Terry Dowling’s “La Profonde” and Margo Lanagan’s “A Pig’s Whisper” will appear in Betancourt and Wallace’s Years Best Horror 2007.
Shaun Tan wins the Silver Spectrum Award for “The Giants” from The Arrival. (Side note: A numbered print of this sits on my wall, alongside “The Four Seasons”. Talk to Justin at Slow Glass Books [...]

A little over a year ago, Claire McKenna, best known as a prolific short story writer, suddenly switched focus and started working on a low-low budget Sci Fi movie based on one of her own short stories, ‘The Liminal’. I’d been getting excited emails from her occasionally with shooting photos attached. A couple of rubber [...]

Terry Eagleton reviews T.S. Eliot by Craig Raine:
Perhaps the best one can say of Raine’s criticism, as of his poetry, is that it is scintillatingly shallow.

Everyone called him Zeke. He came from a small town not far from the Oklahoma border. All of his male relatives died of cancer, specifically cancer of the prostate. His grandfather, his great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather before him, and also all his uncles died of prostate cancer.
Zeke told his tale to a genetic counsellor. The good [...]

Wellington Grey designed up these comparative flowcharts and put them on show among his Miscellanea display case (via Pharyngula).

To which one might add…

From the Horror Writers Association, via Stephen Dedman. [Parochial alert! Congratulations to Terry Dowling and Rocky Wood.]
Mark Worthen and Hank Schwaeble, Stoker Awards Committee Co-Chairs, have announced the final ballot for the 2006 Bram Stoker Awards:
Superior Achievement in a NOVEL
Headstone City by Tom Piccirilli (Bantam)
Liseys Story by Stephen King (Scribner)
Ghost Road Blues by Jonathan Maberry [...]

This short piece by Robert Fulford on the lifelong war between Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht (and now being carried on by their heirs) concludes thus…
Mack the Knife remains popular today but in the late 1950s it was everywhere. Lotte Lenya wrote to a friend: “You hear it coming out of bars, juke boxes, taxis, [...]

Despite its many flaws, I’ve lived happily with Windows Media 10 for several years now. It was time to upgrade to WM11. Having done so, I can compliment the WM team on making the display of tracks more readable. But the library system is even worse than it was before. Moving files from one [...]

Ellen Datlow has just released her list of stories for the forthcoming Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Of the 21 stories, five come from Australian writers (Margo Lanagan has two stories; the other writers are Terry Dowling, Lee Battersby, and Kaaron Warren). And this is just the horror list. Kelly Link and Gavin Grant are [...]

Veteran editor and publisher Paul Collins is pulling on his boots again as Ford Street Publishing, acting as an imprint of Hybrid Publishers. His new line will concentrate on middle-year to young adult genre fiction and already boasts a lineup of authors including Isobelle Carmody and Sean McMullen.