thebookishowl.com

NOTE: I’m curious about the comic book adaptation of a A Game of Thrones, but not really that excited. I loved The Hedge Knight miniseries, but those were novellas that were being adapted compared to a novel that is over 600 pages long. Plus, considering how impressive HBO’s Game of Thrones TV series ended up being, can the comic book adaptation even compare? Also, I’m not a fan of Tommy Patterson’s artwork, although the decision to use Alex Ross and Mike S. Miller as cover artists was definitely an inspired choice. In fact, I might end up buying the series just because of the covers, although I’ll probably wait until the graphic novels are available. Despite my reservations, I have faith in  Daniel Abraham’s abilities and believe the author will do the series justice

Fantasy Book Critic

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

In her own words, here is Alina Bronsky’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine:

My novel The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is the story of a Soviet-Tartar family. It opens with the birth of a girl, Aminat, and follows her for three decades as she grows up, moves from Russia to Germany, disappears and then reemerges on the TV screen – always observed and dominated by her well meaning but extremely selfish grandmother.

The soundtrack for the novel must start with some clips of Soviet pop music – don’t be shocked, the book begins in the 1970s.

1. First of all, of course, would be “Arlekino” (Harlequin), an early song by Alla Pugacheva. There are not many artists who have managed to stay at the peak of their popularity for more than 30 years; Alla Pugacheva is one of them. She has a lovely voice and puts on a terribly funny performance.

2. Al Bano Carrisi & Romina Power- “Felicita”

Nobody could ever give me a good explanation for the constant broadcast of Italian schlager music on Soviet television in the 1980s. Hardly any Russian could speak a foreign language at the time, but every kid knew the Italian word for “happiness“.

3. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s “Wedding March” can’t be missed because there are three weddings in the book (and even more thoughts about matchmaking). None of the weddings are celebrated solemnly enough, so this March only plays in my heroine’s head.

4. “American Boy”, which is performed by Kombinatsiya, one of the first Russian girl bands. This song was an anthem for Russian girls longing for the West during the 1990s. Now it makes my entire generation cry out of embarrassment. I know it’s really painful, but I just couldn’t help including it.

5. “Wind of Change” by the Scorpions

This addresses is a similar subject as above, but interpreted very differently.

6. To make it complete: “Go West” by The Pet Shop Boys.

Okay, now it’s no longer a secret: my book is about emigration.

7. The first part if the novel considers different aspects of Soviet family life. Some of them might seem pretty exotic, for example my heroine’s relationship to her unfaithful husband. The song “You Got Drunk Like a Pig” by Verka Serduchka, a legendary Ukrainian travesty singer, could be considered a perfect accompaniment.

8. “Not a Crime” by Gogol Bordello

Some people think Gogol Bordello makes pretty rowdy music. I agree – but I love their great song titles and often wise lyrics. If you’re writing about Eastern Europe, you start to hope that Gogol Bordello will do the soundtrack for your story. Another useful thing about them is that if you have to meet a deadline, and it’s late in the evening and you’re falling asleep – don’t drink coffee, just listen to Gogol Bordello.

Alina Bronsky and The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine links:

the author’s website

Author Exposure review
Bookslut review
Cleveland Plain Dealer review
Fiction Addict review
Financial Times review
Gina Choe review
Kirkus Reviews review
Leafing Through Life review
Macleans.ca review
Ms. Magazine Blog review
New Yorker review
Publishers Weekly review
San Francisco Chronicle review
Stephanie Anderson’s review
Three Guys One Book review
Three Percent review
Vol. 1 Brooklyn review

Conversational Reading interview with the translator
New York Times interview with the author

also at Largehearted Boy:

other Book Notes playlists (authors create music playlists for their book)

52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film’s soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

Q: Greg, thank you very much for agreeing to participate in an interview. To begin with, could you introduce yourself for our readers and tell us what set you on the path of a writer?

Q: Speaking of The Underworld Cycle, how many volumes are projected (do you have an ending envisioned), how far along are you in the next book, and is there anything you can tell us about volume three?

Fantasy Book Critic

The Authorized Ender Companion
Jake Black
Tor (432 pp, .99, November 2009)
Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

One of my most prized possessions is a signed hardcover copy of Orson Scott Card’s Hugo and Nebula award winning Ender’s Game. Before the signature, Card inscribed “A survival guide for geniuses.” This is a wonderful tagline for Ender’s Game, which has spoken to a full generation of science fiction fans. Now, Jake Black has written a complete and authorized companion to the set of nine (so far) novels and assorted short stories – the Enderverse, as it is known to fans.

The bulk of The Authorized Ender Companion is taken up by the 315-page “Ender Encyclopedia,” which lists every individual, place, or thing that shows up anywhere in the Enderverse. This ranges from the detailed (a 15-page entry on Bean and 20-page entry on Ender) to the passing (such as the one-line entry that reminds us all what a “barkdancer” is). Probably one of the best entries is the 3-page lexicon of Battle School Slang.
The end of the Encyclopedia lists all of the sources, which is very helpful for those of us who haven’t yet read all of the short stories, followed by a couple of pages of “Ender’s Time Line” which, while interesting, is in print that is so small you may need a magnifying glass. (Note: I read an advanced review copy, so hopefully some sane editor will decided that this must be enlarged for the final edition.) Beyond the Encyclopedia, however, are some of the more substantive aspects of this book and the ones that fans should really be looking forward to.

__________

Aaron Johnston, a member of Card’s production company, provides a 30-page essay, “Getting Ender Right,” about the ins and outs of getting the Ender’s Game movie made. This provides a lot of interesting information and a behind-the-scenes look at how books get adapted into movies, but it misses the one piece of information crucial to a fan: a date. Still, the essay provides encouragement that a movie version of Ender will hit the screen within our lifetime.

Next comes the twenty-eight page “The Technology of Ender’s Game,” by Stephen Sywak. This covers everything from the star drive technology and ansible, to the Battle School design itself, including Battle Room, flash suits, and even the computer desks. A note at the beginning of the essay indicates that Card was aware of Sywak’s early analysis while working on the later novels.

The final thirty plus pages of the book are devoted to letters from “Friends of Ender.” This is the heart of the Enderverse … the stories of how the story has impacted people profoundly. Ender’s Game and the related stories are about trying to find your place in the world and doing anything to survive in that world. It is about making the hard choices, when you want nothing more than to make no choices at all. These letters from children and parents, students and teachers, writers and readers, connect those of us who have been shaped by our contact with Ender.

If you’re one of those people, then you’ll probably treasure this book. If not, then it’s not for you… go get the original and see why Ender has so many friends

Black Gate

Hope Mirrlees’ stunning 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist begins with the following epigraph:

The Sirens stand, as it would seem, to the ancient and the modern, for the impulses in life as yet immoralised, imperious longings, ecstasies, whether of love or art, or philosophy, magical voices calling to a man from his “Land of Heart’s Desire,” and to which if he hearken it may be that he will return no more — voices, too, which, whether a man sail by or stay to hearken, still sing on.

It’s a quote from the classical scholar Jane Harrison, who was Mirrlees’ close companion at the time Mirrlees was working on Lud-in-the-Mist. It’s a perfectly chosen introduction to the book. It sets out the themes, and to an extent the method, which Mirrlees used: the conflict between instinctive desires and the conscious will, that tries to repress those desires and establish a social harmony — all symbolically realised through the imagery of myth and fantasy.

The sirens sang to Odysseus, who had himself lashed to his mast to hear their song while his crew went about their duties with their ears stopped up with wax. Apollonius of Rhodes says that they also sang to the Argonauts, but that their song was overcome by Orpheus, and the sirens threw themselves into the sea and became rocks. And I will note here, for reasons that should become clear later, that Apollonius also says that only a little later the Argonauts came to the garden of the Hesperides, in the far west, where the golden apples of Gaea had been kept, a marriage gift for Hera, until Hercules had took them as part of his labours.

These legends seem to have little to do with Mirrlees’ book. At least on the surface. The novel introduces us to Lud-in-the-Mist, a town of merchants and bankers, culturally similar to, say, a small eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century English or Dutch city. It’s the capital of the small country of Dorimare, which is bounded on the north and east by mountains, on the south by the ocean, and on the west by Fairyland. But the Dorimarites do their level best to ignore their western boundary. Like Odysseus’ crew, they have stopped up their ears.

It wasn’t always so. Dorimare used to be a duchy, with a hierarchy of priests of a seemingly-pagan religion. But some two hundred years before the story opens, there was a bourgeois revolution against the aristocracy, and against the priests. Duke Aubry was deposed. The burghers who took over Dorimare decided that the decadence of their former rulers had been caused by their indulgence in fairy fruit, which was now banned. Indeed all products of fairyland were banned, and even to speak of the fairies became a crime against good taste. Still, a scandalous book published — and banned — several years before the novel begins pointed out that Dorimarites had intermarried with fairies in the past, that the flora and fauna were still on occasion elf-touched, and that even the names of the Dorimarites hinted at fairy origins. So did their curses: “By the Golden Apples of the West,” one of them might exclaim, echoing what we eventually find to be “the most potent charm in fairy;” so returning us to myth, to the Hesperides, and to the sirens.

Fairyland, in Lud-in-the-Mist, is the abode of old aristocracy, like Aubry, and of religion and mystery. But it is the abode of many other things as well. Fairy fruit “had, indeed, always been connected with poetry and visions, which, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdy common-sense of a burgher-class in the making.” The reference to mortality is intriguing. Mirrlees frequently associates fairyland with death, lending a dark texture to a book that otherwise seems sprightly. If one can easily read Mirrlee’s fairy fruit as being, like the fruits of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” concerned with sexuality and the erotic, then it’s also easy to read it as connected with the passage of time, with death, and with the thanatic. Fairyland is the Freudian unconscious, the place of those primal urges from which dreams and deep desires come; and Mirrlees’ book becomes increasingly dreamlike as it progresses.

It’s probably no surprise at this point to say that the book covers the subversion of placid Dorimare by the incursion of fairy fruits, an extended parable of the conscious mind being undermined by the unconscious. Mirrlees takes the somewhat risky but entirely successful step of telling this story essentially from the perspective of the conscious mind, as opposed to the more immediately vital and dramatically attractive unconscious. One of the reasons she succeeds in this is by the strength of her dramatisation of the human society at Dorimare’s heart. Lud-in-the-Mist feels like a real community; its people are frequently petty and small-minded, but the characters love it and so we accept those flaws — just as we overlook the pettiness and small-mindedness of any community we love. Conversely, Mirrlees delicately underlines the cruelty of fairyland. Duke Aubrey is a rapist who hounded a jester to suicide for his own amusement. The immoralised impulses are not particularly pleasant.

At the same time, the book is more sophisticated than this description makes it seem. It’s very clear that the rational world of the Dorimarites is itself a delusion. The rule of law they’ve established following the deposition of Aubrey is based on falsity; it refuses to mention Fairyland, and refers to ‘fairy fruit’ only as illegal textiles. “In the eye of the law,” we’re told, “neither Fairyland nor fairy things existed. But then, as Master Josiah had pointed out, the law plays fast and loose with reality — and no one really believes it.” This is no minor point. Much of the plot of the book comes to revolve around a murder case and its resolution, which is based very little on law or legal maneuvering.

So the paradox of the book is that the true fantasists are not the residents of Fairyland, but of Dorimare, who have built their fantasy on the repression of the fantastic. This is more than a conflict of fantasies. The story is, in essence, about denial. It’s about a people who deny their own mortality, who deny art and magic — it’s significant that Lud-in-the-Mist’s graveyard is called ‘the fields of Grammary,’ from ‘gramarye,’ magic, itself deriving from ‘gramarie,’ learning. It`s also significant that the family crypt of the Chanticleers, the leading family of the town, used to be a “pleasure-house” of Duke Aubrey’s; sex and death are wrapped up together.

The main character of the book, Nathaniel Chanticleer, mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist, was frightened as a young man by hearing a Note of pure music, and fears hearing it again as if it will mean the end of everything for him; he represses his romanticism, to the point where “he was apt to regard innocent things as taboo.” This recalls the arguments in Freud’s Totem and Taboo (published just 13 years before Lud); we can see Chanticleer and his society as neurotic, displacing their repressed fears and desires. Freud writes about society projecting its discontents onto its rulers in the form of rituals and taboos, and so Chanticleer, descendant of a family that itself deposed an aristocratic father-ruler in years past, reaches a low point in the book when he’s surreally declared by his subjects to be legally dead (significantly, a legal fiction).

But if the book seems to use Freudian ideas, it also seems to be a critique of Freud. Freud says “the asocial nature of the neurosis springs from its original tendency to flee from a dissatisfying reality to a more pleasurable world of phantasy. This real world which neurotics shun is dominated by the society of human beings and by the institutions created by them; the estrangement from reality is at the same time a withdrawal from human companionship.” Mirrlees suggests the opposite. The world of Dorimare and the law, the social world of human beings, is a function of repression and neurosis (Freud himself would argue something similar in his 1929 book Civilisation and its Discontents). Human beings collectively are estranged from reality. ‘Phantasy’ is a way of returning us to what is real; to express what cannot be said in any other way.

Which isn’t to say that the book’s structure or prose is unsophisticated. Quite the opposite; it is impressively dense with meaning. Symbols recur, images gain resonance with multiple use, and Mirrlees builds a sophisticated array of references which come to link up one to another. Consider the allusions to time, for example. At one point fairy fruit is hidden inside a grandfather clock. At another, Nathaniel’s old nurse tells him in part of a remarkable speech about time that “one learns that he is as quiet and peaceful as an old ox dragging the plough. And to watch Time teaches one to sing.” The nurse then sings for Nathaniel, who hears again the Note he fears: “But, strange to say, this time it held no menace. It was as quiet as trees and pictures and the past, as soothing as the drip of water, as peaceful as the lowing of cows returning to the byre at sunset.” So the imagery binds the Note to time; but also “There’s no clock like the sun and no calendar like the stars,” says the nurse. The sun and stars are part of the great charm of fairyland: “By the sun, moon, and stars, and the Golden Apples of the West!” And the stars, as the Milky Way, are associated with fairyland; which itself is linked with Nathaniel’s vision, in the later part of the book, of a broad white road. Everything ties in to everything else.

You can see it in the names of the characters. Chanticleer is the traditional name of the rooster, who greets the dawn and singals that it’s time to be awake. So of course Nathaniel’s enemy is the dreamy Endymion Leer, whose name harkens back to the nighttime dreamer in love with the moon. This connects to the fact that Fairyland, which among other things is the home of the dead, is to the west of Dorimare, the direction of night; and of the Hesperides, the daughters of the evening star.

Conversely, it’s one of the odd ironies of the book that there’s little actual mist described in the town of Lud-in-the-Mist. The nonexistent mist is simply symbolic. It’s an image of the confusion of the people, lost in delusions that they do not realise.

But although the confusions born of repression are a major part of the book’s themes, so too is ritual and initiation. Which may not bring happiness or wisdom, but which seem to be vital for uniting conscious and unconscious. We come to understand, by hints, that the old religion had a whole series of rites which survive in those strange names and oaths of the Dorimarites. And in the occasional old monument, one of which becomes a key symbol of union between the active world of humans and fairyland, with “the serenity and stability of trees.”

By the end, Nathaniels’ view on his Note has changed, opposites have been united, and a new awareness of Fairyland has in fact helped the Dorimarites in their trading with the outer world, with at least one new industry created. The point being that the integration of conscious and unconscious leads to new strength. And yet the book turns on itself at the very end, insisting on the falsity of all epitaphs, claiming that “the Written Word is a Fairy … speaking lying words to us in a feigned voice.” Perhaps it’s an insistence on the ultimate untameability of Fairyland, of the refusal of the elemental truths of the subconscious to be penned up in language.

There’s a quote on Wikipedia from Jane Harrison which runs as follows:

Every dogma religion has hitherto produced is probably false, but for all that the religious or mystical spirit may be the only way of apprehending some things, and these of enormous importance. It may also be that the contents of this mystical apprehension cannot be put into language without being falsified and misstated, that they have rather to be felt and lived than uttered and intellectually analyzed; yet they are somehow true and necessary to life.

It’s tempting to see that as in part a gloss on Lud-in-the-Mist’s distrust of the written word. It’s also tempting to see that as a hint both for Mirrlees’ adoption of fantasy after two realist novels, and perhaps also her relative silence thereafter (though she did continue to write poetry).

At any rate, Lud-in-the-Mist is a great and deeply odd book. The characters aren’t fully-rounded, but they are flat in just the right way, in just the right satirical key. The story illustrates perfectly the distinction between reductive allegory, where every image has only one interpretation, and rich symbolism — where, as here, every reference has multiple meanings. It captures the feel of dreams like few other books, getting just right the strange balance of mundanity, incoherence, and significance that dreams have. And, crucially, the book is built out of well-turned sentence after well-turned sentence, a powerful work of language.

There seems to be some dispute over the copyright status of the book. With some trepidation I will note that you can find an e-text here. Or you can read about Hope Mirrlees here. Michael Swanwick’s written a study of Mirrlees that appears to be out of print; but he’s got some thoughts about her online here and here.

Black Gate

A wrap-up of features you may have missed this past week at Largehearted Boy:

Lists

2011 Online Summer Reading Lists

Music Festival Downloads

2011 Bonnaroo Downloads and Streams (updated throughout the week)

52 Books, 52 Weeks Book Reviews

McSweeney’s new food quarterly Lucky Peach

Book Notes (authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their book):

John Milliken Thompson for his novel The Reservoir
Myryam Gurba for her chapbook Wish You Were Me
Ofelia Hunt for her novel Today & Tomorrow
Shann Ray for his short story collection American Masculine

Weekly new book recommendations:

Atomic Books Comics Preview (recommended new comics and graphic novels)
Largehearted Word (recommended new books)

New Music recommendations:

Try It Before You Buy It (full album streams and mp3s from this week’s music releases)
The Week’s Interesting Music Releases

New DVD recommendations:

The Week’s Interesting DVD Releases

And of course, the daily music and news posts:

Daily Downloads (10 free and legal mp3 downloads every day, plus links to free live recordings online)
Shorties (news & links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

also at Largehearted Boy:

52 Books, 52 Weeks
Antiheroines
Atomic Books Comics Preview
Book Notes
Book Reviews
Contests / Giveaways
Daily Downloads
Largehearted Word
Lists
music & DVD release lists
Music Festival Downloads
musician/author Interviews
Note Books
Soundtracked
Try It Before You Buy It
Why Obama

Largehearted Boy

At KCRW, stream Neko Case and Nick Cave’s cover of the Zombies’ “She’s Not There.”

The Financial Times profiles author Philip Roth.

“For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that, I was a boy, I didn’t find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam war. I started to try to write the book that became American Pastoral back in the 1970s, when the war was just ending, but I couldn’t do it. It took another 20 years. I wouldn’t know what to write [about Iraq and Afghanistan, or 9/11]. It does take me 20 years to figure it out.”

I am aggregating online summer reading lists.

Today’s updates to the master list include the Book Lady’s Blog’s women’s studies books, the Irish Times’ list, and several others.

The 2011 Bonnaroo downloads and streams page has been updated with videos of full sets by the Arcade Fire, Best Coast, Explosions in the Sky, Florence and the Machine, Grace Potter, Kylesa, and the School of Seven Bells.

The Passive Voice examines what J.K. Rowling’s choice to sell her Harry Potter ebooks independently will have on indie authors.

Backbeat interviews Bill Callahan about his new album Apocalypse and the nature of collaboration.

Vol. 1 Brooklyn interviews singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler about books.

Centro-matic frontman Will Johnson talks to All Things Considered about the band’s new album, Candidate Waltz.

The Literateur interviews author Zadie Smith.

At Reverb, actor Tim Robbins shares a list of the 30 most played songs in his iTunes library.

The Boston Globe interviews singer-songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull.

Mashable profiles the collaborative album review site MusicGrid.me, calling it a “Yelp for music.”

Marketplace interviews Alina Simone about her music and new essay collection, You Must Go and Win.

Cool Tools lists the best magazine articles ever.

At Vulture, Girl Talk’s Gregg Gillis shares his ideal 154-track summer playlist.

State lists its albums of the year so far.

Follow me on Twitter and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (news and links from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture)

Atomic Books Comics Preview (highlights of the week’s new comics & graphic novels)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (highlights of the week’s new books)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

This morning in Center City Philadelphia I saw a bourgie young woman pushing a baby boy of two or three in a carriage. In the child’s lap was a book, presumably with pictures, titled “Wild Animals of North America.”

I noted to myself several ironies. One is that there are very few wild animals left in North America, unless you count squirrels. Another is that, while young boys are attracted to the notion of wild animals, that boy will grow up in the most regulated, watched, and catalogued society– be it of animals or humans– ever. We’re little better than zoo animals. Except for patches of urban wilderness which soon enough point their occupants toward actual prisons, or a few rural hinterlands where reside historical throwbacks like Wild Bill Blackolive, dreams of the wild are all most people get. That boy might become a young literary writer, properly MFA’d after being properly indoctrinated in college, with proper style and proper self-regulated politically-correct thoughts, nothing untoward or messy or wild to be found in himself and his well-crafted words, anywhere.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures

On Friday I came across a post by Jana DeLeon in which she mentioned that she’d written a “gothic-lite” for Harlequin’s Intrigue line:

Since the book’s release, a lot of writers have asked me how I “got away” with writing a ghost story for Intrigue, which is a contemporary romance line and not a paranormal line. The answer is that I didn’t “get away” with anything. Despite the gothic sound and haunted mansion, my story is not a true paranormal, which is why it works for the line. [...]

The house is reputed haunted. It’s isolated. It’s old and empty and has a history of tragic death. The heroine and hero see things they can’t explain. Sure, some of it turns out to be the villain, but not everything. The rest is unexplained. Was the white figure they saw out in the storm debris blowing in the inky black night or was it something else? That question remains unanswered.

By coincidence (spooky or otherwise), Clues: A Journal of Detection has just put out a call for papers for a themed issue on paranormal mysteries:

Paranormal mysteries often feature the usual suspects (ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and so forth) but also branch into the gothic, spirituality (as in Tony Hillerman’s skinwalkers, Michael Gruber’s shaman trilogy), and other magic realism, as well as biochemical transformation (as in the Relic series) and a wide variety of mystery hybrids with horror and dark fantasy. For this theme issue of Clues, potential contributors are urged to think outside the normal boxes. Thematic analysis might include (but is not limited to):

• the paranormal as red herring (explained away by the end, as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles)

• minority culture treated as paranormal (as in depictions of voodoo as horror) in mystery texts

• whether horror/dark fantasy in general requires detection

• the paranormal dialogue with subcategories of mystery: clue-puzzle/hard-boiled/noir/private eye/spy/police procedural/etc.

• paranormal romance in relation to romantic suspense

• the mystery ingredients most affected by paranormal hybridity

• women characters as detectives and/or monsters and/or victims in paranormal mysteries

• use and/or overuse of providence and other supernatural means for mystery resolution

• the dialogue between literary and popular gothic texts

• paranormal mysteries as reading tools/pedagogical resources

I put the bit about romance in bold and left out some of the suggested topics. More details can be found here. The deadline for submissions is 29 December 2011.

There’s a much shorter deadline for anyone wanting to present a paper to the GLBTQ Studies Area of this year’s Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association conference. They “must be received by June 30, 2011“:

Proposals of interest for this year’s conference might include:

*HIV/AIDS in Erotic Culture
*GLBTQ Romance Novels
*HIV/AIDS in Popular Culture
*GLBTQ Television Representation
*The Violet Quill writers
*Popular GLBTQ romance novels/novelists
*GLBTQ comics/graphic novels

The use of bold is, once again, mine. Some inspiration, should it be required, may be found at Dear Author, which is celebrating Pride Week. Today’s post, written by Sarah, is on the topic of “Book Awards and GLBT Books.”

Teach Me Tonight