The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

[Eponine]

Got this on the Kindle from a pre-order, am looking forward to starting reading tonight.

[Larry.]

Excellent. There is one difference between the UK print/e-book and the US e-book. This is what Jeff said on his blog:

The Weird table of contents, also reproduced below the cut. Please note that for the North American e-book only the Buzzatti stories has been dropped and J. Robert Lennon’s “Portal” (2010) added.

I guess I'll have to get the US e-book just to read Lennon's story, so I can have them all.

Also, over at Weird Fiction Review, we're doing a biweekly commentary on the authors/stories that appear in The Weird. Might be of interest to some here. I'm working today on the fourth entry, which will be up Tuesday or Thursday next week.

[Sci-2]

Just wanted to say I'm loving the site and the book, though I haven't been able to get too far in either. I love that there is a comic that moves through the settings of the stories in the book.

The combination of movie reviews, art review, writer bios, and stories make the combination of the book and site a rich one indeed.

Very happy with this purchase.

[Eponine]

I'm enjoying it a lot, but i wish the stories were a little more selective. It's not that they're not almost all good, it just kind of feels like a story dump right now - like every author that could fit into the weird label was included. If it were a bit tighter, I think it would be a stronger collection.

[Sci-2]

Fans of this anthology might like The Cult of Weird blog. :-)

[Eponine]

For Larry:

I re-read the story you translated, and am looking through the other translated stories. Something I noticed as I got further into the anthology was that there were almost no translated stories near the end - that is, the most recently written stories. I feel like this biased my opinion of the translations. For the most part, they fit in exceedingly well with the tone and language of the English stories written near the same time period. But they weren't as easy to read for me as the last 10 or so stories.

To be honest, I didn't like a lot of the translated stories very much, but I don't know if it's because of the translation or if the stories themselves were just not very interesting to me. For example, I thought that The Vegetable Man (Luigi Ugolini), The White Wyrak (Stefan Grabinski) and The Ghoulbird (Claude Seignolle) were all pretty trite and boring. This may have been a side effect of trying to associate too many stories with the "weird" label and stuff them all in. There developed a similarity that made the conclusions of many of the stories, especially the earlier ones, feel unsatisfying.

I thought The Salamander (Merce Rodoreda) could have benefited from a better translation. I liked Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Bruno Schutz) and The End of the Garden (Michael Ajvaz). A lot of the translations seemed a bit, uh, fuzzy, not sharp, like the paragraphs go on too long or something. I'm not sure how to describe it. The Ice Man was an exception where the sentences were more crisp, and for me, more poignant. I don't know if it's a characteristic of the original authors or a tendency of the translations.

[Larry.]

Thanks for the response. One of the trickier aspects of translating is the issue of how much do you break the original construction in order to remake it into something akin to it. Contemporary English prose often favors short, staccato bursts over more leisurely flowing sentences, but this is not the case in many languages. When I translated Monterroso's "Mister Taylor," I "broke" some of the sentences (this was especially the case during the first and second round of edits after I worked with Jeff to make it feel more "natural" for English speakers). In most of the cases, this is not readily apparent, but there were times where some of Monterroso's longer sentences were reshaped, sometimes into two sentences (I did this more often when I translated Leopoldo Lugones' "El escuerzo" for the ODD? e-anthology last year).

But that's only one path toward being a "faithful" translator (if such a person ever exists). Some translators believe in preserving the "foreign" quality of the prose and they aim to replicate as much of the original text's tones and rhythms as possible. Add to that that authors 50-80 years ago (when the majority of the translated stories were originally published) in a global context wrote sentences that differ considerably from what is the norm for the past 10-15 years and I can easily understand the disconnect.

Not surprised you liked the latter stories; just only speculating on a possible reason why some of the stories might have felt "fuzzy" to you.

[Sci-2]

It's a bit past it's freshness date, but people might be interested in this interview with Mieville.

Weirdfictionreview.com: What does the word ‘weird’ mean to you?

China Miéville: I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I’m teaching a course in Weird Fiction at the University of Warwick, so this has come up a lot. Obviously it’s kind of impossible to come to anything like a final answer, so I approach this in a Beckettian way – try to define/understand it, fail, try again, fail again, fail better…I think the whole “sense of cosmic awe” thing that we hear a lot about in the Weird tradition is to do with the sense of the numinous, whether in a horrific iteration (or, more occasionally, a kind of joyous one), as being completely embedded in the everyday, rather than an intrusion. To that extent the Weird to me is about the sense that reality is always Weird.

I’ve been thinking about the traditional notion of the “sublime,” which was always (by Kant, Schopenhauer, et al) distinguished from the “Beautiful,” as containing a kind of horror at the immeasurable scale of it. I think what the Weird can do is question the arbitrary distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime, and operate as a kind of Sublime Backwash, so that the numinous incomparable awesome slips back from “mountains” and “forests,” into the everyday. So…the Weird as radicalised quotidian Sublime.

[Sci-2]

Of the Liwat’ang Yawa, the Litok-litok and their Prey by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

The prey stumbles and the beast closes in. It rises to its full height and spreads its arms wide. Here is the ripping sound of skin giving way under sharp fang. Bone surrenders as claws press through and open up the chest that holds the fruit. Fluttering within the construction of rib, pulsing still with life, the fruit beats wildly even as it is consumed.

Sweet.

The night resonates with the roar of the Liwat’ang Yawa. Fifty years have passed since it exchanged jungle for port city — now it has returned to its original hunting grounds.

In the sky, a winged creature dips and circles over where its master is feeding.

Litok-litook.

The eerie cry makes the night darker than it is. This cry is a warning to any who remember.

Beware. The hunter of virgins and the eater of the unborn have returned.

[Sci-2]

Moving Past Lovecraft

While it’s true that riffing off of Lovecraft has created interesting and enduring work — for example, the fiction of China Mieville and Caitlin R. Kiernan, to name just two powerful and original modern writers who have successfully “cooked” Lovecraft’s influence and moved on — our argument would simply be that, again, the balance is off. The shadow of Lovecraft blots out and renders invisible so many better and more interesting writers. The point isn’t to reject Lovecraft, but to see Lovecraft with clear eyes and to acknowledge that weird fiction should not and simply cannot begin and end with one vision, created by a man who passed away in 1937.

An interesting read. This is timely for me, as I've been arguing for a Non-Lovecraftian examination of the "Far Realms" that permeate the D&D cosmology. I've also found the Reality that eats other Realities to be dull and too often trite.

I've not read too much Lovecraft, more so the derivatives, but I do think the Weird is better for separating itself from any one person...and, admittedly, from a person as controversial as Lovecraft.

All that said, one of my issues with The Weird, which I love more and more, is the association of deformity and medical conditions in humans with Evil. This seems like a good time to ask Jeff about that.

[Zach H]

I think of VanderMeer's own work as more of a center of the weird than Lovecraft. Only ever read one Lovecraft story, though, which I don't even recall much about. I did dig the story Borges dedicated to him, though. I should probably read more weird stuff. Meaning to get to more of Kiernan and Cisco for a while now.

My labeling tends to have its own style, though. Erikson's Malazan sequence is very much an overall epic, although as individual volumes Midnight Tides and Toll the Hounds are very much weird city novels to me. Mieville's The Scar I consider epic fantasy. Kelly Link I just think of as a master of the short story, much in the same way I do Updike and Munro.

[Sci-2]

Congrats to Jeff and Ann on the WFA win! The Weird Fiction Review, IMO, continues to push spec fic in many directions.

[Brendan Moody]

Readers interested in story-by-story discussion of The Weird might want to check out the Yahoo Group The Haunted Bookshelf, which just started at a rate, I believe, of two stories a week.

[Eponine]

Thanks, I would like to discuss the stories individually because I feel like a lot of them kind of got mushed together when I was reading. I stand by my original feeling that a tighter collection would have been more enjoyable and memorable.

[Sci-2]

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2008/03/the-situation-j/

f you aren’t familiar with the work of award-winning writer Jeff VanderMeer, now is your chance to see what the fuss is about. GeekDad is happy to be able to offer Wired readers a PDF copy of VanderMeer’s upcoming book The Situation, courtesy of PS Publishing (cover artwork by Scott Eagle).

For the VanderMeers’ thoughts on technology, genre writing, the Geek label, LEGO vs. Tinkertoys, collecting frogs, Predator, Myst, Alien Babies and D&D, read the full GeekDad interview with Jeff and Ann VanderMeer after the jump.

[Sci-2]

Unstuck

Unstuck is a nationally distributed literary journal based in Austin, Texas. We emphasize stories, poems, and even essays with elements of the fantastic, the futuristic, the surreal, and the strange. In our pages, you'll find everything from straight-up science fiction and fantasy to domestic realism with a twist of the improbable. Every issue of Unstuck includes a mix of established and emerging writers.

In its first three years of publication, Unstuck has been praised in The New York Times and Poets and Writers and reprinted in Harper's and Electric Literature's Recommended Reading. We've featured new work from writers like Steve Almond, Matt Bell, Aimee Bender, Kate Bernheimer, Arthur Bradford, Kevin Brockmeier, Edward Carey, Matthew Derby, Rikki Ducornet, Amelia Gray, J. Robert Lennon, Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth McCracken, Joe Meno, Rick Moody, Mary Ruefle, Tomaz Salamun, Patrick Somerville, and Dean Young.

Our journal is published each February in a big, heavily illustrated perfect-bound print edition. Issues are also available as e-books from online retailers like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and (beginning soon) Weightless Books.