Vidal's essays, by contrast, have all the strengths of his novels with this additional grace: They don't have to make a show of inhabiting other minds. And so the qualities of the originating mind -- wit, phrasemaking, autodidacticism, a talent to inflame -- stand out all the more starkly.

For proof, we may call up "The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal," assembled by Jay Parini, the author's literary executor (more whiffs of the posthumous). That word "selected," of course, implies a certain amount of cherry-picking. Juvenilia, senilia, outmoded usages, casual tribalisms have all presumably been cast away. Or have they? To Parini's credit, more than enough remains to show why and how Vidal gets under people's skin.

There is enough, too, to show that Vidal was, in some respects, well ahead of his time. His defense of homosexuality as "a matter of taste" (in the midst of the '60s), his calls for limits on executive power, his attack on "the National Security State" ... these still walk the razor's edge of topicality. Mere weeks after the Iraq war was joined, Vidal was calling attention to the prisoners in Guant�namo Bay. Some 15 years before Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great," Vidal was declaring that monotheism was "the great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture."

Lou Bayard's review of "The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal" | Salon Books

My Own Kind of Freedom
A Firefly Novel
by Steven Brust

My Own Kind of Freedom has been released under a creative commons license. You are free to download it and share it with your friends as long as it is not used for commercial purposes.

The novel is currently available in two formats. Click below to download in:

Whoo Hoo! I've been looking forward to reading this. Its an unofficial sequel to Serenity by the author of the Jhereg series.

My Own Kind of Freedom: A Firefly Novel by Steven Brust -- The Dream Caf�

Supervisory Special Agent Esther Falkner had been told more than once by people she trusted in the Bureau that her next assignment would be something prominent. Perhaps even chief of the Behavioral Analysis Unit, they'd hinted. She'd done good work there.

Shadow Unit

This just isn't funny.

SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America, an organisation of which I am a member (on account of my having just a slight interest in writing and selling SF in that country) managed to get into a huge public relations mess back in August/September, when Dr. Andrew Burt, acting on his own initiative as a member of the SFWA e-piracy committee, caused a major screw-up in dealing with Scribd, a text file sharing website. (Details on the whole debacle start here; for SFWA's response see here: more here: if you really want to know everything, Google is your friend.)

Charlie's Diary: SFWA attempts to commit public suicide

I work as an assistant librarian at a certain small library attached to a school, and what that currently means is that I've been boxing up books and carrying them away while it gets renovated. While boxing them up, I found this gem:
(Hope this isn't too many images)

Just say "Neeeeeigh!!!"

The most amazing book ever! [56k no] - The Something Awful Forums

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two of America's top authors, John Irving and Stephen King, made a plea to
J.K. Rowling on Tuesday not to kill the fictional boy wizard
Harry Potter in the final book of the series, but Rowling made no promises.

Don't these guys have better things to do or critique? Maybe they want to kill the bastard themselves... I'm having trouble picturing Stephen King having a soft spot for Harry Potter.

Don't kill Harry Potter, authors urge Rowling - Yahoo! News

Internationally bestselling author Robert Jordan’s eleventh book in his wildly popular The Wheel of Time™ series, KNIFE OF DREAMS, will go on-sale nation-wide this October 11, 2005. KNIFE OF DREAMS will be the second to last book in the highly acclaimed The Wheel of Time™ series, the last three books of which have all been #1 New York Times bestsellers.

I don't know if anyone else here has been reading these... but they're really pissing me off. They started off pretty good, and then Tor talked the author into extending the series a few books. Which would have been ok, had he extended the plot somehow. Instead he makes a bunch of books where NOTHING happens. It's like watching fucking paint dry. I have thousands of pages invested in this stupid series which i've been reading as they come out for about a decade now... and the asshole is dicking around. SECOND TO LAST BOOK!!! Fucking die already!!! I'm close to not even caring anymore. I'm starting to think the title "Wheel of Time" is a sick joke from the author to let you know from the beginning that his intention was to waste as much time as possible.

Robert Jordan and The Wheel of Time Series

SAN FRANCISCO - A man who compared a woman's anatomy to a carburetor won an annual contest that celebrates the worst writing in the English language.

N.D. Man Wins Annual Bad-Writing Contest - NEWS - STRANGE - Comcast.net