As announced elsewhere already, I've just sold another short story. "The Contrary Gardener," which serves as a sort of companion piece to "The Voluntary State," will be in the next volume of Jonathan Strahan's Eclipse series of anthologies. I think the book will be out sometime in 2012, and I'll say more about it closer to publication time.
I'm spending most of my time this summer working on my next novel, but my first semester as a graduate student in Eastern Kentucky University's MFA program will start in a week or so. The two courses I'm taking (one of which is a fiction workshop) combine to yield this list of assigned books. I've read about half of them before, but look forward to reading or rereading all of them in an academic setting.
- The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
- Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
- After This by Alice McDermott
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, annotations and other apparatus by Alfred Appel, Jr.
All but the García Márquez and the Kundera are available for the Nook (well, the Nabokov isn't quite available yet, it'll be out on the 16th, I think, and here's hoping that the notes &c. are hyperlinked) which brings up the point that I've lately learned to enjoy being a reader of screens. I've even been reading on my computer, just this week having read the first four of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley mysteries on my laptop. I like having other windows open with the OED and Wikipedia live so I can flip back and forth when I come across a word or something else I'm not familiar with. In the case of Elizabeth George, that means I now know what secateurs are (well, I guess I already knew what they were, just not their proper name), and now know a lot more about the furniture makers of England than I ever thought I would.
