I'm stuck in the land of tiny bits with huge universes attached to them. Not only does this mean paper scraps, phrases pulled out of conversations, garlic, raw & cooked, it means short stories.

Start stopping through Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler makes me go back to What I Didn't See (buy this book) and the two are making me want to try more stories. There is something invigorating about how the reader can feel the harnessed anger and sadness thrumming underneath the stories. My favorite thing about her stories are that they never go where I think that they are going. Surprise is the really the nicest treat.

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The seasons are truly screwing with me. How about you?

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This is an excellent essay about the Penn State child abuse conspiracy and the seemingly incomprehensible reaction of students to the firing of Joe Paterno by Brian Spears. My only complaint is that it is too short.

An awesome comic about depression, rendered in Paint, by the hi-lar Allie Brosh.


Fuck. The. Fucking. Beaches. A Tessa Brunton comic about chronic illness and the bullshit of being "positive" when life is awful.

And for something a bit lighter, here's a story about ghostbusting college kids in Malaysia over at PodCastle by Zen Cho, which shows how a great reading can change a story for the better. Reading by Tracey Yuen.

Brothers, lovers & British women

Abandonware by An Owomoyela on PodCastle is an excellent SF story about grief, siblings and powerful love. Owomoyela captures so much about the experience of a "shrinking family," the strange, painful tension between the roles of child, adult and sibling and the strange rituals required for "moving on." I don't believe in moving on exactly, more like moving through, but this story was a nicely wrought piece of sibling fiction.

Here's an interesting interview with Owomoyela at Fantasy Magazine.

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The other blogger in my house finally posted something! If you like music and blurry pictures, you will love this mega post.

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Because I lost two awesome books in a row, my subway reading dwindled to reading those eerie "Does NYC need church?" ads and NY Post headlines. This was not sustainable, so after a very long class I went to the library on campus and checked over their paltry fiction section for something to distract on the ride home. At first nothing seemed to grab me from the college-bookshelf collection, but then I saw Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet. It was a nice edition and looked intriguing. I'm loving it so far with its wise and anarchic old ladies and precise, pulsing language. I can't wait to dive back in. That's one of her amazing paintings on the cover. After I finish the book I want to find out more about her art.