edition. It's well worth grabbing a used copy of this great weird as fuck little anthology for your bedside or commuter reading pleasure. 

It feels good to be off to a great start writing in the new year. 

And so far, two of my resolutions are checked off.

First, I wanted to write more blog posts, and although I did not specify and make any certain plans known in my original resoultion post, secretly I made a challenge to myself to write (and publish) a piece for three consecutive days. Today's post is the third. 

I'm not sure I'll be able to continue writing daily posts once I start working both jobs again (and, Goddess help me, I'm considering trying to start freelancing in editing and proofreading as a third job). But the challenge I have set for myself is at least one per week. 

The other resolved resolution was writing more creative fiction and poetry. My grandmother always said that whatever you do on New Year's Day, you will do for the rest of the year. So I worked on and completed a poem from my Priority WIP poem list (more on that in another post). I also started, but didn't finish, a new poem and some future blog posts. 

Today, I will begin fulfilling another of my goals for the year. I will choose a book on writing and editng craft from the five I picked out from my collection of books on craft that I was either given or bought, but haven't yet read. Everyday, I plan to read a chapter or two from each of the five books. Today, I have chosen to read the first chapter of a book that has been on my shelf since shortly after I moved into my current apartment four years ago. Revision and Self-Editing is written by James Scott Bell and published by Writer's Digest Press. I think I got it for some ridiculously low price when I subscribed to Writer's Digest.

There are also some upgrades to my resolutions. I intend to seek out opportunities for beginning my editing and proofreading career. I hope to save enough money to be able to have my first paying issue of The Were-Travler (information, here). I am hoping to soon sign on to a monthly membership of the gym at the high-rise office building where my new office at the public media company will be located. I want to keep losing weight and feel better. I plan on a long long overdue visit at the dentist (as soon as I get some decent dental insurance) and do something about these awful broken and painful teeth of mine. 

That's it, folks. Just a few excited lines of success in the first week of the new year. I am hoping to receive some long awaited news about some poetry and fiction submissions made in the past. A nice acceptance email would be a great harbinger of 2017. I would blog about that, for sure. 

I hope your pursuits will all be successful as well. 

Peace--
​

A little list of all the books I'm reading at the moment. I'm a reader who reads several things at once. My brain and gut will tell me what to read at any given moment. Here's what I'm indulging at this time: 

• Blood of Tyrants, Naomi Novik 
  • Number 8 in the Temeraire series, fantasy books about a dragon air force during the Napoleonic wars. Described by some critics as Patrick O'Brian meets Anne McCaffrey. A fair assessment. 
• The Seven Deadly Sins (Nanatsu no Tazai), Nakaba Suzuki
  • ​LOVED the anime, now I'm reading the manga. Interesting take on Arthurian themes. I'm getting ready to end Volume 2 and begin Vol. 3. 
• Claymore, Norihiro Yagi​
  • ​Started reading this manga as part of my research on my Senior Capstone project for college. Part of my research was on strong women in speculative fiction. The Claymores, women warriors who battle demons called Yoma and who are half-yoma themselves fit the bill. I am currently reading Volume 20: Remains of the Dead Claws. 
• The Strange Library, Haruki Murakami 
  • The first book I read by Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, did not impress me much. But I have friends who recommend him all the time. I'd really like to read his Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World sometime, but for now, Overdrive e-book library had this one and since it is a mere 96 pages (his books are usually whoppers!) I feel like I can get through it rather quickly. 
• Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children's Literature​, Alison Lurie
  • ​I know I finished my Bachelors Degree and I'm just hanging around waiting to apply to graduate school, but I miss academic reading. I've taken an interest lately in the literature of revolt and thought this book was a good place to start. It deals with the subversive ideas within classic and modern children's literature. 
• The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
  • ​Started this book before my last semester at college. I'm halfway through it and keep meaning to start reading it again. One thing keeping me back is that I sense major feels are ahead. 
• The Best American Poetry 2015, edited by Sherman Alexie (Editor), David Lehman (Series Editor)
  • ​I picked up this light tome of the best poems from last year at the library. As someone who sometimes writes poems, I wanted to read some of the best recent poems and poets. 

I know this is a lot of books to be reading at one time, but I'm weird. I  honestly love to read. All of the time. 

​What are you reading right now?

This is a crossover post from my Senior Portfolio class from last Fall 2015 semester. I am posting it here because I know a lot of my reader friends dig reading cool free stores online. Researching things like this is pretty much what my Senior Capstone was all about.

Source: Jones, Josh. "100 Great Sci-Fi Stories by Women Writers (Read 20 for Free Online)." Open Culture: The Best Free Cultural & Educational Media on the Web. N.p., 1 Aug. 2013. Web. 7 Oct. 2015.


Link: http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/the-100-best-sci-fi-stories-by-women-writers.html


The whole list of 100 best sci-fi stories by women can be found here: http://iansales.com/2013/07/10/the-list-100-great-science-fiction-stories-by-women/

Researching other resources for this project of planning a class in women's speculative fiction goes has been intense and educational for me. Research for this project goes beyond the standard critical journal articles on theory or analysis. Sometimes you have other ideas for how to view your audience. 

Now, who is my audience, beyond the literature professors here at USFSP who will be viewing the course Google Site I created for the project and who I will be presenting for at the send of the semester? The answer is, of course, any future students who decide that want to cast their lot with me and spend a semester reading and discussing otherworldly, fantastic, and creepy books and stories. I know they will be college students. And as a college student myself, I know that many of them will be flat broke and working two-to-three part time jobs just to afford to sit in my classroom. Therefore, I have determined to make it one of my personal goals to make the course reading materials as cheap as possible, and you can't get any cheaper than free! 

I just happened today to do a general Google search on "best women science fiction short stories" and the first result was the link posted above from a free educational blog. The article was posted by a gentleman, I'm going to assume he is a literature teacher based on the other articles he has posted to Open Culture (I found those by clicking on his byline link at the end of the article). The article contains information about a list compiled on another man in the field of science fiction. The original poster's page had a list of one-hundred of the best science fiction short stories written by women, along with a link to see where the stories could be found: anthology, collection, or online sources were given. Mr. Josh Jones took this list and narrowed it down to only those stories which could be read online for FREE. Mr. Jones' list is comprised of twenty stories that can be read online for free. Don't you just love the Internet? I do. 

Mr. Jones' article was posted to Open Culture in August 2013, so there is the possibility that some of the links don't work anymore. I'm going to have to check them all, and if I use any of them they will have to be checked periodically to make sure they are still active. I know from the experience of being a student that there is nothing more frustrating than having reading assignments online and when you click the links to read them...ERROR! FILE NOT FOUND! Going to do my damnedest as a professor to avoid that scenario. 

There are short stories on this list that I may add to the reading canon, namely: ‘The Cartographer Bees and the Anarchist Wasps’ by E Lily Yu, ‘Spider the Artist’ by Nnedi Okrafor, ‘Eros, Philia, Agape’ by Rachel Swirsky, ‘A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel’ by Yoon Ha Lee, and ‘The Lady Astronaut of Mars’ by Mary Robinette Kowal. Of the original one-hunded story list, five of them are on my canon already. I need to evaluate more of them.