Books Received--April 19

First off--Tanyo Ravicz deserves a lot better than being published through iUniverse. He's a very gifted short story writer and I highly recommend this volume. You can find out more about it on Amazon.Secondly, I am going to appear to lightly send up the delightful Mr. Tobias S. Buckell below, but it's done with affection.Sometimes publicists get tired--and tired of making up stuff so often--and that's when you get a press release like the one accompanying Sly Mongoose, which starts out "Talented and fearless Tobias S. Buckell cracks his knuckles after Crystal Rain...and Ragamuffin." and ends "by the time Buckell turned 25, he had lived through an island revolution, witnessed a hurricane destroy the boat on which he lived, and won first place in the L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Award." Talk about anti-climax, starting with knuckle-cracking (?) and ending with the writers of the future award after having built up expectations with hurricanes and revolution!But it's the eternal search for interesting information about authors that hopefully has some relevance to the novel at hand that eventually gets to the publicist, from my personal experience pretending to be one, and yet every writer has something that can be stated in this regard.For example, my next book's press release could state, "Having grown up on an island where machete deaths were the primary form of murder, having watched a hurricane destroy a bus stop outside of his house, and then winning a Golden Poet Award from Poetry America, Jeff VanderMeer was well-suited to write this new novel, Mary Mary You're Too Hairy, a finely nuanced comedy of manners set in contemporary Manhattan. Cracked his knuckles, he did."For the bookless amongst us, what would you use as derring-do characterization for your bio on your first book?