Recent Reviews and Features

My SciFi Weekly review of Inferno, edited by Ellen Datlow:This is the brief at the smoldering heart of Inferno: to provide the reader with a heart-pounding moment of shock or dread. But horror is about more than that jolt, and the majority of stories in Inferno work well because the writers are willing to push their concepts and their characters to the brink. The best examples of this willingness to go beyond come from two of the Young Turks in the anthology, Barron and Ballingrud, both of whom are known exclusively for their short fiction.On Amazon's book blog:Tiny Books, Big ImaginationsWhy do I like small books? Well, when I'm on vacation, it's a great rationalization for buying books in the first place: Oh, I'll just get this microscopic book here, that I have to pick up with tweezers. That way, it'll fit in my luggage. Of course, I wind up buying so many tiny books using that rationale that I wind up with less space than if I'd just bought big books to begin with.Are You Feeling Better?In Better, now out in trade paperback, Gawande focuses on issues like hand-washing (if everyone in hospitals did it, many more lives would be saved), medical malpractice suits (the issue is more complicated than you might think), and advances in saving lives on the battlefield (due mostly to improved processes rather than new technology).Various linkage