Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted →

danchaon:

He was still living in the old house where he grew up,   which he realized was probably a big part of the problem.   His parents had been dead for two years,  and his older sister Jodee was now living in Chicago with her boyfriend, Jake the Medical Resident.  

            After their parents’ funeral,  Brandon and Jodee had both agreed that the best thing to do was to sell the house and split the profits equally.   The original plan was that Brandon would live in the house for a few months and fix things up a little to make it more presentable so they could sell it.  

            But the house didn’t seem to want to be sold.  Things that had never been wrong in the twenty years that the family had lived there together suddenly turned sour when the housing inspector came to check on the building. 

Read the rest. It’s an excerpt from the story “Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted”  from the collectionStay Awake by Dan Chaon (Ballantine, Feb. 2012) and so, so good.

Good Reads: A Study In Emerald →

neil-gaiman:

A PDF file of a short story that won the Hugo Award. If you know anything about Sherlock Holmes or H. P. Lovecraft, you may enjoy this. If you don’t, it’ll probably be incomprehensible twaddle.

Neil Gaiman has posted a fantastic short story to his website. The plot will be familiar to Sherlock Holmes fans, and the milieu familiar to fans of H.P. Lovecraft. You don’t want to miss it.

Good reads: "The Routes by Which I Attempted to Contact You," by Sheridan Macauley →

This arresting piece on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency starts off light and playful, but by the end the reader is hit with a huge lump of late-night, internet-fueled nostalgia. Perhaps it’s meant to be played for laughs, but I found it very moving.

Good reads: "In the Walls of Eryx," by H. P. Lovecraft →

H.P. Lovecraft writes his very own space story:

Leaving the Crystal Company’s post at Terra Nova around dawn, VI, 12, I followed the southerly route which Anderson had mapped out from the air. The going was bad, for these jungles are always half impassable after a rain. It must be the moisture that gives the tangled vines and creepers that leathery toughness; a toughness so great that a knife has to work ten minutes on some of them.

A trip to Venus, written by one of the best horror stylists ever. It’s great stuff, even more so because it favors the flowery side of interplanetary sci-fi.

Good reads: "Magic for Beginners," by Kelly Link →

It’s a little longer than most of my good reads, but “Magic for Beginners” is worth it. It won the 2006 Nebula Award and 2006 Locus Award for best novella and is the title story of her awesome second collection (which can be downloaded here under a Creative Commons license).

If you like this opening sentence you’re sure the love the rest:

Fox is a television character, and she isn’t dead yet. But she will be, soon. She’s a character on a television show called The Library. You’ve never seen The Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had.

Boy, do I ever.

Good reads: "The Cassandra Project," by Jack McDevitt →

There’s nothing like a little space-race nostalgia to keep hard SF interesting. In this story, the Apollo landings turn out to have been a hoax, but not the kind of hoax most conspiracy theorists talk about.

Good reads: "Claire In Africa," by Emily St. John Mandel →

Brothers, love, reflection. I was worried that this story, which starts out on a downer and pretty much continues down for several thousand words, would have an unhappy ending. Thankfully, that isn’t the case.

Good reads: "The City," by Ray Bradbury →

I mean, gosh, this is just an imperfectly-OCRed version of the story, and if you really want to see the real thing by all means pick up the book. But even here, reading off this Scribd document on a glowing computer screen, I am transported back fifteen years to the dusty Hardin County library, where I pulled down a book of Bradbury stories off the shelf and sat on one of those metal wheeled library stools and just read.

Bradbury always makes me miss the musty-sweet smell of that building’s old air conditioner, the claustrophobic science fiction stacks on the second floor, and the way the thick old walls would slow summer afternoons to a crawl. It’s ironic that a forward-thinking science fiction writer could create such a sense of nostalgia, but then Bradbury’s magic always leads back to childhood somehow, to stillness, to the sense that the world is a much larger and stranger place than we give it credit for.

Good reads: "Nomen Ludi," by Rob Beschizza →

Fantastic short story about nostalgia, old video games, and not always getting what you want out of your memories. The presentation — simple reading format, great images, and no visual distractions — is awesome as well.

(via Robin Sloan)

Good reads: "The Truth and All Its Ugly," by Kyle Minor →

Imagine my surprise when I started reading this fantastic short story by Kyle Minor after it came up on my RSS reader.

The setting seemed eerily familiar at first — close-knit Appalachian families in a near-future SF setting. But then things started moving closer and closer to home — the University of Kentucky, and stone fences built by slaves, and Sonic burger, and Man O’ War neighborhoods near the Lexington airport, and Keeneland — I was completely taken aback. Seriously, it was kind of creepy to see my neighborhood pop up out of the blue like that. (Not to mention the climax scenes at the Lexington Green shopping center, which I had just visited. Granted, New Circle Road is called “the Loop,” which I haven’t heard, but that can pass.)

And a knock-out SF ending. You don’t know what’s coming until it does, and then it punches the reader in the gut.

It’s not Danny. It’s not Danny.

I’m going to have to find more stuff by this author, because this story is amazing. (via The Rumpus)

Mythologist of Our Age →

Slate’s Nathaniel Rich has an appreciation of the work of Ray Bradbury, who will turn 90 soon. Now would be a good time to reread a story or two. (via The Rumpus)

Good reads: "Water Liars," by Barry Hannah →

We tell lies to hide ourselves from the pain of the truth. This short story starts out slow, but comes to a boil by the end to punch the reader in the gut.

Last year I turned thirty-three years old and, raised a Baptist, I had a sense of being Jesus and coming to something decided in my life—because we all know Jesus was crucified at thirty-three. It had all seemed especially important, what you do in this year, and holy with meaning.

Hannah’s narrator is, on one hand, perfectly ordinary, but on the other hand he stumbles into something profound.

Robin Sloan (author of Annabel Scheme) has a new multimedia short story up on his web site. The Truth About the East Wind involves words, sounds, and images, and is thoroughly awesome.

Good reads: "Lostronaut," by Jonathan Lethem →

Reading this review of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel Chronic City, I’m reminded of this circular short story that appeared in The New Yorker last fall.

Trapped in space with a rowdy, unreliable Russian crew after the Chinese deploy mines around her vessel, lost astronaut Janice writes a series of letters to her boyfriend, Chase, stuck back on Earth. As their situation becomes more desperate and Janice deals with the knowledge that she has cancer and is doomed anyway, whether help comes or not, her letters to Chase take on a mystical, dreamlike quality.

Chase himself is the main character of Chronic City, so Janice’s missives to him form a sort of side story to the novel. But by themselves, they’re a beautiful, dreamy meditation on longing, loss, and outer space.