Weekly Round-up

I'm trying a new feature here to get myself re-interested in this blog. It's a weekly roundup of things I find interesting on the web. I'll try to keep it focused on books, stories, and publishing, though I may throw in the occasional movie trailer or cat video, just to drive my links up. Enjoy!

Stories:
Nobody's Stranger
Maud Newton has a story in two parts on medium.com. It's described as 'Miami noir love story.' It starts out like the kind of story that would be dismissed critically as a male fantasy of easy sex with a gorgeous woman if a man had written it. And parts seemed designed to act as a discussion starter of inverted gender roles in po-mo fiction rather than as an actual story. But some part of me really liked this story, and it stuck with me, so I'm going to say you should read it as well.

The Impossible Man
On another end of the gender spectrum, in the Paris Review, J Robert Lennon writes about a guy's guy, in trouble with his girlfriend, who takes a walk and loses his memory. When it comes back, he forgets all the parts of himself that weren't very nice. Things go downhill from there.

You Invent this Incredible Invention
From Pank magazine, an incredible story with a great voice that illustrates an amazing worldview. You could call it the tale of a geek and the woman who loves him, but it's more than that. Molly O'Brien, stand up and take a bow!

Books:
It's compilation season for the year's best short stories. The Best American Short Stories 2013 is out. After a brief glance, it looks like once again The New Yorker, Tin House, and Granta are still in charge of American short fiction. The O Henry Prize Stories collection is also out, and they do a slightly better job of looking beyond the big names but not much. For more obscure stories by lesser known but no less talented authors, The Pushcart Prize is your best bet.

Dumb movie trailer of the week:
The Desolation of Smaug: The Hobbit Part II (or, The Lord of the Rings -2)
This movie has it all. Dragons! Giant Dwarf-knuckle walkways! Suspenseful droning music! Hot he-dwarves. Hot she-elves! Untippable barrel racing with whitewater ninja-fights! Eyebrows of all shapes and sizes! Gold-pile luge racing! Me wants it, precious!




No, but seriously, I need to see the physics behind those barrels. And the eyebrows.


Cats!