Hey, Mary Anne's collection Bodies in Motion got mentioned on NPR in their Summer Reads recommendations. (They called her Mary Jane Mohanraj, sigh.) Hope it gets her some readers! Mary Anne's stories are smart and sultry. Her book goes on sale Tuesday, so go order it!

Mike Jasper sold a novel! Specifically a romance with Blackbeard's ghost. What's better than love and pirates?

Kelly Link's brilliant, magical first collection Stranger Things Happen (which is as important a collection as Sturgeon's Without Sorcery or Lieber's Night's Black Agents) is available for free from the Small Beer Press site. So if you haven't read it, go, do.

I wrote a rave review of To Charles Fort, with Love by Caitlín R. Kiernan, which will run in the August ish of A Certain Magazine. There's not a false note in this book, and it includes two of my favorite Kiernan stories ever, "Onion" and "Standing Water", as well as the really powerful Dandridge Cycle. I'd read a couple of the Dandridge stories separately when they first appeared, but the impact is much greater when you read all three at once. It's a yummy book. She's one of the smartest dark fantasy writers working today, and her voice is so singular and compelling.

Hmm. I thought I could write a whole book-related entry, but I think I've said everything I have to say about the books I've read recently in other entries. Here's what else is stacked up in the queue: Conrad Williams's London Revenant, to maybe review; the Dark Delicacies anthology, which I was looking forward to until I read the introduction, in which one of the editors expresses the opinion that it's the most significant horror anthology in the past 25 years -- so now I'm primed to be really critical; Stiff, that book about dead bodies, which somebody (maybe Leslie What?) recommended to me ages and ages ago, and which I finally picked up; Never Seen by Waking Eyes by Stephen Dedman (I liked his Art of Arrow Cutting, so maybe I'll dig his stories), possibly to review; a book about bears (it's transcriptions of lots and lots of people talking about encounters with bears in Alaska, with lots of associated bear-related info); Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven about religious extremists; and, um, I think that's all that's in the active stack. I'll probably plow through those in the next month.