-BARREN WORLDS SF Anthology-

Edited by Eric T. Reynolds (w. Adam Nakama)

www.hadleyrillebooks.com

Order Here/Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Barren-Worlds-Eric-T-Reynolds/dp/0978514823/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215215694&sr=8-1

Anthology Line-up: Drew Arrants, Adele Cosgrove-Bray, Geraint D'arcy, Lawrence R. Dagstine, Tristan Davenport, Graham Fielding, Ginny Gilroy, C.E. Grayson, Rob Haynes, Jasmine Hammer, Erin Hartshorn, Martin Hayes, Geoffrey Maloney, Mary Ellen Martin, Tracie McBride, Ken McConnell, Kevin James Miller, Shane Nelson, Michael Obilade, Sue Penkivech, Shauna Roberts, Lawrence M. Schoen, Ted Stetson, Gene Stewart, David Tallerman, Andrew Tisbert, Geoffrey Thorne, William Blake Vogel III and Christopher Woods.

Other New Entries: "Books & Anthos"

Anime

OK, I haven't really been watching much lately, except the stuff that comes on Adult Swim on Saturday nights. All I have to say about that is that Death Note is very close to its end, Code Geass is kind of cheesy, and I'm disappointed that the Pizza Hut references were edited out in the American release. Anyway, I'll have a proper review very soon, because Lucky Star volume 2 and the final volume of Kanon are both being released tomorrow.

Manga

Both Yen Press and Del Rey have announced manga anthologies, titled Yen+ and Faust respectively. This is great news, because so far the only English-language manga anthologies available in the US so far are Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat, which aren't really marketed towards hardcore otaku. Yen+ will have titles such as Bamboo Blade, Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, Sumomo Momomo, Soul Eater, Night School, Maximum Ride, and others. Faust will have both manga and light novels serialized, such as the novel xxxHOLIC: Another HOLIC, from which there will be an excerpt in the first volume. These anthologies will be released in July and August respectively.

Music

A while back, I heard a certain iTunes commercial, which featured Coldplay's song "Viva la Vida." Now, I'm sure you've all seen the commercial, considering how frequently it comes up, but if you haven't, you can find it on YouTube. Anyway, I googled Coldplay soon after seeing the commercial, and found that this was the only song by them that I liked very much. (I also discovered that their cover band, the Coldplayers is, in my opinion, slightly better than them, but I digress.) So, when their latest album came out, I checked it out, and found that most of the songs were pretty good. So I bought it. Apparently, this latest album is a big departure from their old ways, perhaps because Brian Eno is producing it, and it has create a bit of a schism in their fanbase. Personally, I think their newer work is better, but that's probably because I was never a fan of them to begin with. Just my two cents.

Food

There've been a lot of frozen yogurt places cropping up lately, and I must say that I prefer Fraiche to Red Mango. It bothers me that there are no wet toppings at Red Mango, like fudge or fruit sauce. I don't think either place has fudge, but at least Fraiche has fruit sauce. Another thing is that Fraiche has plain yogurt or chocolate, whereas Red Mango has plain or green tea, and chocolate beats green tea, hands down. also, I think the color palette of Red Mango (red, brown, and super-light pinkish brown) is weird.

So yeah, just some stuff.

Double clicking will increase the image size. http://www.norilana.com/WarriorWisewoman-TPB-Front.jpg

Norilana has been expanding rapidly with speculative fiction and from what I can see their covers look smashing. I can't wait to receive my copy.

I have several other stories out where the closing date for subs was at the beginning or middle of this week, so that's even more anticipation.  Also, I saw on one of the many forums I frequent that Our Shadows Speak has started sending out responses and I also have a story in the waiting line over there as well.  (By the way, go over and check out the cover art for these upcoming anthologies...they look amazing).

Anyway, hopefully there will be more news-worthy things to report on the next post.  Until then, it's back to finishing up book 2 of Hell On Earth...and with the way it looks to be wrapping up, I have backed myself into a VERY difficult corner for the series' resolution in Book 3.

Prom Nights from Hell

1. "The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath"
2. "Twelve Centuries of English Literature"
3. "Best Newspaper Writing 2007-08 Edition," The Poynter Institute
4. "Ada," Vladimir Nabokov
5. "William Shakespeare: A Popular Life," Garry O'Connor

time as river flowing

life as dream

death as sleep

love as illness

life as play/stage

wisdom as light

eyes as stars

book as world

human being as tree

music as food

etc., etc.

-Susan Sontag  : role of Metaphor :

Sciousness
by Jonathan Bricklin, editor

A review by Jerry Katz

Eirini Press is a new publisher of nonduality books, filling the niche of the Western contribution. Sciousness is their only title at this time. If Sciousness exemplifies, in both content and design, the quality of their forthcoming books, Eirini Press is positioned for serious success.

Beyond "The Varieties of Religious Experience"

Those who have enjoyed James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, will discover what James could not talk about in that series of lectures: the truth of "pure experience" or nondual awareness. The following quotation is an example of about how far James could go in "Varieties" toward approaching nonduality:

"It is evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so little is really known."

"Varieties" was a series of lectures delivered in 1901-1902. In 1890, James first suggested the nonduality thesis but did not develop it until 1904. This book collects James's nondual writings published during 1904 -1905, with short writings from 1890 and 1912. The intended audience is students, scholars, readers of Western philosophy as well as followers of the literature of nonduality.

Sciousness

If sciousness sounds to you like "suchness," that's the point. James recognized that nondual experience knows no "with-suchness," only suchness, or pure experience, or the essence of Zen. Con-sciousness is suchness accompanied by the sense of "I," or a "me," a "myself." A great effort is made in this book to describe the "I."

Radical Empiricism

James called his nondualism radical empiricism. His empiricism is radical because it absorbs what is directly experienced and ALL that is directly experienced, including unifying experiences and nondual experience.

He brought ordinary empiricism up to speed by showing that nonseparateness is to be included, along with separateness, along with collectionism and abstraction as part of a description of reality.

In that effort, James brought Rationalism down to earth by showing that nonseparateness, unity, or Truth is not a separate order of reality eventually requiring corrective agencies of unification.

A Definitive Anthology

In Sciousness, Jonathan Bricklin has constructed a definitive anthology that conveys completeness and unity in the presentation of William James's nondual expression. This work is driven by intellectual argument and is based in James's confession of nondual knowing. It is elevated by elements of charm and poetry which arise out of the anthology's design and the writings by all the three authors. Most importantly, this work is founded in Bricklin's understanding of what nonduality is.

This is mainly a collection of James's writings. The book opens with its crowning achievement, without which James's nondual writings on their own would not likely be published for a broad audience of philosophy and spirituality readers. The book's crown is Bricklin's article, Sciousness and Con-sciousness, which introduces and analyzes James's nondual work, making it readily understandable.

The article is followed by six writings by James. The book ends with an article on radical empiricism by Theodore Flournoy, one of the few contemporaries of James who understood and appreciated his thesis, and which served in its day as a crowning (if little known) achievement on behalf of James.

Thus the anthology is balanced: James's writings are located centrally, flanked the writings of Bricklin and Flournoy. The entryways of the book consist of the preface, in which Bricklin elegantly delivers the nugget that James prepared the way for quantum theory expositions on nonduality and for Western seekers, students, and teachers of nonduality; and six pages of an Eastern nondual confession by Seng-t'san (Sosan), Third Zen Patriarch. The exit is a quotation by Rilke.

Zen meets William James

The Seng-t'san selection, On Believing in Mind (Hsin-Hsin-Ming), is a bowing to the East prior to the reader's turning to the West. Most readers and knowers of nonduality will be led into the Western mode of nondual writing through the Eastern description: "All things are the same at their core / but clinging to one and discarding another / Is living in illusion."

Or is it as simple as a bow and a turn to the West? In this book, East and West are not so separate. The turn is not from East to West, but from an emphasis on Eastern to an emphasis on Western thought and influence. Bricklin points out that D.T. Suzuki alerted his teacher Kitaro Nishida to James's writing and Nishida used James's phrase "pure experience" in his scholarly writings intended to bring East and West closer. Suzuki himself is well known as a bringer of Zen to the West. Martha Ramsey has pointed out to me that Zen and Buddhism rode into Western minds and hearts upon literary steeds of Romantic and American Transcendentalist traditions. Bricklin himself extracts the Zen nature of James's nondual writings and in the process he uses a Zen which itself was probably influenced by William James. That is, a Zen that is perhaps thinly infused by James is brought to today to explain James.

Show me the nonduality

How nondual was William James? That's what today's audience wants to know. People today can read a few words and detect whether someone is speaking with authenticity or parroting someone else. Listen and decide for yourself:

"If the passing thought be the directly verifiable existent which no school has hitherto doubted it to be, then that thought is itself the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond."

"...things and thought are not at all fundamentally heterogeneous, but are made of one and the same stuff, a stuff which one cannot define as such, but only experience, and which one can call, if one wishes, the stuff of experience in general."

"I believe that consciousness, as it is commonly represented, either as an entity, or as pure activity, but in any case as fluid, unextended, diaphanous, devoid of all content of its own, but directly self-knowing - spiritual, in short -, I believe, I say, that this consciousness is a pure chimera, and that the sum of concrete realities which the word consciousness should cover deserves a quite different description."

"The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the `pure' experience. ... If the world were then and there to go out like a candle, it would remain truth absolute and objective, for it would be `the last word,' would have no critic, and no one would ever oppose the thought in it to the reality intended."

"The instant field of the present is always experience in its `pure' state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as someone's opinion about fact."

Here James is on verge of refining "pure experience" into "pure silence:"
"Whatever differing contents our minds may eventually fill a place with, the place itself is a numerically identical content of the two minds, a piece of common property in which, through which, and over which they join. The receptacle of certain of our experiences being thus common, the experiences themselves might some day become common also. If that day ever did come, our thoughts would terminate in a complete empirical identity, there would be an end, so far as those experiences went, to our discussions about truth. No points of difference appearing, they would have to count as the same." Thirteenth century mystic Jnaneshvar (translated by Swami Abhayananda) echoes:

After such a discourse,
That speech is wise
Which drinks deeply of silence.

James's approach was soft

James did not confess his knowings and leave them at that. Not without lengthy philosophical explanation and demonstration. Rather than simply state the way things are - and he knew - he would soften his confessions with phrases such as, "I believe," "I conclude," "I should like to convey," "I feel," "I say," "I am convinced." If someone uses those phrases today, they are deemed halfway up the mountain, even if they are not. "James theorized about pure experience sciousness more than he described instances of it," Bricklin writes.

Were James preaching to a congregation, the language would have been different. There is a sense that James wanted to simply be the preacher and tell it the way it is: In this passage he comes close: "I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing." Here too: "While still pure, or present, any experience - mine, for example, of what I write about in these very lines - passes for `truth.' The morrow may reduce it to `opinion.'" However, James asserts that this knowing of `truth' is valid: "When the whole universe seems only to be making itself valid and to be still incomplete (else why its ceaseless changing?), why, of all things, should knowing be exempt?"

There's a sense that James wants to leap from declaring his confidence to declaring the truth that he knows. In fact, Bricklin leaps for James - or let's just say he infers -- wonderfully and memorably in his article.

The limits of philosophy

James called philosophy an "ugly study" since if offered no "sublime and simple" Ultimate Reality. Bricklin says, "James never developed his philosophy of pure experience sciousness beyond brief passages and essays. To do so would have made it ugly."

William Samuel, who wrote and taught during the 60s-80s, was himself blunt about philosophy: "God would be a sadist if one's saving grace depended on a detailed knowledge of philosophy. What kind of god would require continual delving into the abstruce and arcane lore of mysticism or metaphysics as a passport to a Reality that is already ONLY and unchallenged?"

The limitlessness of philosophy - direct path

William James offers a direct path nondual teaching. Dennis Waite says in his book Enlightenment, The Path Through the Jungle, that the direct path begins "with one's own experience, and tests one's assumptions against the simplicity of this experience in the moment. It examines the world, body and mind, showing through one's experience how they are nothing other than the awareness, which is the Self." Self is James's "pure experience."

Waite says "The direct-path approach is characterized by an uncompromising, logical approach to the truth (and is) most suitable for those of a philosophical bent."

Waite quotes Sri Atmananda, a teacher of direct path in its purest form: "(the direct path) is removal of untruth by arguments, leaving over the Truth absolute as the real Self."

Though I would not call James's writings the purest direct path teaching, they are historically significant and wondrous to read, considering the the audience for whom they were intended.

Conclusion

In the 60s and 70s, many seekers of spiritual truth learned about mysticism and found affirmation of their nondual intuitions within William James's book, The Varieties of Religious Expression. Now we can discover that James was a nondualist afterall. Sciousness is a superb anthology, the best possible book imaginable for the discovery of the nondual William James.

Sciousness
by Jonathan Bricklin, editor

The 2008 O. Henry Prize Stories anthology is a great way to play catch up on all of the reading you missed last year. Culled from publications like Zoetrope, Harper's, Granta, and Tin House, this anthology features established masters like William Gass and Alice Munro along with newer voices. There are plenty of highlights and no duds. Sharon Cain's "The Necessities of Certain Behaviors" explores an amorphous world of gender-bending, while Stephen Millhauser's "A Change in Fashion" imagines a new mode where women cover every inch of their flesh from the gaze of men. Lore Segal's "Other People's Deaths" perfectly captures the painful awkwardness and shame we experience when encountering, um, other people's deaths. Similarly, the title of Tony Tulathimutte's "Scenes from the Life of the Only Girl in Water Shield, Alaska" is spot-on, and Gass's contribution, "A Little History of Modern Music," is the funniest monologue we've read all year. But our favorite in the collection has to be Edward P. Jones's "Bad Neighbors," which examines the changing fortunes of an African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. A great collection, and if a story disappoints you, there'll be three to make up for it.

In the ultimate in lazy reviewing, we will let the title of McSweeney's kids anthology Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn't Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out stand as its own summary. However, this is a beautiful book with lots of lovely pictures, and the collection is worth it for Nick Hornby's story alone. Good stuff.

Edited by superstar Chris Ware, The Best American Comics 2007 serves as a delicious tasting menu of some of the best comix published in the past few years. Although hardcore comix fans will no doubt have already read the selections from Charles Burns's Black Hole and Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve, there's plenty here for aficionados and newbies alike.

Chances are you've read a number of the canonical texts in 50 Great Short Stories, but it's also likely you haven't read them in years. We've had this book for years, and have revisited often to indulge in old favorites for new inspiration. Classics like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and Hemingway's "The Three-Day Blow" nestle up against lesser-reads like Edmund Wilson's "The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles" and Francis Steegmuller's "The Foreigner." And have you read Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" since high school? No? Shame on you! What about Carson McCuller's "The Jockey"? Dorothy Parker? Kipling? Consider it a light crash course in great literature.

Besides the pub date, my search also returned results for many well-known novelists who have mentioned their short stories on their websites, only they do a better job of promoting themselves and the anthology than I do. They actually mention the titles of their stories, for one thing, and maybe a sentence or two about their stories. This got me thinking...

Self-promotion: A skill that doesn't come naturally to me.

End result, I need to exhibit a little shamelessness. It's not like I have oodles of fiction credits under my belt yet. I mean, really, the following tidbit is big news for a newbie like me:

Elizabeth George, New York Times bestselling novelist, sent me an email asking me if I'd like to write a short story for her anthology, edited by her. I'll be one of a few newbies included in a section entitled "Introducing...."

Very cool, yes? I ought to fling the news about for the whole world to view. Look at me! Look at me! Which is what this blog post is all about (all the while feeling uncomfortable even though I can be as full of myself as I wanna be on my blog!).

Self-promotion: Not for the faint of heart.

The funny thing is that for the seasoned novelists, the anthology is probably not a huge deal. I imagine most of them pumped out their short stories in under a week while I worked my fanny off over quite a few months to get mine right. Once again, sigh.

Here's the scoop on Two of the Deadliest: It will be an all-female collection of mystery and crime stories centered around the themes of lust and greed -- "two of the deadliest" sins. My story is called "Paddy O'Grady's Thigh" and features an inexperienced journalist, two Irish Travellers, and one dug-up corpse.

There.

Self-promotion: Not so bad when I cringe and do it anyhow.

             Interesting use of metaphor...

                       are you taking care of your Earth Suit-- I hope so!

            - Bonne Nuit

How to write, edit, or create and anthology: Part One

For history, read the Wikipedia article, Anthology.

Excerpt: "The word derives from the Greek word for garland — or bouquet of flowers — which was the title of the earliest surviving anthology, assembled by Meleager of Gadara. Meleager's Garland became the seed that grew into the Greek Anthology. The term miscellany is also used, but was more common in the past."

How to Create a Poetry Anthology gives simple, concise steps applicable to any anthology. A good beginning article.

Excerpt: "Step 3 -- Review the submissions carefully. Each entry needs to match the tone and theme of your poetry anthology. If it doesn't, don't include it. Send acceptance and rejection letters to the contributors. Include a personal note on each rejection letter if possible. Step4 -- Create a master file containing accepted submissions complete with each author's biography. Back up this file so it is not lost when Murphy's Law takes over.

Anthology Books And Stories: Getting your personal essay into an anthology compilation, covers rights, payments, expenses, and benefits of appearing in an anthology.

Excerpt: "...with respect to Chicken Soup for the Soul Series...true, they take all rights and only pay $300 while their marketing tactics reap the rewards for years and dollars to come. But when you write an article, on a work-for-hire basis (as a copywriter), you give up all rights for the same $300. At least with Chicken Soup for the Soul, you have your byline, which can often gain you more writing assignments elsewhere—work-for-hire assignments do not allow you a byline."

Publish an Anthology: How it's done gives general publishing advice within an excellent website on writing that emphasizes anthologies. This web page asks, "How does a writing group put together an anthology that gets reviewed, sells copies, and even turns a profit?"

Excerpt: "Don't put together a mishmash of crap (poetry mixed with fiction and nonfiction and biographies and God knows what else). Find a theme that works. For instance, we stuck with the Monterey Peninsula in California and we all wrote fictional pieces. Period. No poetry. No nonfiction. No biographies. Other writers groups may not have such a rich history as our area, but there IS something interesting in your section of the world. I guarantee it. You just need to find out what IT is."

How to Edit an Anthology, by Gary Bowen, gives 14 short reality shots.

Excerpt: "Fourth: Produce guidelines, outlining everything the potential contributors need to know, including place to send paper submissions and paper queries. Good outlines get the right kind of fiction on time with a minimum of paperwork hassle. Distribute the guidelines--this means getting the guidelines to the people you want to have them; generally speaking workshops do not have a wide enough base of skilled enough participation. Your workshop may be different. Send copies of guidelines to your agent.

"Fifth: Harvest your crop of mail, crosscheck failed addresses, log your submissions, read and answer your submission as promptly as possible. Juggle submissions for length, style, subject, tone, etc., until you have enough words to fulfill your contract while reinforcing and highlighting one another. The sum of the parts should be greater than the whole. Think deeply about the impact your anthology is going to have on the reader, and tailor acceptances and rewrites to enhance that. A synergy develops in a good anthology in which ideas feed off of one another, and writers expand the concept in ways the editor didn't envision. The editor must prune off distracting tangents, no matter how well written, and strengthen the core ideas. Let your agent review the manuscript."

How to Edit (or Submit to) an Anthology, by Laurel Snyder, is very well written, humorous, and all too truthful.

Excerpts: "First, you need to find some names, some luminaries that will help you sell your idea. You need celebrity writers on board, and without a high powered agent on your side, they’re hard to find. So you wander around on websites such as Readerville, and wrangle your friends into forking over email addresses for their ex-professors, people who won’t bother with you anyway. But you have a dream, and you do this. It takes months. Because you don’t have a contract yet, and won’t until you can land those names. And those names will want to know how much you’ll pay them, because names get paid to write. And you don’t have any money, except what you make waiting tables."

"In the end, you will have to cut some essays you’ve poured countless hours of editing into, and some writers will be mad at you. This will happen because the anthology will take on a life of its own. It will find a shape for itself, an agenda you didn’t know it had, and some of the work you thought you wanted will not fit into the book. You will cut some solid writers because of issues beyond the quality of the writing. You will feel terrible about this."

The Accidental Anthologist in Istanbul, by Anastasia M. Ashman, brings you into the the soul of an anthologist.

Excerpt: "The joys of collaborating with writers from my home office clarified confusing aspects of my character—like how I am a prickly introvert who nevertheless craves connection with people.

"One late winter day Jennifer and I stopped coughing and sold Tales from the Expat Harem to Dogan Kitap, the most prominent Turkish publisher.

"'That's more like it,' snapped the librarian when I next saw her at a club meeting, my reputation somewhat rehabilitated in her eyes. Four decades’ worth of expatriate self-discoveries earned its shelf space in her opinion, more than my own 40-year life story would have."

An interview with poet Sina Queyras reveals the passion of the anthologist. Scroll about a quarter way down the page.

Excerpt: "But I’m not conjuring up some obscure vision of Canada in my selection. This is contemporary Canadian poetry. This is what we do. The depth of thought, the range of forms, the intensity and singularity of poets like Christian Bök, Tim Lilburn, or Christopher Dewdney; the quiet linguistic turns in Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard; the wild intellectual gymnastics of Erin Mouré. This is who we are and it’s amazing."

The Way of the Anthologist, A Review by Richard le Gallienne, exposes the thanklessness of the anthologist's task. Published in 1922 in the New York Times, this is a deep and detailed, even "tormenting" review of An English Anthology of Prose and Poetry.

Excerpt: "That the editor prefers other poems or passages is not to the point. He is not editing the book for himself, and he is not at liberty to indulge his own preferences in a fashion so exclusive. Over and over again I feel this perversity of a personal idiosyncrasy at work in Sir Henry's selections, and his anthology, therefore, often fails of being really representative. Take Sir Thomas Browne, for example."

A short while ago, on my other blog, I asked for suggestions for introductory texts to science fiction for younger readers. I received quite a few useful replies, many of which I'm still following up. By coincidence, this anthology (published by Viking/Penguin) was mentioned on BoingBoing shortly afterwards, so I ordered it immediately, and decided to read it myself first, to see if it would be suitable for my ten-year-old daughter, who had expressed an interest in SF/fantasy (thanks to Doctor Who).

According to the publishers, this is for ages 12 and up, which is about right, because my daughter has an advanced reading age (she's reading, and enjoying, Katharine Kerr, and also tackled Stephen Baxter's H-Bomb Girl). Having read this, I'm fairly sure my daughter will find some of this quite hard to understand, though there are certainly stories she'll "get" straight away. Still, it would be remarkable if she liked everything in here the first time she read it. The idea is to discover new writers, and to follow and develop your own tastes, and to perhaps return to the volume at a later date and discover some more.

The old Aldiss-edited Penguin Omnibus of Science Fiction did the job for me when I was a younger reader, and it's fitting that this collection is from the same publisher. My old copy of Aldiss is over 30 years old and extremely dog-eared

I recently reviewed another Jonathan Strahan collection, Eclipse 1, and - as with that volume - I've got no problem with the selection of writers here, who include familiar names such as Stephen Baxter, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, Gwyneth Jones, Ian McDonald, Garth Nix and Alastair Reynolds. You can read more about the book at the editor's own blog. In fact, they're all prominent, excellent SF writers and all have back catalogues worth exploration. As a sampler of or introduction to contemporary SF, it would be hard to find anything better than this. It's remarkable to me how many of these writers are British-born. I don't know if that reflects a bias on Strahan's part, or whether the British are punching above their weight in the world of science fiction.

So, in what ways is this collection aimed at younger readers? They're certainly not being patronised here, or otherwise talked-down-to. Like all the best SF, some of this pushes you to understand some tricky ideas. What these stories have in common is that the protagonist(s) are usually young people, making them accessible to the target demographic.

Among others, I enjoyed Garth Nix's play on vampire hunting (featuring one of the older protagonists), "Infestation," and the deep space adventure-horror of "The Star Surgeon's Apprentice," though I think my favourite is the last one in the collection, "Pinocchio" by Walter John Williams, which kept me up past bed time so I could finish it in one sitting. How my daughter will cope with the idea of people uploading themselves into gorilla bodies, I don't know. Take it in her stride, probably. I was thinking as I read it that it would make a good discussion point for an 'A' level Media Studies class.

If there isn't the variety of voices and viewpoints here that I'm used to with the Gardner Dozois anthologies (which is at least partly down to the familiarity with his tastes I've developed over many years and volumes), it's because of the common thread supplied by the young protagonists. I also started to feel uneasy after a while, especially in the stories that heavily featured gaming and an online existence, because I realised how much I've been sheltering my kids from some aspects of our modern technological world. No game consoles round here. I'm starting to feel like one of those people who doesn't have a TV.

Good stuff, and certainly enough interest and entertainment for readers of all ages. I'm really chuffed that I got this. My only quibbles are that, first, it doesn't advertise itself anywhere on the cover as a book suitable for younger readers; and, second, that each author's short explanation for the story might have helped understanding if it was included at the beginning rather than the end of each entry. But those are minor quibbles, and once you know the author's note is there, you can always cheat and read it first.

Recommended.

This week I have picked up a few anthologies. Scared Stiff with Laura Baumbach, William Maltese, Josh Lanyon and Sarah Black. I have not read the Maltese as yet but I really liked the other three. I thought Rhys and Sam from Josh Lanyon's book were a delight and I have a real soft spot for Sam. Sarah Black's story was lovely. A story about another chance at love and historical ghosty badness. Laura Baumbach does a hot tale in Soul Desire. Despite not having read one of the stories as yet (or I would never get any sleep) this was a fab read and well worth picking up.

The 2nd one I picked up was Arresting Developments by Josh Lanyon, James Buchanan and L. Picaro. Josh has Tim and Luke looking into an freaky old memory from when Tim was younger. Luke is a cop and his spidey senses start tingling at Tim's spooky story retold during a dinner party.  It is so worth reading for Tim coping (or not coping) with camping and thinking he is lost, heh. I identified lets just say. In  James Buchanan's tale Rick has just left his prick of an ex and is working the border in New Mexico. Augi, is the brother of his best friend from High School and is participating in some rather questionable activities when they run into each other. I loved the attraction Rick felt for Augi and there was this hint of forbidden as he was his best buds younger brother. Super hawt tension! I am looking forward to reading some more of this authors work. The last story I was not as keen on. I understand the constraints of a short story but for me it lacked tension, which is a must for me as a reader. I reckon Marc would have been interesting if he had held out or been more standoffish and hesitant. I dunno, it was just one that did not speak to me personally as a reader.

All in all a good week so far for reading...and seeing! If you have not already, you should check out the totally cool post Lisabea and  James Buchanan did on hero types. It is an excellent piece. Not sure which one is my fav, although I do love the accidental beta hero and the redemptive is so cool. I lurve the character of Zsadist!!!! Maybe the broken hero, I do so pine for some Jake goodness or is that badness?? Happy reading.

Here are the two big encounters you must know about when building an anthology:

1. Getting permissions. This can be easy as pie, as when I needed a last minute permission from an author who got back to me within hours with a positive response. Or it can be frustrating, as when the publisher at a certain press kept accepting my several phone calls and would chat with me, but refused to say yes or no. He simply waffled and waffled and waffled. I contacted the book's author. She had the same experience. The publisher would not commit. A simple "no" would do.

Getting permission can be expensive. It usually depends on how large your printing is. In my book, One: Essential Writings on Nonduality, which had only 1500 copies in its first printing (it is in its second printing), a publisher wanted $100 to print a few lines of a poem by a fairly well-known author. Many authors/publishers didn't charge anything. Some charged around $200 for entire chapters, a fair price I thought.

Some publishers tried very hard to get permissions, without success. One of the largest publishers in the world went out of their way to locate an author's family in Japan. They were not successful, but I was ever grateful for their effort.

I received a very difficult permission upon catching the publisher at just the right time.

Every experience with gaining permission to reprint is different. That's why there are houses that specialize in getting permissions. It is a career unto itself that depends on know-how, negotiation skills, legal and publishing background, and industry connections.

Because each experience in getting permissions was unique, I enjoyed it, overall. It was fascinating.

2. The impossibility of including everything and everyone you like, and the edge that can place on friendships and working relationships. Often the decision of what to include in an anthology is not in your hands. The editor or publisher will make those final decisions.

For my book I invited a dozen or so authors to either submit writings or to allow me to reprint from their works. Only one of those people was featured in the book. The people not featured included household names in the spirituality world. However, even if I were spare in selecting contributors, disappointments would occur. It cannot be avoided.

Why were invited authors not included in the anthology? Common reasons include space limitations, refinement of the vision as the anthology reveals itself, and complication or repetition of a theme.

In Part Two of this series I'll give links to articles on how to create an anthology, and excerpts from them.

Flashing Swords Press, publishers of The Return of the Sword: An Anthology of Sword and Sorcery Fiction has a spanking new site! Pretty cool, too! Click over and buy your copy of RotS today! More fiction than you can shake a sword at - and more swords than you should shake a book at! Enjoy the read.

But the book is also a roadmap to contemporary publishing, a real tool for writers. Annie understood several things about publishing that she was at pains to have us know right up front: "Nonfiction makes more money than fiction," she announced in class one day. "It sells more copies and publishers pay more for it." A few essays could help us keep afloat, she said, and I remember thinking about this when a commission for my essay, "After Peter", helped me afford to go to a writer's colony and work on my novel.

This was, keep in mind, before the bloom of the memoir. Annie's career was deep in the personal essay boom, which predated that. Elizabeth Wurtzel was still at Harvard and Prozac Nation was undiscovered territory, much less what lay beyond it. Personal essays, she told us, were also the best way for an editor to meet your voice. And because they were written on experiences that had already happened, it meant the editor and the magazine didn't have to spend any money to send you anywhere. You had already done what was needed to write the piece.

Annie taught out of Best American Essays in part, she told us, because it took the temperature of what was being published and who was publishing it. But there was more to it than that. Here's basically how she taught us to use the book, in a three easy steps.

1. After every essay or story (these rules apply for Best American Short Stories) take a look at the magazine who published the story, and if you feel like your work is at all close to the essay or story, note that.
2. In the back of the anthology is a list of the magazines the editors consulted, and these magazines are where you want to be published, in order to be noticed by editors and agents.
3. Do not use these addresses directly to submit work, but double-check them against live issues of the magazine, the most current one, for two reasons. The first is that they may have moved offices. The second is that some use a version of their published address in both this anthology and Literary Marketplace to tell them who is basically just getting their address and sending them essays or fiction blind, and who is a real reader of theirs, who actually knows what's in the magazine. And you should read the magazine to make sure it's the right place for your work. Part of submitting work is making it easy for the editor to say yes, and that means, knowing what they like and what they publish.

None of this of course expresses the devotion I felt to the Anne Carson essay, which I loved desperately, and which I had to read again and again. Nor does it speak to the way in which the collection consistently is a portrait of the sensibility of the series guest editor each year, and how this is of a subtle but important value to a student writer who's perhaps studying that writer's work. In my case, Annie had forbade us to read her while we studied her. "I'll have enough of an impact on you," she said. "You're going to try to please me anyway, so at least wait, so you won't imitate me." When, that fall, after I'd graduated, I found her edition of that anthology, I remember I bought it the moment I saw it in a burst of homesickness for school. I was living in San Francisco, working in a bookstore and feeling a little lost now that the writing and what happened to it was all up to me. Reading that edition turned out to be a way to keep her considerable wisdom with me in the years that followed, like a kind of guide and a bullwark against total inertia. I still have it in my office.

BLOODY OCTOBER

An anthology inspired by the haunted season...

Edited by Christopher Allan Death

http://midnighthorror.fortunecity.com/bloodyoctober.html

COMING HALLOWEEN 2008

Other New Entries: "Books & Anthos"

Though lots has been written about adoption, there is a real lack of resources for birth parents. I'm very excited to participate in this project, which will be edited by mother-daughter team Ann Angel and Amanda Angel. They have their own great story to tell, which they may choose to do at a later time on this blog. Essays can be short or long. We are a literary press and looking for essays written to the highest standards. Please submit your best work.

If you want to submit an essay or poem to this upcoming anthology, please contact Amanda and Ann at the following email: alangel78 at gmail.com. You can also contact us here at Catalyst Book Press at info at catalystbookpress.com.

p.s. this is a sensitive topic; for those who need it, we will welcome essays and poems written under pseudonyms...

Love You To Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising A Child With Special Needs

Edited by Suzanne Kamata / Beacon Press / May 2008 /

This just out: A collection of fiction, non-fiction, memoir and poetry about the experience of parenting a child with "special needs," i.e., disability, chronic health condition, or whatever your phrase of choice happens to be. I haven't yet had a chance to read the entire book--it just arrived yesterday--so this isn't a review, but a shameless plug. I shouldn't review it anyway, since I have a piece in it, titled "A Homecoming." I hope to post it here later on--just as soon as I find my electronic version...I am soooo disorganized. Rather than a review, I'll share my experience of being published in anthologies.

Having had enough experience with anthologies to know the drill, I send off my work and forget about it. More often than not I send something already written, sometimes even published elsewhere. I do this because I know that many proposed anthologies never see the light of day; either the editor was unable to continue or she couldn't find a publisher. I used to get pissed off about this, but years in the biz have taught me how hard it is to put together anthologies. There are so many pieces to cobble together, all interdependent on each other, that it's a miracle so many do get published. Writers want to know who the publisher is, or even if there's a publisher, before they send their work--and the more accomplished the writer, the truer this is. Meanwhile, publishers want names of writers who've committed, and sometimes want to see their pieces. It's a rare editor who doesn't lie through her teeth to publishing houses, throwing around names of known writers, exaggerating their level of commitment. It's all one big Catch-22 situation. I've begun and abandoned three or four anthologies--either I didn't get enough good work, or I couldn't get a publisher, or I just got sick of the whole damn thing. All of which is to say that, once I submit something to a proposed anthology, I don't expect to hear back about it for awhile, if ever.

When the thing does fly, it's a wonderful surprise, nine months or a year later, to find a contract in my mailbox, and a few weeks later, if it's a paying gig and paying early, a small check. As small as

these checks are, they're gravy. They always seem to come at the most crucial moment, too: when I'm on my last cigarette, or PG&E has threatened to turn off the lights.

After the contract and check, I usually forget all about the thing again. So it's a great moment when, like yesterday, this labor of love arrives in my mailbox. Glossy, pristine, filled with unknown treasures, it never fails to give me a boost. I love sitting down and reading, in this order: the Table of Contents, author first; Contributor's Notes; and my own piece, which I've probably forgotten, and which, if I'm lucky, surprises me by how good it is. (That was the case this time; many times I cringe, hating my piece). It's usually a few days before I get to sit down and read through the whole book, but when I do, I begin with the authors I know first, then go back and read the rest. And finally, I place the new anthology on the bookshelf that's been set aside for my own work. It's quite a full shelf, and I do believe I'm going to have to start another one to accommodate this latest addition. My friend Chris Muncie says it's a great day in a writer's life--the day she starts "the second shelf."

So I guess it's a great day. I hope everyone will go check out Love You To Pieces, buy or borrow it, or stand in the bookstore and read it. This is a life experience that, if you haven't lived it, will expand your mind, maybe even your heart. And if you have lived it--I don't have to tell you. You know what hearing other people's stories means to you.

SATIRICA IS ON THE HORIZON

The darkest, most twisted speculative fiction anthology in the history of the known universe has now found a publisher! Satirica will be published in a hard cover edition by Cowboy Logic Press in SUMMER 2008, with paperback to follow in SUMMER 2009. Satirica will be printed in the UK and USA, and distributed through all the big names, including Ingram, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. It packs 110,000 words into over 300 pages, and includes 24 of the hippest stories by 20 of the hottest new authors in the field of speculative fiction. It will bend your perceptions of social reality to the breaking point, and you will never look upon contemporary society in quite the same way again.

A truly international collection, Satirica includes authors from Canada, the USA, Scotland, England, Wales, Australia and New Zealand, in a compilation of the very best of contemporary satire and social science fiction.

Jeffery Archer had me intrigued as a writer; the way he went about writing books and the way he thought.  I'm reading Cat O' Nine Tails.  It's an anthology of short stories based on stories told to him while he was in prison.  His writing is really smooth.  His stories are fun to read.  I've enjoyed them so much that I haven't been paying attention to the way he writes.  He loves to have fun with the reader.  He doesn't simply narrate the stories, involves himself in them.  I sometimes even think I can hear him speaking as he narrates the story to me.

I have a lot of respect for this author simply because he acknowledges that he's been to prison and uses that experience to write.  I will definitely need to pick up one of his novels after this.

Having recently published my first anthology, I've wrestled with the usefulness of these, at worst, heavy weight doorstoppers. After RonSilliman reviewed For the Time Being along with two other anthologies on his blog, a number of commentators in the comments section quickly trashed anthologies on the whole as money schemes and worthless careerist moves. To an extent, I found myself agreeing with much of the criticism. As I think Silliman rightly points out in his critique of a Rock and Roll poetry anthology, anthologies miss the mark where they stretch the truth or make arbitrary distinctions. Themed anthologies often fall into this category, and all of a sudden you have a shelf full of Cat Poetry and Verses of the Night Sky. It reminds me of how the editors of Thoreau's Journal originally published selected versions of it according to season. Thoreau on Fall. Thoreau on Spring. Or Thoreau on Nature. Or Thoreau on Trees. Ultimately, this kind of arbitrary lumping demeans both the writers and the subject matter. Another way that anthologies tend to get it wrong, in my opinion, is when they cast too wide a net. When, for example, they collect too many poets who have little to do with one another into too big of a volume. This becomes your classic 700 or 800 pagedoorstopper, which ultimately makes the whole project unreadable, and sucks the life out of any of the actually good poems that might be contained within.

The best anthologies, on the other hand, are focused and serve a purpose. By their nature, anthologies serve as introductions. They are teaching texts and reference volumes. I find Don Allen's anthology, for example, to be so excellent, because I keep going back to it again and again. A poet like Larry Eigner, who I missed the first read through, is still there on my shelf next to Ginsberg, who I immediately loved. At some point in all of our lives our tastes change and we grow out of one writer and move toward another, and then, if we had the right impulse from the beginning, we return to the original writer with fresh perspectives and dig something else they were up to and then repeat the process several times over. I was reminded about this a few days ago when Joe Massey sent me a copy of a poem he dedicated to Joe Ceravolo. I read Ceravolo as an undergrad and regrettably have sold my Ceravolo books, but then I pulled down some nameless Norton anthology off my shelf and there Ceravolo was. So, while I'm waiting for my latest ABE.com purchase to arrive, I still have a fewCeravolo poems to keep me company.

But more then serving as a repository of who's who, a good anthology will actively point the reader off in many directions. Through Schelling's excellent explanation and examples in his introduction in the Wisdom anthology, I was able to better understand the connection between McClure's beast language and esoteric Hindu-Buddhist tantras. Maybe if I was even a somewhat astute student, this would have been obvious, but sometimes students miss what is right under their noses. Therefore, I would posit that a strong introduction is also the mark of an excellent anthology. No need in my opinion to touch on every piece within the volume, but to give shape and context to the project is crucial, not only for the introduction itself, but for the anthology as a whole. Consequently, when Tyler Doherty and I were putting togetherFor the Time Being, a strong and well thought out introduction was at the top of our agenda from day one. Also, the decision to include an essay on teaching the poetic journal and a booklist at the end was another nod toward usefulness. The inclusion of interviews and mini essays collected spontaneously from contributors were also in this vein.

Therefore, I'd conclude that anthologies, if done right, remain a useful tool. Of course there are sellouts and unthoughtful volumes anddoorstoppers galore. But a good anthology is certainly a worthy purchase. I'd like to see the conversation steer away from the knee-jerk, blanket statements toward nuance and usefulness. The nuts and bolts of what constitutes a good anthology are certainly up for discussion; a discussion that might be beneficial to us all.