In the new issue of Smithsonian, Armistead Maupin writes about why he loves San Francisco while also dropping several fascinating literary tidbits about the city's history:

* That Mark Twain, while steaming in a Turkish bath on the site of the current Transamerica Pyramid, struck up a friendship with a local fireman whose homespun-sounding name—Tom Sawyer—would later prove useful to the storyteller.
* That Billie Holiday was busted for drugs in a room at the Mark Twain Hotel.
* That the ashes of gunfighter Wyatt Earp were buried in a Jewish cemetery south of San Francisco so that his beloved widow could later be interred with him.
* That Jack Kerouac wandered away from Neal Cassady's cottage on Russian Hill to stumble upon Joan Crawford, larger than life in pumps and a fur, shooting Sudden Fear in the fog.

Okay the bit about Wyatt Earp isn't really literary at all, but it is the perfect segue for me to point out Jeff Vandermeer's A+ review of Emma Bull's Territory. I'm enjoying the hell out of this book and I really hope it gets some mainstream review attention. It crosses so many genres: historical fiction, western, fantasy, mystery - if readers find out about it, they are going to love it.

Speaking of books that need to be discovered, I finshed Your Own, Sylvia and I'm quite a bit blown away by the whole experience. How author Stephanie Hemphill managed to write a biography of Plath entirely through poems is amazing to me. She chose just the right people in the poet's life to use as points of view for each poem and then provided any necessary historical info as footnotes to each poem. You never get lost or confused reading this book - instead it draws you in with some amazing emotional writing and in the end made me determined to read more of Plath's poetry. The fact that it's written for YAs should not dissuade any fan of Plath's from getting this book; it is truly outstanding. (More in my September column.)

Over at Endicott Studio, Midori Snyder posts about Farrago's Wainscott, an interstitial online journal. This looks very very cool and I noticed just from Midori's post that Catherynne Valente has some poems up in its new summer issue. Is it just me or is Valente kind of everywhere all of a sudden? I just reviewed Salon Fantastique (July Bookslut, up any day now) and she has a short story in there, and I'm working on my Interfictions review for August and she has a short story in there and now here she is in Farrago with three poems, including "Immigrant" about Baba Yaga in America. I am fascinated by the stories of Baba Yaga - she showed up in Diana Wynne Jones' wonderful mythic novella The Game, as well. And she is a major evil bitch in Fables (which everyone should be reading). Valente, of course, puts her own very dark spin on things with "Immigrant"; good stuff and only the tip of the iceberg for this author.

As the SBBT group moves forward we now have the Winter Blog Blast Tour tentatively scheduled for the week of November 5th, the Radar Recommendations posts about undernoticed titles scheduled for the week of August 27th and a one day multiblog project, "One Shot World Tour: Australia" set for August 15th. That day will be devoted to writing about Aussie authors and we do hope other blogs will join in our project. (Adult authors, YA, MG, comics, picture books - whatever - all genres, all formats, all ages welcome.) If you'd like to post on an Australian author on August 15th do let me know a few days before so I can be sure to get a link to your site.

For those of you inclined to comment here, I do appreciate your extra moment or two to go through the Typekey authentication business. Once you've filled out their little form once and commented though, I get to note you as a "trusted commenter" and from then on you just go to comment, sign in at typekey, and it zips you right back here in a second (no different from signing in at google or LJ). I have now banned all of that nasty spam so I really must keep things this way - 200 invitiations to have strange sexual adventures everyday is just too much.

I mean really!

Finally, it is hard to be a writer and a mother. Wow - it's like someone just discovered the wheel all over again, isnt' it?