Shelf Media Group

Shelf Unbound Top 10 Books of 2011

Since November 26 is Small Business Saturday, why not include small presses? With that in mind, Shelf Unbound magazine is releasing our Top Small Press Books of 2011, as follows:

Shelf Unbound book review magazine’s Top 10 Books of 2011

The e-book revolution may have closed Borders this year, but it opened borders for small and independent presses, giving them an unprecedented opportunity to reach a large, global audience. Shelf Unbound indie book review magazine is part of this digital revolution as well, with each issue going out to more than 100,000 readers in 17 countries. Shelf Unbound’s Top 10 Books of 2011 list includes works by both first-time and established authors, who offer new perspectives on art, reality, war, terror, and love.

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, Coffee House Press, www.coffeehousepress.org. This cerebral comedy from first-time novelist Lerner explores the authenticity, or inauthenticity, of our relationships to art and to each other through the character of the brilliant, self-doubting Adam Gordon, a young poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid. The book is remarkable for its ability to be simultaneously warm, ruminative, heart-breaking, and funny.

Quiet Americans by Erika Dreifus, Last Light Studio, www.lastlightstudio.com. The stories in Quiet Americans look at the impact of the Holocaust on generation after generation, starting in prewar Berlin and moving through time and family up to the present day. In such stories as “For Services Rendered, about a high-ranking Nazi’s wife and a Jewish doctor before the war and the moral implications of the actions they take to survive, Dreifus writes with incredible emotional nuance and empathy.

Airplane Novel by Paul A. Toth, Raw Dog Screaming Press, www.rawdogscreaming.com. Is Airplane Novel the 9/11 novel? Perhaps. It certainly makes the short list. Toth brings new perspective to the events with a second tower omniscient narrator, the South Tower himself, who details his birth, life, and death from his singular, elevated vantage point.

Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work by Edwidge Danticat, Princeton University Press, www.press.princeton.edu. In Create Dangerously, a powerful collection of personal essays on writing and exile, Haitian American author Danticat details atrocities in her country of origin and her experience as an immigrant living in one world and tied to and haunted by another. Dandicat writes of such gut-wrenching events as execution, assassination, and torture with such impeccable sobriety as to bring the reader in, to add another eyewitness to tragedy.

The Samaritan by Fred Venturini, Blank Slate Press, www.blankslatepress.com. A can’t-get-laid coming-of-age tale takes a sharp turn into sci-fi territory when the main character, Dale Sampson, discovers he has the ability to regenerate his own organs and body parts. Fred Venturini does an interesting thing, though, with his over-the-top premise: He keeps his focus on character development, so that you start to care about Sampson and the perpetual breaking of his heart.

Damascus by Joshua Mohr, Two Dollar Radio, www.twodollarradio.com. Mohr accomplishes the feat of bringing a pathetic dying man, an alcoholic semi-prostitute, and a naïve performance artist to full literary life while intelligently exploring various viewpoints on the war in Iraq. “I hope you dig it,” Mohr says at the front of the book. And we do, indeed, dig Damascus, another stellar offering from Two Dollar Radio.

Iraq: Perspectives, photographs by Benjamin Lowy, Duke University Press, www.dukepress.edu. Lowy’s photographs of both daily life and the terror of warfare were taken through the windows of a Humvee and through military-issue night vision goggles. They provide a revealing perspective on what he describes as “the fear and desperation that is war.” The book is the winner of the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.

Repeat It Today with Tears by Anne Peile, Serpent’s Tail, www.serpentstail.com. “The first time I kissed my father on the mouth it was the Easter holiday, the book begins. You know right away where this is going, so when it gets there it is not particularly shocking. Peile under-sensationalizes the mechanics of the incest, the inherent lewdness, focusing instead on drawing an observant portrait of the emotional complexity of young Susanna, who grows up desperate for the love of her perfect, absent father. And then finds him, and his love, or at least, in her mind, an approximation of such. Nominated for the Orange Prize, Read It Today with Tears is an elegantly written, tender, memorable book – a marvel.

Exit by Nelly Arcan, Anvil Press, www.anvilpress.com. Nelly Arcan explores depression and suicide in her fifth novel, Exit, completed a few days before Arcan killed herself at age 36. The book’s narrator, Antoinette Beauchamp, immerses the reader in her own pain, which she describes as “unremitting in [its] darkness and exhausting like a swarm of bees that is impossible to brush aside with the back of your hand without getting stung, eaten.” Exit is a dark, moving read, made all the more so by the author’s decision to let Antoinette ultimately desire life, when she herself could not.

The Final Appearance of America’s Favorite Girl Next Door by Stephen Stark, Shelf Media Group, www.shelfmediagroup.com. In this sexy, edgy, literary page-turner, New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year author Stark explores love, loss, and multiple realities. Pushcart Prize winner Laura Kasischke calls the book “entertaining, thought-provoking, and beautiful – like no novel you’ve read.” (Disclaimer: The Final Appearance is the first e-book from Shelf Media Group, publisher of Shelf Unbound magazine, but we couldn’t leave it off this list. Read an author interview and sample chapter here: http://www.pagegangster.com/p/bTuxs/.)

Shelf Unbound book review magazine is published six times a year by Shelf Media Group. Subscriptions are free; sign up at www.shelfmediagroup.com. For more information, contact publisher Margaret Brown, Margaret@shelfmediagroup.com.

Media contact: Margaret Brown, publisher, Shelf Unbound, margaret@shelfmediagroup.com, 972.375.4956

New issue of Shelf Unbound book review magazine

Shelf Unbound book review magazines celebrates its one-year anniversary with the publication of its new August/September 2011 issue. Highlights of the issue include the following:

*Nom de Plume: a (secret) history of pseudonyms by Carmela Ciuraru from Harper Collins.
*The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide by Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor from Harper Collins.
*The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, edited by Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee from Counterpoint Press.
*Dog Ear by Erica Baum from Ugly Duckling Presse.
*The Orange Suitcase by Joseph Riippi from Ampersand Books.
*The Suitcase by Sergei Dovlatov from Counterpoint Press.
*The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnette Friis from Soho Press.
*Airplane Novel by Paul A. Toth from Raw Dog Screaming.
*Poetry After 9/11: An anthology of New York poets, edited by Valerie Merians and Dennis Loy Johnson, from Melville House.
*Memory Remains: 9/11 Artifacts at Hangar 17, photographs by Francesc Torres, from National Geographic.
*You Are My Heart and Other Stories by Jay Neugeboren, from Two Dollar Radio.
*Inside the Money Machine by Minnie Bruce Pratt from Carolina Wren Press.
*Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura from Omnidawn.
*Love at Absolute Zero by Christopher Meeks from White Whisker Books.
*Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs from Quirk Books.
*Novel Places Bookstore in Montgomery County, MD
*The Vices by Laurence Douglas from Other Press.
*Bobby Fischer by Harry Benson from Powerhouse Books.
*Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in all the Confusion by Johan Harstad from Seven Stories Press.
*Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner from Coffee House Press.
*Wattpad Prize Winner “Obsidian” by J. Alexander Greenwood.

Shelf Unbound features the best of small press, university press, and self-published books. Sign up for a free subscription at www.shelfmediagroup.com/subscribe.php.

Kathleen Winter talks about her book Annabel

Shelf Unbound magazine discussed the book Annabel by Kathleen Winter in an hour-long Twitter conversation. Following is the edited transcript.

Shelf Unbound: Hello, Kathleen. As a brief introduction, Annabel, your first novel, was a best-seller in Canada, a finalist for the Giller prize … Annabel won the GLBTQ Indie Lit Award and has just been named a finalist for Amazon.ca’s First Novel Award. Annabel is the story of an intersex baby born in Labrador in 1968. Kathleen, how did the idea for this story come to you?

Kathleen Winter: An acquaintance told me in my kitchen about an intersex child. I’d never heard of this, and did some research. … I gradually found out many, many children are born with ambiguous gender, and I wanted to write about this.

@katyvance: Hi Kathleen! I read your book Annabel and loved it! Your portrait of Atlantic Canada was accurate without diminishing
through stereotypes.

KW: Thanks — I drew the place from experience.

Shelf: Would you give us a brief description of the four main characters?

KW: Wayne/Annabel is the intersex child. Treadway is his hunter/trapper dad, well-meaning and loving, but traditional. Jacinta is Wayne’s mother — a dreamer, a city girl trapped in the wilderness. Thomasina is Wayne’s midwife, mentor, strong woman role.

Shelf: And the setting could be called a character as well. Describe Labrador and why you chose it.

KW: Labrador is magnetic, northern wilderness: alluring and brutal, mystical and merciless.

Shelf: I also want to interject that Annabel was just published in the US by Grove Atlantic.

KW: Yes, and in March it comes out with Jonathan Cape in the UK. Also being widely translated, including into Chinese.

Shelf: In the prologue you describe a white caribou who has left its herd. “Why would any of us break from the herd?” This sets up a major theme of the novel, the many ways people can be isolated. Do you see Wayne as the MOST isolated character in the book?

KW: I love this question about Wayne’s isolation. I see his isolation as having an end, as he connects with the world. I see his mother as being perhaps the most isolated in the book, because she loses so much and can’t confide. Jacinta is cut off from any truth, or friend, or solace that might have nourished her.

Shelf: Yes, I actually think that his father, Treadway, is the most isolated. You render him quite beautifully. He does harsh things but in private reveals uncertainty. In the woods he sees a vision of his daughter and loves her. Was it hard to find his tenderness?

KW: I didn’t know his tenderness existed before I wrote the book. He showed it to me himself. I waited and he showed me. That’s how I do a lot of writing, by waiting to see what would really happen, not what I think SHOULD happen.

Shelf: The mother, Jacinta, refers to the baby as a girl at the doctor’s. Does she always think of Wayne as a girl?

KW: Yes, Jacinta always sees the girl, Annabel. She sees Wayne as well, but she secretly and longingly sees her daughter.

Shelf: Do you think it could be argued that Treadway’s decision was not entirely wrong? Would Wayne have struggled equally raised as a girl?

KW: For me, the other choices include raising the child as ambiguous, without denying the male or female aspect, so to answer your question, I don’t think it would have been any easier to deny the Wayne side of Wayne and honour only Annable.

@nikgore: I was curious about why you didn’t give W&J more time together after he chose to embrace the female side?

KW: Wayne and Wally maybe? Yes, I know what you mean — it would have been great to continue to find out more about Annabel. … Part of the answer might be that the book was already 460 pages long!

Shelf: You mention waiting to see what WOULD happen in your stories … what else in the book came to you from waiting?

KW: Bridges. The bridge used to be a treehouse but I didn’t like it. I waited and waited, and one day bridges floated to me. Also the ending — that was the hardest part and I had to rewrite the final third of the book many, many times.

Shelf: Brilliant. I was particularly struck by the bridges metaphor when I re-read the book. It is subtle but powerful. All of the characters seem to be attempting to bridge two worlds or wishing they were in another world. Thomasina, the mother’s friend who witnesses the birth, seems to most successfully break out of her restriction. Tell us more about her.

KW: Thank you — I love it too — I thank the fiction gods for that idea. … Thomasina is the strong one because she sees nothing wrong with blunt truth. She’s wise and strong, though wounded.

Shelf: The story takes place in 1968. Why did you set it then, and would it play out the same today?

KW: I thought Medicine would have been less evolved then, but in fact the same brutal choices are made today.

@katyvance Maybe it is obvious, but what do you think Wayne’s parents should have done?

KW: I think they did the best they could. The question the book asks is, why isn’t it okay to be gender-ambiguous? I think it is okay.

Shelf: Isolation is a big theme. The place is isolated, the characters are isolated from one another. Did you intend that at the start?

KW: My fave author is E.M. Forster, who wrote “only connect.” Isolation is a huge theme for me, yes. My whole aim of writing is, I sometimes think, to ward off loneliness. … I mean my own loneliness, the loneliness of the people in my novel or stories, and the loneliness of being human.

Shelf: I’ve asked @unputdwnables to join us and tell about Annabel winning an Indie Lit Award.

@unputdwnables Annabel won the Indie Lit Award in the GLBTQ category. The @IndieLitAwards are run by book bloggers. … Annabel was nominated by book bloggers as the best GLBTQ book of 2010. It then made the shortlist in December and was announced as the winner this month. Kathleen just granted us an interview which is now on the site.

@bonjourcass The panel raved about her stirring descriptions of the Canadian wilderness and her representation of an often ignored community.

Shelf: You mentioned struggling with the ending. How did you settle on this particular one? What alternatives did you consider?

KW: God, the possible endings! Treadway wreaks revenge on Derek Warford. Jacinta ends up in the mental hospital. Wayne and Wally become lovers. Wayne marries Graycie Watts. Wayne stays in Labrador and becomes an outfitter. I could go on all night with possible endings.

@katyvance I was glad that Treadway considered revenge and equally glad he didn’t take it.

Shelf: So it sounds like you wanted to give Wayne happiness.

KW: I HAD to give Wayne a chance of happiness because the real lives of intersex people contain so much trauma. I couldn’t bear to write a novel without some hope for Wayne/Annabel. Not a happy ending, but one with a hope of connection.

Shelf: Well that is a good point: hope of connection. Because as you say on page 1, “Break apart, separate, these are hard words.”

Shelf: I think that frequently stories about GLBTQ people do not give the characters happy endings. As a gay person, I liked seeing that.

KW: I’m so glad to hear that as a gay reader you wanted a hopeful ending. I think there’s too much literary despair.

@thatneilguy Did you have an easy road to publication?

KW: No, the road to publication was long!!! It took loads of persistence. Many many rejections, but I used them to improve my work, constantly improve it by rewriting and studying writers I loved and respected.

Shelf: Well now I must ask: you’ve mentioned EM Forster… what other writers do you most love and respect?

KW: Heinrich Boll, Colm Toibin, Katherine Mansfield, Gretel Erlich.

@thatneilguy: do you think you had extra stumbling blocks because of your subject matter?

KW: I’m not sure I had extra stumbling blocks — usually I don’t notice stumbling blocks even when they trip me!

@debdak143 I just started reading Annabel and i can visualize the setting so well. Loving it so far. Thanks.

KW: Very glad you like the setting — it is drawn from observation and experience. Labrador is a powerful land.

@nikgore I assumed Wally was gay. But I guess that works in the end doesn’t it? I’m so glad Wayne left Graycie. … I imagine the rape was hard to write. You did a great job depicting the brutality.

KW: Yes, I’m glad Wayne left Graycie too. As for Wally being gay, I like that assumption! … I almost took [the rape] scene out — it was too brutal for me and I was shocked that I wrote it, but I began to realize people in Wayne/Annabel’s position are often raped, beaten and murdered. So I left it in.

Shelf: Kathleen, this has been a fantastic hour. I want to wrap up by asking what you’re working on now?

KW: I’ve nearly finished a murder mystery and am doing preliminary reading for a nonfiction work about the Arctic.

Video Contest Announcement

Media inquiries: Margaret Brown, Publisher, Shelf Media Group, www.shelfmediagroup.com, 972.375.4956, margaret@shelfmediagroup.com

Shelf Media Group announces The Final Appearance of America’s Favorite Girl Next Door video contest. Read a chapter from this forthcoming book by acclaimed author Stephen Stark, then create a one- to two-minute video based on or inspired by the chapter. Post it on YouTube with the tag TFAOAFGND by April 1, 2011. All video content, including music, must be your original work. Three winners will be chosen by Shelf Media Group based on creativity, successful evocation of the chapter, and number of views on YouTube. The winning entrants will have the opportunity to have their video included in the official app for the book and will also receive a signed limited-edition copy of the book. The chapter appears below.

About the novel and the chapter:

The Final Appearance of America’s Favorite Girl Next Door

After years on what the brilliant comic Bill Hicks called “the flying saucer tour,” comedian Ellen Gregory has hit the big time with a sitcom called Girlfriends. And when she leaves it in the middle of a shooting season, after being kidnapped by and later shooting to death a stalker, it is not just the biggest blunder of her so-far brilliant career. It is the only thing she can do to survive the spiritual crisis of having reached for and got it all.

All except for love, which is the last thing she expects to find when she flees to the childhood home in Iowa she left half her life ago and hasn’t returned to since.

But Michael Webster, the Ph.D. student she meets in a grocery store, may be everything she’s ever longed for but could not have. But can she really have him? After a whirlwind romance – the only real romance she’s had with anything other than her ambition – Michael is killed and Ellen is maimed in a savage shark attack off the coast of North Carolina.

When Ellen recovers, she finds that, thanks to the black box, the “failed” device he created in the research for his dissertation, he may not be dead all. The black box, a computer with a mind of its own, seems to enable the user to enter parallel universes, where the slightest change in plans can have profound consequences for the future. In the other world she discovers that she and Michael never went into the water the day of the attack. He is still alive and she still has her left foot.

But is this real, or real even in the unconventional sense of the black box, or is it the wishful thinking of a grieving woman? Like a powerful drug, entering into the world of the black box is both addictive and dangerous. But how do you say goodbye to the one to-die-for man who does?

And the chapter:

The novel does not operate in strictly chronological time. Although it takes place over a period of several months in the spring and summer of 2001, as the story plays out, there is considerable plasticity to time.

Michael Webster is a thirtysomething scientist trying to finish the research for his dissertation – a prototype human-machine computer interface that enables the user to operate a computer by thought alone. Wiry and pale, with dark, curly hair, he has spent much of the last decade of his life in a computer lab, or in a medical lab with his business partner, Soraya Ouellette, MD, who has been helping him with brain research to finish the prototype for the Black Box. But something goes awry with the prototype, which starts doing something it should not (as Michael sees it) be able to do.

Ellen Gregory – the title character of the novel – is about the same age as Michael (32), a comedian-turned-white-hot-TV-star who abruptly leaves her TV show and LA to hide out at the childhood home she left slightly before her 18th birthday and to which she hasn’t returned until this crisis of the self. Her departure from LA is not very long since she shot to death the stalker who tried to kill her in her own home. She makes an appearance toward the end of this chapter, but without her “wholesome” girl-next-door blond hair. Instead, she sports the haircut and dye job she did on herself in a bathroom in LAX as she was leaving.

When Ellen and Michael meet – chronologically later than the moment in this chapter – they become quickly attached. He’s one of the few people she’s met who has no idea who she is – the same is the case with his circle of friends. But it is to be a tragic love affair. On the last day of a beach vacation – the next day he will return to the lab and she will return to LA – they are savagely attacked by a tiger shark. She loses a foot. He loses his life.

But such is the strange magic (so to speak) of the Black Box that in it – in the alternate worlds to which it provides access – he is still alive, and she can still be with him. Except that being in another world is extremely dangerous to the body in this world.

The Black Box
Michael Webster had not slept in something like two or three days, and while this would have been nothing ten years ago when he was 20, these days, he was nearing his limit.
Old man, he said out loud, but there was no one but his computer array to hear him.
He had also only had one real meal in the last couple of days, but he was used to working through meals, and had the vaguely gaunt, incredibly pasty appearance to show for it.
Right now, he wasn’t exactly sure what day it was, or time. This wasn’t an unusual state of affairs, either. His office at the university was in the basement of a 1950s-era building that had been repurposed with a lot of very expensive processing power for very serious number-crunching by physicists and mathematicians who took number-crunching very seriously. The office had no windows, but it was aggressively air conditioned pretty much year round (despite the cold Iowa winters) because of the heat that the servers generated. This had become his favorite place on earth, largely because he had, in the last few years, been nowhere else, except for the annual beach trip he took with friends at the beginning of each summer. That one-week trip represented about 80 percent of his social life. It had been more than a year since Soraya had broken up with him, and he had not had a lover since. This wasn’t because he and Soraya still worked together closely, it was just because he didn’t have the time.
He was almost there, almost to the virtual grail that he had been seeking as soon as he had realized that it was possible.
He rebooted the computer and picked up the headset and put it on again, then reset the Black Box.
The headset consisted of a custom-made and -built goggle display that fit tightly over your eyes and blacked out everything else, headphones that did essentially the same thing for your ears, and a sort of modular headband that fit tightly against the temples and other key brain areas so that its sensor-stimulators could interact with the head of the user. Right now he was almost literally goggle-eyed from weariness and wearing the headset (but also from frustration and anxiety).
A few hours ago, it had seemed that he was perilously close to a breakthrough, that it was at last going to work. He had actually dropped in—he had been inside the sweet blue sphere that he had designed—but then it had crashed. It had taken hours to find the bug in the boot code, and now he was giving it a final try before he would give up and go back home and go to sleep for a day or two.
When he plugged in again, he had the sense he got sometimes when he’d spent too long coding. His field of vision was no larger than the frame of his monitor.
He hit the safe switch, which shut the system down after a pre-determined time just in case you happened to induce some grisly neurological horror (another Soraya precaution).
He saw flashing lights, and there was a hum that was actually binaural tone code that
The Black Box

Michael Webster had not slept in something like two or three days, and while this would have been nothing ten years ago when he was 20, these days, he was nearing his limit.

Old man, he said out loud, but there was no one but his computer array to hear him.

He had also only had one real meal in the last couple of days, but he was used to working through meals, and had the vaguely gaunt, incredibly pasty appearance to show for it.

Right now, he wasn’t exactly sure what day it was, or time. This wasn’t an unusual state of affairs, either. His office at the university was in the basement of a 1950s-era building that had been repurposed with a lot of very expensive processing power for very serious number-crunching by physicists and mathematicians who took number-crunching very seriously. The office had no windows, but it was aggressively air conditioned pretty much year round (despite the cold Iowa winters) because of the heat that the servers generated.

This had become his favorite place on earth, largely because he had, in the last few years, been nowhere else, except for the annual beach trip he took with friends at the beginning of each summer. That one-week trip represented about 80 percent of his social life. It had been more than a year since Soraya had broken up with him, and he had not had a lover since. This wasn’t because he and Soraya still worked together closely, it was just because he didn’t have the time.

He was almost there, almost to the virtual grail that he had been seeking as soon as he had realized that it was possible.

He rebooted the computer and picked up the headset and put it on again, then reset the black box.

The headset consisted of a custom-made and -built goggle display that fit tightly over your eyes and blacked out everything else, headphones that did essentially the same thing for your ears, and a sort of modular headband that fit tightly against the temples and other key brain areas so that its sensor-stimulators could interact with the head of the user. Right now he was almost literally goggle-eyed from weariness and wearing the headset (but also from frustration and anxiety).

A few hours ago, it had seemed that he was perilously close to a breakthrough, that it was at last going to work. He had actually dropped in—he had been inside the sweet blue sphere that he had designed—but then it had crashed. It had taken hours to find the bug in the boot code, and now he was giving it a final try before he would give up and go back home and go to sleep for a day or two.

When he plugged in again, he had the sense he got sometimes when he’d spent too long coding. His field of vision was no larger than the frame of his monitor.

He hit the safe switch, which shut the system down after a pre-determined time just in case you happened to induce some grisly neurological horror (another Soraya precaution).

He saw flashing lights, and there was a hum that was actually binaural tone code that was in the same frequency range as beta brainwaves, and suddenly there were colors—what would have looked like a pixellated screen if this were a screen and not a retina-painting goggle display. And then he dropped in.

What he expected to see was what he had designed, and what he had seen a few hours ago: a three-dimensional correlative of a common computer desktop, a virtual space where a user could operate using nothing but thought. His operating system had leapfrogged the tools that others in the field used to manipulate icons and data. That was what his collaboration with Soraya had done for him.

It turned out that the whole brain-hand-keyboard interface was totally unnatural, no matter how completely second nature it seemed to someone like Michael who had spent so many hundreds of thousands of hours at it. But that was Soraya’s point, it shouldn’t be second nature, it should just be natural.

That old interface involved several different neurological processes in completely different areas of the brain (something that he did not know until he met Soraya). His interface tapped directly into the areas of the brain where things happened. No middleman. You didn’t have one neurological process handing off to another to another. It was intuitive in the purest sense.

Ultimately, it wasn’t about laptops or desktops, but computers that didn’t exist yet, computers that would be so small you would carry them in your pocket or wear them, and you would be connected to the cloud—servers that existed somewhere—through ubiquitous bandwidth at the same time you were connected to the real world, and you could be on a treadmill, or on the john, and you’d get an idea and you’d just open up that file, mentally, and make your notes, fire off a message. There would be the prosthetic reality of the computer right next to real reality, and the prosthetic reality would augment the real reality, and it would be like what people like Michael’s heroes Doug Englebart and Ted Nelson had been predicting for thirty-plus years.

And it wouldn’t be some kind of matrix-like horror show, it would be a thing that came close to approaching—if not actually achieving—the singularity, and whatever knowledge you had would be augmented by knowledge that was out there, in the cloud, but instantly attainable with nothing more than the flick of an eyelash.

You’d sort of be able to just think your way through a task. Productivity would leap exponentially, by a similar order of magnitude to the one it did when offices switched from paper to computers, when computers went from command line to graphical interfaces. And then it would grow even more as people locked onto the idea and built things around the concept. It would no longer be point and click to open a document or application, it would be point and think. It was to be a 360 x 360 environment (he would have to remember that, point and think). The implications were well understood. But this was—when it worked—still very primitive, very much a proof of concept.

Michael had begun his research on this transparent man-machine interface during his master’s days. It was largely viewed to be an impossible, or at least not-yet possible, artificial intelligence sort of endeavor. But that was what appealed to Michael about it. And Michael viewed it as within reach, a natural step in the evolution of the graphical user interface, and as far as he was concerned, there was nothing in computing that had not seemed impossible before it had been done.

The way he viewed the black box (so far a name for it had not come to him) was that it should be simple. A proof of concept first. And so he had begun with the simplest possible version of an open source operating system, and then had built onto and around it with a combination of brain research and the help of the university’s gridded computer system (a reasonable facsimile of a super computer), and a tool he had spent almost two years helping to develop. A genetic coding development environment that enabled something akin to coding on steroids. You could go from concept to application at very high speed because now you could pull strings of open source code in seconds that might otherwise you might have had to hard code. And, of course, you had to be smart about what you were doing—you had to have the right kind of heuristic model.

And you had to have just the right combination of arrogance and stupidity and naiveté to think that you were the guy who could pull it off. The code was now so good, so elegant, that it didn’t take up enormous amounts of storage or draw vast amounts of memory or energy—it could fit easily on a modified laptop.

It had yet to work in any sustained sort of way, but that was merely a speed bump. Over the last few months, Michael had had glimpses, moments that had said, Dude, you are the Man. But these were mostly punctuation in the midst of long strings of nothing, of coding and research and theorizing.

His life during this time had been like crossing an ocean but becoming increasingly uncertain that there was another side. Until today.

The pixelation made him dizzy—a feeling like motion sickness—and then, as the image resolved, the sensation went away. Another one took its place. Mostly it was confusion. The virtual space he thought he had created—and which he had glimpsed—had disappeared completely. What was in its place was confusing not so much for what it was but for what it wasn’t.

Suddenly, when the pixelation had gone, he was not in a mid-winter computer lab in Iowa, but on a beach.

He reeled a little. Too little sleep, too much caffeine. He tried to reach for his desk, something to give him poise. But the beach was so real. Almost more real than real.

It was the same stretch of beach where he had been each summer for the last seven or eight years, and it was as real—the constant sound of the waves, the heat of the sun, the shimmering water—as if he were there.

In video games and computer animation, people talk about the physics of the environment, meaning if your car bumps up against a wall, does the wall react like a wall and does the car react like a car? Do sparks fly? Do metal and paint get scraped off? Do you careen from the force? Even the best games had physics limitations. Unless you programmed it that way, you couldn’t break down a wall, or dig into the earth. This all took enormous processing power.

Like a dreamer not sure if he was awake, Michael put his feet hard into the sand and could feel every last grain against his bare feet, the soft and shifting sift of it—no matter that he was [really] wearing thick socks and hiking boots. He stood up—in actual fact, he was still sitting—and walked across a stretch of sand and climbed up a sun-faded wooden stairway and sat down again. He couldn’t guess the season except to say it was summer, and he was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and he had a view to the road.

It was the fragrance of the environment that was the most remarkable—the salt air, the vague scent of fish rotting—that made him think that the physics were beyond impeccable; they were remarkable, like nothing he’d ever seen.

On the stair, he could feel the heat of the sun-soaked pressure treated timbers against his feet, could feel the solid heft of them beneath him. Despite it being a virtual environment, he couldn’t help but wonder if he should have put on sun screen. A woman ran down the road toward him. This was no virtual woman, but a real, 3-D, flesh and blood woman. Her running shoes dug spectacularly into the sand at the side of the road; the muscles visible in her calves, above her shoes (the little white balls of footie socks), were perfectly rendered. Everything about her—her short, spiky black hair, the pale skin of her face, reddened slightly from exertion and damp—was perfect. There was no pixelation. There was none of the blur that you would expect from motion in any kind of display. None of that weird seasickness that came in video pans.

He decided to call out, just to see what would happen. Hey, he said, but she did not respond.

Since this world was not real in any conventional sense, it didn’t matter if he made a fool of himself. And it had been so long since he had been with a woman. He shouted, Hey, black-haired girl running on the side of the road.

This brought her to a halt, and the way her feet hit the sand, it sent splashes of sand up.

You’re beautiful, he said because she was, and since she was not real there was no reason not to.

The way she looked at him was peculiar—she clearly knew him. But since this was no more real than a dream, he said, I haven’t been laid in ages. You’re beautiful.

She laughed. She had a grin that could kill you, he thought. There was something in it that was almost magical. She had a brilliant aura of femaleness that left him almost dumbfounded (it really had been too long since he’d got laid).

Michael, she said, shaking her head knowingly, You’re the one who’s beautiful.

Okay, this was good. Not only did she know him—which, from a certain angle, could be interpreted as this just being his dream, his own erotic fantasy—but concomitantly he had the most intense sense of déjà vu he’d ever had. Both here and there: Here in his lab where he wore boots and socks. And there next to the ocean, with his feet in the sun-warmed sand. A sort of double déjà vu.

She came to where he was.

You think I could shower first?

He tossed her the towel he suddenly realized he was holding. Sure, he said. Or not. I don’t care.

This was a place where he had been and this was a situation—he knew this with absolute certainty—he had been in.

But of course this was not possible. There was something going on here that was completely beyond him, beyond his machine, beyond his code—and not something that the black box should have been able to do. It was a failure, but one of a spectacular sort. But the girl. He knew what she smelled like if you came close and pressed your nose against her neck, kissed the downy hair at its nape. He knew the taste of her sweat.

Michael wasn’t sure what to feel. Should he feel good that he’d created his own strange erotic paradise—but it was too soon to know about that—or good that at least something had happened without crashing, horrible because the environment he had been trying to create seemed to have completely disappeared, or totally and completely insane because this was just so spectacularly nuts that it defied every law of sanity he thought he knew.

Then, just as he started to follow her inside, the machine’s safety kicked on. Everything began to pixelate and now he was in his office again.

She, the girl, however, was still in his head. A glimpse of the curve of her neck, the spiky black hair, and then very pale down along the skin that rose from her shoulder to her hairline.

What the fuck was this?

FridayReads Modern Love Anthology for Book Lovers

As a special thanks to FridayReads participants, Shelf Unbound magazine has put together a FridayReads Modern Love Anthology for Book Lovers (click on the link above to download). We’ve included short stories and poems from leading indie writers and small presses, as featured in previous issues of Shelf Unbound, as well as an introduction from the originator and fearless leader of FridayReads, Bethanne Patrick (@thebookmaven on Twitter). Enjoy the anthology, feel free to share it with your book-loving friends, and let’s all keep FridayReads social media’s favorite book club! How to participate in FridayReads? Every Friday, post what you’re reading on Twitter with the hashtag #fridayreads or on the FridayReads page on Facebook. See you there!

Shelf Unbound magazine’s Katrina: Before During After feature

Before During After

In conjunction with the Louisiana State Museum’s exhibit Before During After, Shelf Unbound is spotlighting our feature on the book of the same title. Click on the link above to access content. Shelf Unbound is a digital-only indie literary magazine featuring the best of small press, university press, and self-published books.

Twitter discussion of Annabel by Kathleen Winter

Shelf Unbound indie literary magazine is hosting a Twitter discussion with Annabel author Kathleen Winter. Please join us with comments and questions for Winter on February 24, 8-9 pm ET, hashtag #shelf. Following is a review of the book excerpted from our January 2010 issue.

Book Club Find

Annabel by Kathleen Winter
Grove Press
www.groveatlantic.com

Published last year by Canadian indie press House of Anansi, Annabel is Kathleen Winter’s first novel and earned her nominations for Canada’s Giller Prize, Governor-General’s Literary Award, and Writer’s Trust Prize. Like Jeffrey Eugenedes’ Pulitzer-winning Middlesex, Annabel uses the premise of an intersexed, or hermaphroditic, main character to explore issues of gender, identity, destiny, and familial and social connections and expectations. Annabel is a smaller, quieter story than the epic Middlesex, but just as compelling and thought-provoking. The setting is the frozen wilderness of the small Newfoundland coastal village of Labrador, where the men are gone much of the year on hunting expeditions and the women are home contending with a hardscrabble domestic life largely less than what they had hoped for. It is 1968, but the social revolutions fomenting elsewhere are unfelt in Labrador. Men follow the paths of their fathers, and women of their mothers. What to make, then, of a child born both male and female?

Raise him as a male, is the answer determined by the child’s father, Treadway, and the local doctor. His mother, Jacinta, follows along but silently mourns the loss of her “daughter” as the baby is christened with the name Wayne. Thus begins Wayne’s journey in the male world, being taught woodworking and trapline maintenance by his father from an early age. To Treadway’s annoyance, family friend Thomasina, who was present at the child’s birth, attempts to nurture an artistic side of Wayne, who she privately refers to as Annabel, her only daughter who drowned. That Wayne’s adolescence will be heart-rending and tragic is a given.

Winters graces her flawed characters and their flawed decisions with a tender humanity. She has said of Treadway, “I tried to walk all around him and look at his motivation and right in front of my own eyes he changed and became somebody that deeply cares about his son.” Readers cannot help but care about all of them. -- Margaret Brown

2010: The Year of the Reader and of #fridayreads

The top-selling gift of the holiday season was the new color Nook. Not a flat-screen TV. Not the latest mp3 device. Not a video game player. Not even those adorable Sing-a-Ma-Jigs. No, it was an e-reader. We are reading.

We are reading broadly, and exuberantly. I see this particularly every Friday when thousands of people post what they are reading with the now viral Twitter and Facebook meme #fridayreads, launched by Bethanne Patrick (@thebookmaven). The #fridayreads top 10 list each week has its share of NYT best sellers, but it also is filled with new voices and indies.

To e or not to e, there are plenty of people in either camp and plenty of people in both. The important thing is that we’re reading.

10 Literary Apps for Your New iPad

If there's an iPad under your tree, check out Shelf Unbound indie book review magazine’s list of Top 10 Literary Apps for the iPad:

Bookstores! In addition to IBooks, the App Store also has free e-reader apps from Kindle, Nook, GoogleBooks, and Kobo.
3D Classic Lit. Tremendously fun app with Jules Verne, Jane Austen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and more … complete with audio sound of turning pages.
Pedlar Lady. Gorgeous animated tale with audio from Moving Tales. When’s the last time someone read you a story?
ElectricLit. A fantastic quarterly anthology of contemporary short fiction.
Wattpad. Sort of like YouTube for writers — read, post, comment, vote.
Flipboard. A favorite of iPad owners, the Flipboard “social magazine” aggregator has an informative section called “FlipReads.”
Poetry from the Poetry Foundation. Created “to introduce new audiences to the world of poetry.”
Green Eggs and Ham. The colorful Dr. Seuss world you remember looks particularly vivid on the iPad — “read to me” or “read it myself.”
Verses. Get your Bard on with this colorful version of magnetic poetry.
Zinio. Zinio is a digital newsstand offering magazines for purchase and download. Get your literary fix with Shelf Unbound indie book review magazine, available for purchase and download via Zinio’s free app.

#donaterif

Jason Pinter (@jasonpinter) launched a twitter campaign today raising money for Reading Is Fundamental. Literary twitter types are joining in, including @shelfmagazine, pledging $1 or so for every new twitter follower they get between now and December 31. Here’s a list of participants thus far (will update later). Follow these folks to help raise money for Reading Is Fundamental!

@jasonpinter
@thebookmaven
@erinfaye
@shelfmagazine
@authorrobbins
@trishaandtwoboys
@sam_Iles
@vivian_kees
@bradfordlit
@leahcstewart
@aswinn
@badsvillebroad
@shanditty
@laurieabkemeier
@danacmrn
@hollywest
@riljn
@pdtoler
@cblackstone
@trydzinski
@timobrien
@irisblasi
@patobeirne
@mincontro
@mysteryscene
@danielpalmer
@sammywrites
@mjrose
@alisonedits
@jeaninecummins
@medusasmirror
@authorrobbins
@zombologist
@bcmystery
@bookfreakchick
@joannelessner
@toddaritter
@angelakelsey
@alanjporter
@thrillerchick
@steveulfelder
@tyrusbooks
@lisacon
@crenel
@jmpaterno
@medusasmirror
@ljsellers
@ruthspiro
@lundeenliterary
@toddaritter
@theresewalsh
@judylarsen
@avwriter
@cathychall
@jeaninecummins
@leslie_tentler
@patobeirne
@sarahdarerlitt
@lara_adrian
@libbyfh
@otherpress
@marklidstone
@blankslatepress
@kd_james
@paulwhankins
@toddstoke
@anitasilvey
@hooksnbooks
@amylvpoemfarm
@teachingfriends
@MCSnugz
@lorcadamon
@LisaScottoline
@StephenVBeirne
@jenniferpooley
@julieklam
@erinhere

Yes, Virginia, Books Change Lives

In the 1960s, Random House published a series of pop-up books that were particularly enchanting for those of us just learning to read. My grandparents gave me a copy of Pop Up The Night Before Christmas in 1968, and it remains a beloved tradition in my family that I read it each Christmas Eve, followed by my brother and parents reading their own cherished Christmas stories. It is still a delight for me to read The Night Before Christmas aloud, to pause after “and laying a finger aside of his nose and giving a nod,” then pull the tab that springs Santa up the chimney.

Sourcebooks, Friday Reads, and Shelf Unbound indie book review magazine have launched Books Change Lives (www.sourcebooks.com/readers/books-change-lives.html), which asks readers and authors to name the books that changed their lives. We would love to know what book changed yours, so check out the site and post your entry. Da Capo Press, whose book Bound to Last: 30 Writers On Their Most Cherished Book is featured in the current issue of Shelf Unbound (preview here: www.zinio.com/pages/ShelfUnbound/Dec-10/416146768/pg-58), has kindly agreed to give away five copies of Bound to Last to randomly selected Books Change Lives participants.

Books Change Lives. For me, my Night Before Christmas book continues to make glad the heart of childhood.

Granta’s new Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists collection

In the October issue of Shelf Unbound indie book review magazine, we featured The Private Lives of Trees by Chilean Alejandro Zambra, translated into English by Megan McDowell. “Zambra in English is a gift I hope English-speaking readers will take advantage of,” McDowell wrote in Shelf Unbound. I will make this same statement about UK literary magazine and publisher Granta’s The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists, published last week concurrently in Spanish and English. The collection of short stories is indeed a gift to English-speaking audiences, introducing us to 22 writers under 35 (including Zambra), giving voice to a post-dictatorship generation. “For them, censorship, blacklists, exile and persecution are historical facts rather than actual memories, although it is obvious that they have had to fight other difficulties and fears,” write editors Aurelio Major and Valerie Miles, referring to the “quotidian” rather than political nature of most of the stories.

I highly recommend this fantastic — and important — collection, available at www.granta.com, and on Granta’s behalf invite you to join their launch party on Twitter tomorrow, November 30, from 9 to 11 a.m. Eastern time, using the searchable hash tag #literatura. Shelf Unbound will see you there.

Thankful for Small Presses

It’s been a big year for small presses. Bellevue Press published Paul Harding’s Tinkers, and it won the Pulitzer. Two books on the Booker shortlist were from small presses, as were two Orange Prize finalists. The naming of Johanna Scribsrud’s The Sentimentalists as the Giller prize winner had Gaspereau Press, which initially printed just 800 copies of the book, scrambling to meet newfound demand. Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule from McPherson & Co. just won the National Book Award, and Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel from Coffee House Press was a finalist.

It’s been a big year for new voices. Three of them made the Shelf Unbound Top 10 Books of 2010 list: Grace Krilanovich (Orange Eats Creeps, Two Dollar Radio), Kira Henehan (Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles, Milkweed Editions), and John Jodzio (If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home, Permanent Press).

It’s been a big year for book lovers. The conversation has been not just about what we’re reading but how. Print or digital? Kindle? Nook? iPad? The digital revolution is changing publishing, but we think for the better, allowing a wider range of writers to reach a global audience of readers.

And that’s why we launched Shelf Unbound magazine. To celebrate small presses, university presses, and self-published authors. To explore new voices and varied voices and singular voices. Because we, like you, are book lovers. It’s been a big year, and we are thankful.

Crossing the NaNoWriMo finish line

This month we’ve been following the progress of three participants in National Novel Writing Month, and I am happy to report that the first of them has made it across the 50,000-word goal line. Despite having a busy life and a full-time job, Brenda Mantz reported today that she finished with 50,043 words and a draft that she is ready to begin editing. EJ James and Celine Nguyen are not far behind and we will continue to report on their progress.

The best part of following these three? Observing their email and twitter communications to each other over the month, sharing cheers and support and commiseration. My hat is off to all three. We will be excerpting portions of their NaNoWriMo novels in an upcoming issue of Shelf Unbound. I can’t wait to start reading!

Shelf Unbound indie book review magazine’s Top 10 Books of 2010

Amid all the discussions this year about ways of reading books — Kindle? Nook? iPad? print? — one thing is for sure: The quality and variety of new books available for us all to read this year has been outstanding, and small and indie presses have garnered more top awards and recognition than ever. In no particular order, here’s Shelf Unbound magazine’s Top 10 Books of 2010. We’d love your feedback and recommendations. — Margaret Brown, Publisher

The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich from Two Dollar Radio, www.twodollarradio.com. Our review: The Orange Eats Creeps is a relentless existential nightmare as baffling as it is brilliant. Krilanovich dispenses with so many writing norms that the reader is required to figure out a new way to read. It’s a thrilling ride.

Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles by Kira Henehan from Milkweed Editions, www.milkweed.org. Our review: Orion is a Pop Noir masterpiece filled with inventive, ingenious intrigue. We love this book!

I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita from Coffee House Press, www.coffeehousepress.org. Our review: A National Book Award finalist, I Hotel is a remarkable literary feat, telling the story of Asian American lives and activism in early 1970s San Francisco in 10 novellas, from numerous perspectives, and in a variety of styles from prose to graphic art.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas from Penguin, us.penguingroup.com. Our review: Critics have called it vulgar, racist, and misogynistic. Fans have called it brilliant, gripping, and one of the best books of the decade. Should it have won the Booker Prize? In our book, absolutely.

If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home by John Jodzio from Replacement Press, www.replacementpress.com. Our review: For all its odd characters, John Jodzio’s writing is simply about the folly of being human. Every one of the stories in his debut collection is succinct, funny as hell, and spot-on smart.

Tengo Sed by James Fleming from University of New Mexico Press, www.unmpress.com. Our review: I read straight through all 130 pages then started over again with page 1. It is the best piece of medical literature I have read since Atul Gawande’s Complications and one of the most insightful and strikingly original books I’ve read in years.

Maple Leaf Rag by Kaie Kellough from Arbeiter Ring Publishing, www.arbeiterring.com. Our review: Echoing the Scott Joplin title, Kellough’s poetry is syncopated and ragged, a brilliant language of jazz beats and African rhythms. Canadian Kellough’s poems comment on place, identity, race, and history. It’s a compelling collection that we highly recommend.

East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres by Andrew Lam from Heyday Books, www.heydaybooks.com. Our review: Part of a ’90s-era peer group that includes first- and second-generation Asian Americans who achieved elite educations and discovered new levels of acceptance and wealth in the process, Lam insightfully and artfully examines the underpinnings of our immigrant nation that keep certain cultural divides untranslatable, all while pointing out the dichotomies in his own beautiful words.

Detroit Disassembled, photographs by Andrew Moore from Akron Art Museum and Damiani Editore (Italy), www.akronartmuseum.org. Our review: Moore takes us beyond the individual toll of a failed economy to something more Pompeiian in scope. To an empty city falling in on itself, in unspeakable tragic beauty.

Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson, translated by Damion Searls, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, us.macmillan.com. Our review: Originally published in the Netherlands in 1947, long out of print, and finally translated into English, Comedy in a Minor Key is a finely crafted story of a Dutch couple hiding a Jewish man in their attic in during the Nazi occupation of Europe. The novel is spare and nuanced, examining humanity and atrocity from the vantage point of one small house.

Calling all NaNoWriMo’s!

We’re following three NaNoWriMo writers this month — Brenda Mantz, Celine Nguyen, and EJ James — see their progress in our earlier blogs. We’d like to know what everyone’s midpoint word count is — just post your word count as a comment to this blog! Keep writing!

NaNoWriMo Progress Report from EJ James

National Novel Writing Month participant EJ James shares her Week One experience:

My first week has been a bit of an eye opener for me. I’ve never really written so quickly without editing before and I can see the real benefits in it – finishing a piece of work for one – although it did take a couple of days before my inner editor stopped shouting at me. I finished the week just over 10k so I have a bit of catching up to do. I haven’t hit any walls yet, but I’m slightly concerned that my story might run out before my word count – I may have to do a little padding! I came up with the idea of an interplay between two characters at turning points in their lives. It’s the story of a man who comes of age through the discovery of his neighbour’s discarded poetry. It sounds a bit slushy, but that isn’t the inspiration at all. The theme is one of inner transformation and ‘life is what you make it’. The support I’ve received from other writers has been amazing and it makes such a difference at the end of the day when you’re tired and want to stop. That extra 500 words squeezed in following a few tweets of encouragement is very satisfying. No steamy sex scenes yet, but I have included a small explosion … — EJ James

Brenda Mantz talks NaNoWriMo and revenge and gives a sneak peek at her work in progress

As you know, we’re following three writers participating in National Novel Writing Month and asking them to keep us apprised of their progress. Here’s a Week One recap from Brenda Mantz:

During the thirty days of NaNoWriMo I write much differently than I do the rest of the year. This is a time for me play and experiment and explore genres and characters that don’t make it onto my page the other 335 days of the year.

I don’t begin with a plot or an outline – just an idea. The characters do the rest. I’m just along for the ride. This year’s ride has been a lot more fun because I’ve had company. I get regular ideas and encouragement from new friends in the Twitterverse – particularly @shelfmagazine, @mynameisceline and @ejjames.

This year’s idea was planted during a lunch with an old friend at the Bombay Club. My friend, a fellow writer, was about to leave DC and this would be our last lunch. He posed what I thought was an unusual question: “Have you ever considered writing a REVENGE novel?” The seed blossomed into this year’s Nano

revenge.docx: A Novel.

Sasha Carpenter’s new laptop has a mind of its own. The stories she finds herself creating on her new HP Mini don’t come from her own mind but from the mind of some other vengeful and malevolent being. And these stories come true with terrifying results

Read a sample here http://brendamantz.wordpress.com/ — Brenda Mantz

High School Senior Celine Nguyen’s Week One NaNoWriMo Recap

This is high school senior Celine Nguyen’s fourth year to participate in National Novel Writing Month. Here’s her week one recap:

The first week of NaNoWriMo is deceptively full of promise. I keep on thinking—it’s finally November! I have a purpose in life again! I have a much better idea than last year! And then I sit down to write and sentences have to be forcibly extruded from my thoughts. I start thinking I like the idea of writing more than the actual process.

Day 1 went well. I stayed up until midnight doing math homework, stayed up until one doing my first 1,667 words, and took a math test nine hours later. (I got an A.) Day 2 I made a half-hearted attempt to write and stalled after a few hundred words. I told myself I wouldn’t write anymore until the weekend, to concentrate on Very Important Events in my life, but then the weekend rolled around and I realized all over again that writing is, to employ the old cliché, like pulling teeth. And you know it needs to be done, but you try to avoid it by “warming up” and “starting slowly” and “mentally preparing yourself”. I holed up in my room Saturday afternoon with a cup of hot chocolate and 7,000 words to write to catch up.

I made it by Sunday morning, my sheer determination matched only by my massive reserves of junky writingfood. And my plot is—peculiarly but unsurprisingly—evolving underfoot. Ideas I had on October 31 have been abandoned. Characters have recused themselves or snuck in. Even with an outline, I’m writing blind—new ideas keep on cropping up, and the wonderful thing about NaNoWriMo is that I feel the freedom to take them and spend a few thousand words seeing if they’re keepers or not.

#fridayreads: my favorite concatenated micro-meme

The Wikipedia article on hash tags clued me in to micro-memes and had me looking up the word “concatenated.” My favorite concatenated micro-meme? #fridayreads. Every Friday, thousands of people post what they’re reading with the hash tag #fridayreads, becoming what CNBC recently called “the book club of the Twitterverse.”

#fridayreads is a fascinating snapshot of people who love to read and what they’re reading. Starting this week, there’s even a new FridayReads page for Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/FridayReads/107931275939402.

Join in the #fridayreads fun and be part of a global community of book lovers. Prizes from books to chocolate are given to randomly selected participants each week — including a free subscription to Shelf Unbound indie book review magazine. What are YOU reading today? #fridayreads wants to know.