If You Like That Sort Of Thing

Grad school...

... is over! Just finishing my thesis (on Nabokov's Pale Fire in case you were interested) but coursework is completely finished. Or at least for now, as I busy myself applying to my next grad school program. I think I'll probably be in school forever, which is fine with me.

A new year!

It's a new year (!!) and that means that Strange Horizons has done their annual year-in-review post, in which I have yet again contributed. Here's my bit:

I'm still getting through a lot of the year's short fiction for Nebula nomination season, but so far one of the 2011's knockout stories for me is "Younger Women" by Karen Joy Fowler: a pitch perfect take-down of the allure of the vampire in YA fiction. I also really loved Caitlin R. Kiernan's "Tidal Forces" in Eclipse Four, one of the best and most affecting love stories I've read in a long time. New collections by Maura McHugh and Daryl Gregory are also welcome additions to my bookshelf. And as far as new novels go, I was very impressed with The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington, a marriage of historical fiction and dark fantasy which worked to great effect. But perhaps the most exciting thing happening in the genre world right now, at least in terms of the mainstream, is the proliferation of quality genre television. Of particular note this year was Game of Thrones, a slow burn which proved irresistible by the end of the season, and also American Horror Story, one of the year's biggest surprises, a captivating family drama tucked into a terrifying haunted house story which will hopefully open the door for more risk-taking in horror on the big and small screens.

It was generally a very good year of reading for me, especially as I finished up coursework for my Master's degree and encountered a lot of new things, such as Nausea by Sartre, Jealousy by Robbe-Grillet, and, strangely enough, my first Faulkner novel, The Sound and the Fury. Now I embark on a thesis about fantasy and Nabokov's Pale Fire, among other things.

Meanwhile I also read a bunch of great books for pleasure such as Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (already one of my favorite New York novels), St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell (a fantastic short story collection), and Creatures, an amazing anthology of monster fiction edited by John Langan and Paul Tremblay, two of my favorite horror writers. So, lots of good stuff! And I also spent some time revisiting early Stephen King novels, finding that my affection for the man's work remains strong.

On the personal front, I published six new stories this year (two to professional venues) and one reprint, along with selling a reprint to an anthology forthcoming in 2012. And I still have a few stories about to make the rounds, which I've written at various points over the course of the past year. Very happy with 2011 on the writing front, and hoping for more of the same in 2012.

A (weird) review...

A review over at Diabolical Plots of my Daily Science Fiction story, "This Always Happens Here," is generally pretty positive; the reviewer calls it a "good thought piece" with a "Rod Serling feel," a "pretty good metaphor for the facade of reality," all of which I'm certainly happy to hear. However he also mentions that there are some "alternative lifestyle undertones in this story that may turn some people off." The alternative lifestyle referred to is, like many of my other stories, that of men being gay, mostly incidentally as it were, which is how I perceive it in the real world, too: an incidental part of someone's identity. The fact that it might turn some people off is, I suppose, a sad reality that must be faced, but nonetheless the fact that the reviewer felt the need to "warn" potential readers is definitely off-putting.

Ah, well. If alternative lifestyle undertones don't turn you off, you can read the story online here.

Happy holidays!

An old review, etc

Just saw that "The Ghost Party" (which originally appeared in Subterranean's YA issue) got a nice review back in July from Tansy Rayner Roberts:

“The Ghost Party,” by Richard Larson is a subtle story which captures the voice and internal panic of a teenage girl for whom the world is Totally Ending. The supernatural threat of the ghost party interweaves with the very real threats to the safety of a girl like Charlee, and the portrayal of her friendship with Amanda and what it could overcome was incredibly uplifting.

The story will be reprinted soon in Beyond Binary, an anthology of bisexual and genderqueer SF edited by Brit Mandelo, to be published by Lethe Press in May 2012.

Meanwhile! The writing continues. Several new stories in the pipeline, along with something that might be a bit... more? We'll see. Also, I've just officially finished coursework for my M.A. from NYU, with just a thesis to go. ("Just a thesis"... I know.)

SF and the MFA

We live in a literary culture where the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction are of dubious relevance, as argued eloquently by David Shields in his 2010 manifesto Reality Hunger. Generic boundaries between categories of fiction are even less relevant. A culture where the next album you “buy” is more likely a laptop mashup of 300+ samples of everything in the library probably needs its literature to do something similar to help us confront the gothic high-tech of network culture and the scary chaos of the 21st century. We are already starting to see more geeks in the MFA programs, and more MFAs lurking around the sci-fi con at the suburban Radisson (while still avoiding the Klingons). The results produced by a generation unafraid to cross those rails will be wonderful and important—a literature, perhaps, that bites into the copper wire of mapping out possible paths of living in a thoroughly disrupted world.

New Year's Eve...

... is just as terrible as you expect it to be. My review just went up at Slant Magazine.

A snippet:

The lesson to learn from watching Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve, a predictably insufferable, self-congratulatory cash cow designed to be ingested and then happily discharged without a second thought by gullible moviegoers who just don't know any better, is that we live in a time without economic dignity, a time in which we must be ready to do just about anything for a paycheck.

Some fun things elsewhere:

Bag of Bones mini-series? Okay!

Peter Orullian interviews Lev Grossman.

Dan Callahan on Michael Fassbender.

Adam Gopnik on fantasy and YA literature: "Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist, fights that never happened, all set against the sort of medieval background that Mark Twain thought he had discredited with “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court."

And also: "Kids go to fantasy not for escape but for organization, and a little elevation; since life is like this already, they imagine that it might be still like this but more magical."

Kathe Koja wins the Gaylactic Spectrum Award.

The legend of Zelda (Fitzgerald).

An amateur reviewer on Twilight: "There are times when I feel like I'm at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, shamefully staring down at my feet as I stand and admit truthfully, 'Hi, I'm Riley, and I hated Twilight."

More on literary criticism!

Weird Fiction Review. One of the coolest new things out there.

Magick4Terri. Important cause for an important woman.

And finally, an ode to Kermit the Frog:

If we had to get think-piecey about what the Muppets meant in their first mass moment and what their tenderest fans took from them, we might note that the years of Kermit's ascent coincided with those of Woody Allen's rise from cult farceur to major American filmmaker, and we would notice that the amphibious banjoist, with his nebbishy neuroses and his Borscht Belt funny bone, strikes some of the same chords as the mammalian clarinetist.

Anthology!

My short story "The Ghost Party," which originally appeared this summer in the YA issue of Subterranean edited by Gwenda Bond, will appear next year in Beyond Binary, a reprint anthology from Lethe Press of bisexual and genderqueer SF stories. Very excited about the project, and happy to see my story included!

Lev Grossman on fantasy:

To be sure, fantasy worlds are often animated by weird mysterious forces – like magic – but even those forces on some level come from inside us. They’re not made in China. They express deep human wishes and primal emotions. Likewise the worlds of fantasy are inhabited by demons and monsters, but only because we’re inhabited by monsters, the ones that live in our subconsciouses (subconsci?) Those monsters are grotesque and not-human, and sometimes they even destroy us, but we recognize them instinctively.