I am nominating things for the Hugo for the first time! And yes, this is mainly in reaction to the Puppies hijacking last year's ballot. Even though the Puppies were decisively cut out of winning, they prevented a lot of good work from receiving the recognition it deserved. I'm focusing on short fiction and other categories that are the most ( Read more... )

What did you just finish reading?
Kevin Young, The Grey AlbumHard to summarize. Dense and ambitious cultural criticism focusing on African American culture, with particular attention to counterfeits, masks, variable personae, and truthful lies. There's quite a bit about how African American writers and musicians did modernism and postmodernism ( Read more... )

Read since last week
Dessa, Spiral Bound
Flash fiction, short stories, maybe some poetry but I forget. Each story has bits I like, but I never love the whole. Her new album, on the other hand, has been the best thing about my week.

Karen Joy Fowler, We Are Completely Beside OurselvesContemporary fiction. I'd heard the "twist" elsewhere, but I ( Read more... )

What did you just finish?
Do people do everything they've been reading in a week or just the most recent thing they've finished? I started off with the latter but have been moving towards the former. So:

Kate Zambreno, Heroines: Massively frustrating. I don't know whether I want to write this up or not. But (since this relates to current ( Read more... )

What did you just finish?
Once I finished rereading Elizabeth Wein, I went on to rereading Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books, not in any particular order -- well, in a particular order, but one whose logic is hard to describe: Memory going forward to A Civil Campaign, then back to Shards of Honor and more or less forward from there. I tried ( Read more... )

What are you reading now?
Sayuri Ueda, The Cage of Zeus. This is a Japanese sf novel about the genetic engineering of humans with both male and female sexual organs and the social implications of this. Sadly, it is terrible. The translation is awkward and often only barely comprehensible, there is a huge amount of repetitive and boring info- ( Read more... )

What are you reading now?
Sean Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. I started this on the way home last night, so I've only just gotten up to the invention of the Fantastic Four and Spider-man.  So far, my impressions are that the early twentieth-century magazine industry was extremely sketchy and that comics' habit of treating creative workers ( Read more... )