Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

The Very Tall Husband made this banner a while back as a sig file for the Something Awful forums. Since we were talking so much about Thundercats earlier, I thought I’d share the love.

The gay inter-species love.

FEEL IT.

First, check out this fine piece of cover art for Rick Moody’s new book. It’s a popup, but go on, it’s worth it.

Would you look at that cover and think, ‘Oh! Yes! A satire on Hollywood’s independent film industry!”

Of course you would...not!

Noble and clever Ron Hogan forwarded us this article about how the cover is turning women off to the point where the publisher has redesigned it (warning: NY Times requires registration after the dateline of the article) to reflect more of the book’s content.

Oh, if only the same were true for most romance authors. Can you imagine - “No, you will NOT have big man-titty on my book cover!”

Candy asked for dissent and commentary, and one of the requests, made by more than a few people, was for a link to comments that would display the newest comments first, as opposed to having to scrooooooll down to the bottom to see the most recent comments.

So, behold. You see below each entry a “comments” link, which displays oldest to newest as you scroll down, and a “new comments first” link, which displays new comments at the top of each window.

Enjoy! 

From Kate Rothwell’s blog cometh this very interesting tidbit concerning Medallion Press’ status as an RWA-approved publisher:

From Wendy Burbank of Medallion with permission to forward: “Medallion Press has received a letter from the Executive Director of RWA stating that our status as a publisher was revoked in error.”

Man, I’m just sooo freakin’ curious about what went on over here. For a while there it sounded as if Medallion had kinda dropped the ball, but now… Huh.

Dude tries to stop some young thugs from beating up a sweet young thang on the tube. Dude gets the crap kicked out of him. Dude falls into a coma. Dude enters into an incredibly self-conscious reverie as he attempts to wake himself up from said coma.

And there we have the entirety of Alex Garland’s The Coma. Not all stories with simple plots are brief or insubstantial, but both are true for this book. And when I say brief, I mean brief. It’s only 208 pages, it’s a smaller-than-average hardcover book, every chapter starts with a woodcut illustration, and the font is big. If you’re a book size queen, you’ll barely notice this tiny tome.

That’s not to say it’s a bad book. It’s just that, as a whole, the story was obvious and, well, kind of juvenile. If a precocious high-school kid had been given a writing assignment about the nature of consciousness, she might’ve come up with something like this.

The concept itself is pretty damn cool, but if you were made to suffer through Descartes or Waking Life at some point in college, this book covers much of the same ground. What is being? What is reality? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the nature of perception? Unfortunately, this book doesn’t offer anything new, insightful or particularly interesting.

A few of aspects of the book manage to save the story from being utter drek. The surreal yet concrete nature of the coma patient’s experiences mimic the dreaming state quite credibly. Three scenes in particular—one in the narrator’s bathroom, in which he discovers he’s bleeding, one in a music shop and one in a bookstore—are truly excellent. These scenes, however, are fleeting, and the deeper ramifications are left unexplored.

Garland’s prose style, as always, is gorgeous. If sacrificing shaved gerbils at the altar of the ancient Sumerian god Manititti would help me write sentences as clean and beautiful Garland’s, my house would be well-stocked with really tiny razorblades.

(Don’t worry, the gerbils are safe. I’m content to envy Garland from afar.)

The woodcut illustrations for the story, courtesy of Garland’s father, Nicholas Garland, are also gorgeous. On one hand, they add a certain oomph to the book. On the other hand, I couldn’t help feeling that they were used to pad the pagecount.

After the wonderful stories Garland offered in The Beach (get the British version, the American version seemed to be modified quite heavily), The Tesseract and 28 Days Later, The Coma hath broken my fangirlish heart.

OK, not broken. But it’s dinged quite severely.