My friend Ayize's first book, The Liminal People, has been picked up by Small Beer Press (the press founded by the also fabulous fabulist Kelly Link), and he's getting some great reviews.


















Science and science fiction publication io9 calls The Liminal People, "the twisted superhero story that Heroes should have been" and a "damn good read." Bookotron calls it "seriously well-written, but also seriously fun to read" and deserving of "a sequel, sooner rather than later."

Ayize's book IS seriously well-written, as well as highly detailed and an exciting-from-the-get-go read, and I'm so glad it has been picked up and is getting the press it deserves. Read an excerpt here, and then support both the author and small press publishing and come and get it!

Wow, what a fantastic piece in the New York Times on Haruki Murakami, his new tome, 1Q84, and the odd and oddly intoxicating organism that is Japanese culture.

I read an excerpt from the 1Q84, "Town of Cats" in the New Yorker last month, and it was terrific. But this piece by Sam Anderson is so great because instead of focusing strongly on this single book, he so deftly zeroes in on the beating heart of Murakami's work -- that terrible and beautiful Murakami muse: the darkness and light, the "ennui and eroticism" that is Japan, and his self-described outsider status.

Anderson implies that Murakami is bemused by his unofficial Japanese literary ambassadorship to the world, as he thinks of himself as a sort of reject from Japanese society. But this is what I find so tragic and beautiful about Japanese culture: their wa (which means both "Japan" and "harmony") -- and thus their perceived homogeneity -- while working well on the surface, lends itself to an individual and private feeling of otherness, of outsider status. This paradox of rejection and complete Japanese-ness, and Murakami's ability to heave this sort of unrequited love out of himself and into the novels that he writes, is what makes him the perfect ambassador for this country in perpetual identity crisis. I don't think Murakami is alone, and I think both he and Anderson know that.

After a few minutes, a strange creature fluttered into my view of the garden. At first it seemed like some kind of bird — a strange hairy hummingbird, maybe, based on the way it was hovering. But then it started to look more like two birds stuck together: it wobbled more than it flew, and it had all kinds of flaps and extra parts hanging off it. I decided, in the end, that it was a big, black butterfly, the strangest butterfly I had ever seen...[m]oments after the butterfly left, Murakami came down the stairs and sat, quietly, at his dining-room table. I told him I had just seen the weirdest butterfly I had ever seen in my entire life. He took a drink from his plastic water bottle, then looked up at me. “There are many butterflies in Japan,” he said. “It is not strange to see a butterfly.”

Oh lovely day!

Trevor's got a review of Nick Harkaway's Gone Away World up at the blog for Bay Area publisher Omnidawn. This will hopefully be the first of many. Check it, yo.

And speaking of books: someone loves me in London, and sent me a prezzie:


















Fantastic! Need I remind you?



Plus, it was 77 degrees today. Bloomin' gorgeous! Forget the down jacket -- I'm cycling to work in a t-shirt tomorrow.

Attended Rusty and Ken's book release party yesterday at Diesel, A Bookstore for their new title, Paraspheres, from their baby, Omnidawn Publishing.

Paraspheres was conceived of and published as a way to expose Latin America's magical realism literary styles and themes on a more global scale, and is flying the flag of the "New Fabulists." Of course, there are many gringo authors who have been writing in this style for some time, most notably one of my favorites, Rikki Ducornet (who also lends her words to this anthology as well as the introduction) but this is one of the first anthologies to surface, and it is very well done.

Superb pieces at the reading, all different, all touching and complex in their own way, and all with that enchanting glint of magic running like a vein of gold throughout. Amongst the 7 readers -- all excellent -- Charlie Anders spoke as one of a power couple (she a med student, he a law student), mad for each other's love but unable to reconcile their equally mad schedules in order to capitalize on that love, and their so-crazy-it-just-might-work scheme to take turns in cryogenic freezing to allow the other to complete their studies and preserve their love for a later, less hectic date. Carol Schwalberg regaled us with the story of Annie, an artist no longer struggling to make ends meet, but with the guilt over her Jewish identity amid a marriage to a good, safe, secure, but ultimately boring Protestant named Frank, and her dreamtime visitations from the strict and oh so Orthodox Moish, who wants to marry her and make her the proper Jewish girl she never was. And Laura Moriarty, poet and Deputy Director at Small Press Distribution stunned with an excerpt from her latest book, Ultravioleta -- a poem, a war, a narrative, a song, and a science fiction novel all as one.

Pick up Paraspheres directly from Omnidawn, Small Press Distribution, or Diesel, A Bookstore (links above). And if you're local to the Bay or visiting San Francisco soon, check out Omnidawn's second reading for Paraspheres on Thursday, September 28 at City Lights Books, where Rikki Ducornet will be flying in from Colorado to read her contribution. See you there.