So, this week's mail brought me an above average haul, I think. First up there are James Doig's two volumes of Australian gothic and horror stories from mid-19th to mid-20th century. All reprints, but the stories and authors are all completely new to me (and probably to anyone else who doesn't specialize in Australiana).
I had picked up a couple of Graham Roumieu's Bigfoot books from amazon a couple months ago and enjoyed them, so I took advantage of a gold box coupon for In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot, which looks as fun as the others.
A bunch of new lit mags this week: F&SF, Light: A Quarterly of Light Verse (featuring amusing work from John Updike,
tomsdisch and many others), the Missouri, Kenyon, and New England Reviews, the Canadian Descant (with its charming "Genuine Canadian Magazine" seal on the front cover), and of course, the always wonderful Black Static.Then we've got the first two books from
clarkesworld's Wyrm Publishing: Realms, collecting the first year's stories from Clarkesworld Magazine, and Memorare, a new novella by Gene Wolfe.Leigh Brackett's The Ginger Star is the latest in Paizo's Planet Stories line of pulp reprints.
From Prime, the much-delayed limited edition of Jeff VanderMeer's Secret Lives has finally arrived. My own secret life as a cat-rescuing superhero is included.
From Night Shade, I got my copy of Walter Jon Williams' new "post-singularity" novel Implied Spaces which has been getting some good buzz and I'm quite looking forward to reading. In other hard SF, I also received Charles Stross' new novel Saturn's Children (which has one of the worst covers I've seen recently; if I'd received this month's SFBC catalog before ordering the trade edition, I think I would have gone for the book club edition with its "exclusive cover" instead).
I must admit to having no recollection of ordering Jenny Davidson's The Explosionist, but it looks like it's a YA alternate history from a first-time novelist. I must have read a good review somewhere.
Read Responsibly is last year's new collection of Unshelved, Bill Barnes' and Gene Ambaum's hilarious library comic strip. There's a new collection just out as well, but apparently it's back-ordered at the moment.
The Diving Pool is a collection of three novellas by Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder, presented in a lavish paperback (complete with French flaps and rough cut edges) from Picador. Two were previous published, in The New Yorker and Zoetrope, one is new (at least in English).
Burning Babies is Noah Cicero's collection of poetry and prose, and Treatise is his new novel, both from A-Head Publishing. I don't know much about either, but I've enjoyed the poems I've sampled so far and the novel looks interesting.
From the Book Depository (who somehow manage to offer free worldwide shipping on UK books), I received the cute little Picador UK edition of Richard Hamblyn's The Invention of Clouds, a biography of Luke Howard, the Quaker and amateur meteorologist who developed the nomenclature for clouds that we still use today.
And lastly, there's the enormous new book from Taschen, publishers of gorgeous coffee-table art books, this one a history of the photography of large penises. A beautiful and fun production all around (and even the cover is a clever two-layer arrangement that allows one to remove the model's underwear...)
There's no mail tomorrow, so that should be all the books for this week.
