August 25, 2012
Sofia Samatar Roundup
Here's the cover of my wife's forthcoming novel, A Stranger in Olondria. The release date has been pushed back to April 2013.
Sofia has been publishing poems, stories, and reviews hither and yon. Here are some links:
A wonderful story, "Honey Bear," appeared in the latest issue of Clarkesworld (in very good company, as you can see above!).
The decidedly Borgesian "A Brief History of Nonduality Studies" appeared in Expanded Horizons.
A poem, "The Hunchback's Mother," appeared in inkscrawl.
"Burnt Lyric" appeared in Goblin Fruit.
"Lost Letter" appeared in Strange Horizons.
August 5, 2012
Literature and Doping
http://www.flickr.com/photos/carolineshih/6961846481/ |
In the spirit of the Olympics ...
In 2018, following the National Commission on Literary
Doping’s decision to impose standards retroactively, the literary canon shifted
dramatically. Naturally, works such as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Naked Lunch, which, by the authors’ own
confession, had been written under the influence of drugs, were dropped from
curricula and library shelves. That much had been foreseen. However, the NCLD’s
discovery that increased levels of alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine in the
bloodstream could enhance creative output and, as they noted in their report,
“allow for the free association of images, thus providing users with a distinct
creative advantage” jeopardized the legacy of a number of authors who had been viewed
as relatively “clean.”
Though it was difficult, in the absence of blood tests and
urine samples, to ascertain the precise levels of proscribed substances in
historical subjects, diaries and contemporary reportage provided damning
evidence in many cases. Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Lowry, and Graham Greene were
among the first to lose their credibility. Hemingway’s Nobel Prize was
retroactively rescinded and bestowed on a Norwegian farmer named Oddmund. Martin
Amis and Beryl Bainbridge, whose usage of performance-enhancing nicotine
greatly exceeded the pack-a-day limit, were also swiftly excoriated, and
laudatory reviews of works such as Money
and Every Man for Himself were
excised from websites.
Perhaps most controversial was the caffeine limit stipulated
by the Commission. Keith Miller, whose novels were undergoing a critical
reappraisal, was discovered to have exceeded the three-cups-of-java-a-day limit
on multiple occasions, and it was determined that the excess caffeine had
directly influenced the celebrated purpleosity of his prose.
The new NCLD-certified canon is topped by Catherine
Marshall’s Christy, followed by the
complete works of Patricia St. John.
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