A fascinating look at the work of Guy de Maupassant, a writer who was mega-famous in the 19th century but considerably less well-known today, who was massively prolific and whose work became progressively stranger as he succumbed to syphilitic delirium.
I'm not a big fan of Charles Stross' fiction, but I find his essays consistantly interesting. (One of a number of fiction writers who I think are actually better at non-fiction than fiction.) Here he is talking about the business of ebooks in the context of the rest of the publishing industry.
Tor.com finally reveals fiction submission guidelines. Tor.com didn't make my Fiction Magazines Worth Reading 2010 list only because I don't see them as a fiction magazine; fiction is only one thing among many that they publish. For similar reasons I didn't include Harper's Magazine either, even though I subscribe to it. Tor.com (like Harpers) has consistently fantastic fiction offerings, in no small part because they're willing to pay real money for it. Perhaps next year I'll reframe FMWR to include these two venues.
Matt Cheney reminisces about Barry Lopez, a writer who resinspired him to write and find meaning in the business of fiction writing.
Another person wonders why so few speculative fiction books get translated into English, especially when the number of sf books published in mainland Europe is so huge.
Åsk Wäppling expresses her discomfort with Facebook, outlining a lot of the reasons why I'm glad I deleted my FB account.
In an interview with GalleyCat, J.A. Konrath why he makes more money self-publishing books on Kindle than he does with traditional publishers.
Hal Duncan investigates what genre labels are and what they mean.
Fiction time!
In "Lost in the Funhouse", John Barth constantly interrupts his narrative with commentary about the effectiveness of the writing itself, providing a self-commentary on fiction writing and questioning all the techniques that writers use.
If there was any case for ebook readers, this is it as far as I'm concerned: The Tachypomp and Other Stories by Edward Page Mitchell is an out-of-print, public domain short story collection. Written in the late 1870s/early 1880s, before HG Wells famous works on similar themes, these stories describe the first vehicle that can travel faster-than-light, the first machine that can travel through time, the first instance of a cyborg with a computer brain (inspired by the "calculating machine of Charles Babagge"), the first scientifically-created invisible man, the first story with a teleporter, as well as suspended animation, a tunnel to the center of the Earth and more. All of it is pulled off with humor and a very Poe-esque sense of building mood. It is, in other words, a landmark book, and one that now anyone can download as an HTML file and transform (via Calibre) into ebook-reader friendly formats like ePub or Kindle Mobipocket.
And finally: Brontë Sisters! Activate!