Who's your favourite, Matt? I can't tell the books apart by title anymore.

Teldra, I'm guessing.

Hey look at these interesting books recommended by the Village Voice.

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GRAB BAG + THE HAUNTED HILLBILLY
By Derek McCormack
Little House on the Bowery, 203 pp., $14.95 ( Buy Grab Bag); Soft Skull, 112 pp., $11.95 ( Buy The Haunted Hillbilly)

Gay vampires. Lonely highways. Country songs. No, it's not a Stephin Merritt musical (not yet, anyway). It's the double debut of Derek McCormack, who conjures creepy worlds using little more than elliptical triads. Weird, inventive, magical, the omnibus Grab Bag features a lonely closeted teenager named Derek McCormack and a grotesque fascination with carnivals, drifters, and disease. The Haunted Hillbilly reimagines Nudie the Rodeo Tailor, who in real life dressed Elvis in gold lamé, as a bloodthirsty undead Svengali with a crush on his doomed client, c&w legend Hank Williams—perverse, mesmerizing, heartfelt. With a morbid comic vision and a delightfully twisted imagination, McCormack delivers a one-two knockout punch that establishes him as one of the best new voices of the year.

BLOOD AND SOAP
By Linh Dinh
Seven Stories, 138 pp., $16

"Prisoner With a Dictionary" is four perfect pages in which words and reality trade places, and Blood and Soap, chocked with such linguistic labyrinths, is the year's best nightmare subway reading. Elvis Phong is Pierre Menard as a Vietnamese rocker, famous for such songs as "Mot Ngay Trong Cuoc Doi" ("A Day in the Life") and "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da" ("Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da"). A New York neighbor learns English by studying a single tabloid story every night—consulting the dictionary, shouting each word ("Was! Was! Was! Was! Was!"). A cookbook aficionado argues for her chosen literature's superiority over porn and even Shakespeare, though she's never sampled the delicacies described. "Words are all she'll ever eat," the narrator sniffs. Dinh's stories, pared to parable, are enough to nourish any reader's mind.

Getting a book for a 14 year old girl. When she was 13 all she was interested in horses and boys. She has now given up all interest in horses.

Good book recommendation for her?

Crossposting to literary.

When I was fourteen, Paula Danziger cracked me up. And there's always "Forever".

Gay vampires. Lonely highways. Country songs.

Oooh...

Gar, do you have any sense of what level she's reading at?

Don't know her that well. About average, I gather.

Chose Weezie Bat for 14 year old. Sense of humor, strong interest in sex overwhelming everything else (according to brother - her father). I think she will like it. For bright 12 year old church goer who liked Tamsin (our birthday gift to her last moth), I chose the Lion+the Witch and the Wardrobe. (Not likely she has already read it for various reasons.)

Laurell K. Hamilton explains how to write a sex scene.

By putting it in the bathroom, you know some of the props available, and some that are not. No nice roomy bed, no sheets. You get water, smaller spaces to use, so mostly none standard positions. You have soap, but you have to be careful on the soap, someo of it is simply not meant for internal use. Lubricant and soap are not always interchangeable. I know that we’re going to include a second man, and most of the men are on the tall side, so I think only two in the tub at the same time. Hmm. Okay. I think I’m ready to go make pages now.

Also:

Yes, my biology degree is showing. My bio background is one of the things that pushes me to get those realistic details that seems to make all the fantastic stuff so much more real.

From Neil Gaiman's blog, he's answering a question:

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Long time reader, first time writer. I'm sure you've been asked this before, but as I can't find it discussed on the message boards:

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." - William Gibson, Neuromancer

"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." - You, Neverwhere

You're either paying homage to Gibson, which is weird because the two books are in different genres and he isn't mentioned in the acknowledgements, or perhaps there's some manner of Jungian collective unconscious phenomenon at work here, in which you have unwittingly mimicked Gibson, or..?

Or it was a very small joke, essentially pointing out that since what is arguably the most famous opening sentence in SF was published in 1984, the nature of what a "dead channel" looked like had completely changed, from grey static fuzz to a pure dead blue. Well, I thought it was funny, anyway.

Heh. Which neatly addresses my perpetual cognitive dissonance on re-reading Neuromancer and getting stuck on that very point.