BOOOOKS! Featuring Ballard and Kiernan, BOOOOKS From Delany, Doubinsky, Biancotti, and More, Always MORE...

First off, just to catch up, two new features on Amazon: an interview with Caitlin R. Kiernan about her new novel The Red Tree and a short appreciation of The Collected Stories of J.G. Ballard, complete with a selection of first lines from the book.In addition, I'm pleased to note that I just turned in the introduction to Kiernan's forthcoming 2010 collection The Ammonite Violin & Others, which reads in part:

Part of this authenticity—part of the reason I find them disturbing—comes from the simple fact that the people in these stories don’t really survive their encounter with the supernatural. Whether in, among others, “Madonna Littoralis” or the two “Metamorphosis” stories, this inability to survive can be literal or figurative, or both—and it occurs because the supernatural isn’t so much something terrifying in Kiernan’s view—it can be, but that’s not the true point. The supernatural to Kiernan is also something beautiful and unknowable in intent, and often wedded to the natural world. In a sense, trying to know something unknowable will always destroy the seeker.

(Also, I must mention Kristine Kathryn Rusch's ongoing brilliant freelancer survival guide series, this time focusing on emotional setbacks.)Now, on to books received. You want coffee table books, I've got coffee table books. Comics? Check. Novels. Yep. Story collections? Yessir, including two from Ramsey Campbell and the debut from Deborah Biancotti, A Book of Endings, which is presented in a sweet design from one of my new favorite publishers, Twelfth Planet Press (watch them--they're smart, savvy, and when you get one of their books, you just know from the look-and-feel that they've got that extra little something that makes a publisher special). Pull back the veil and, voila! Books, for you. (And while you look at that, it's time for me to go hike in a thunderstorm...)