Reading Matters

Now that I've turned in the novel, I can spend some time reading (an activity that for any writer is as important as hammering the keyboard).  First up, Andy Duncan's fine collection of esoteric Americana, The Pottawatomie Giant and other Stories, and Samuel R Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of the Spiders: enormous, enormously challenging because of its frank depictions of polymorphous perversity, thematically congruent with his examinations of the responsibilities of freedom in Trouble on Triton: an Ambiguous Heterotropia and Dhalgren, and a moving, beautifully humane story of a partnership that endures the hopes and hazards of the next seventy years.