I have a new review up over at Voices. Voyage of Midnight is an amazing YA novel about the slave trade, especially the Middle Passage. If you are looking for a book on this subject you will not find better than this one. As an added bonus, since it involves a young boy who goes to sea, it will especially appeal to boys. This one is most highly recommended - it blew me away and I thought I already knew a lot about this subject.

Glorifying Terrorism is sitting beside me as a I type - it arrived today and I'm thrilled to see it. I'm all about striking blows for freedom of speech lately, and this book looks to include some powerful stories. (With contributors like Jo Walton, Hal Duncan and Charles Stross, it is a guaranteed winner as far as I'm concerned.)

I just received an ARC of the massive Connie Willis compendium from Subterranean Press. I haven't really started reading it yet, but I noticed in her Intro she discusses her love for screwball comedies. She clearly has that in common with Kage Baker and if you like that sort of movie as well then you must - YOU MUST - read Baker's fabulous Rude Mechanicals. I reviewed it along with her other new collection, Gods and Pawns, in Bookslut this month. Honestly, I don't care if you like Sci Fi or not, if you love Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey then Rude Mechanicals will totally crack you up.

The Spring issue of Subterranean Magazine continues to go online with fiction from Jay Lake, Bruce Sterling and more. I am finding Elizabeth Bear's columns on writing to be most interesting. To wit:

As a writer, you have to be able to set limits on what you are or are not willing to do. I personally would recommend not writing anything you're not sufficiently passionate about to really want to write.

Most of the things aspiring writers do to punch up the beginning of a story are boring. (Explosions, sex, shocking revelations, the inevitable heat death of the universe.) All that stuff is boring.

The best part about what Bear is saying is that she's just saying it - no beating around the bush bullshit. How refreshing!

Said Hyder Akbar and two other Yale students were arrested this week for buring an American flag - and also maybe almost burning someone's house down. It's very odd anyway, but I was shocked to see Hyder involved in this. I interviewed him last year after reading his amazing memoir, Come Back to Afghanistan. Such a nice guy and his editors at Bloomsbury really seemed to like him. I don't know what these guys were doing (I'm thinking some alcohol was involved), but I hope it gets sorted out soon.

And finally over at the Booklist blog, the argument is made that it's okay for David Sedaris to make stuff up and call it nonfiction because he is funny. I don't feel good about this - I think nonfiction is nonfiction and that should be it. If you aren't telling the truth then you aren't writing nonfiction. Maybe this is just a sore spot for me as the fiction/nonfiction issue has come up with my book (all the flying is true but the people are purely fiction, and that makes it fiction, or so I thought).

I don't know - did I miss a memo or something? Is it okay for memoirs to be fictional as long as they are funny?