Christopher Barzak's amazing "What We Know About the Lost Families of ____ House" opens the Small Beer Press anthology Interfictions. Chris has managed to reinvent - or reinvigorate - the haunted house story with this one. He makes me realize all over again what you can do with a story when you're a truly good writer. This one just might have thrown me back onto the writing track.

Heinz Insu Fenkl's introduction has also made me determined to get his novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother which was actually a memoir and is now going to be republished as such.

I'll be reviewing Interfictions in an anthology column this fall.

Laura Bowers's Beauty Shop for Rent has proven to be a delightful surprise. What I thought was going to be a nice warm story about family and teenage girls and working at a small beauty shop has turned out to be a big story about how screwed up your average kid can be from the mistakes made by her parents. What I loved about this was how normal teenage Abbey is - and thus how easy it is for readers to identify with her. My review of this one will be in the June column - it's going to be highly recommended.

In the latest issue of Booklist, Donna Seaman loves Anne Fadiman's new essay collection At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays. "Fadiman finds lessons for living in the contemplation of ice cream and coffee, the adventures of an Arctic explorer, and the collecting of butterflies. A master of the tangential, a close observer and a lover of language, Fadiman is blithely brilliant in her pursuit of beauty and meaning as she wrestles with questions of life, death and rebirth." I'm a huge fan of Fadiman and glad to hear that this collection will not disappoint.

Sci Fi author David Brin has a new YA title coming out this summer from Subterranean Press: Sky Horizon. I'll be talking to David in June about the book and also talking to Sub Press publisher Bill Schafer about the three YA SF titles he is publishing this summer: Connie Willis's fabulous D.A. (in my June column), Horizons and Orson Scott Card's The Space Boy. For all of you wondering (like me) where the YA SF is, I say look to the small presses.

And I have an essay in the new issue of Elysian Fields Quarterly Review. It's not online, but it's about my father and baseball and why divorce sucks. It's called "His Favorite Sport Was Hockey". My father would have loved that I got into a baseball magazine - it would have proved all over again how much of a Daddy's girl I truly was.

I miss him still ; every year that goes by I understand better how I'm going to miss him forever.