Keith Miller's Blog, page 5

The Tale of Robin Duck

I have a new story called "The Tale of Robin Duck" up at Interfictions. It's a click-through slideshow, and has lots of pictures!

Del Samatar

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My brother-in-law, Del Samatar, is a wonderful artist. Check out his website. The image above is from a project he's working on with my wife.

African Flavors

My mother, who is a wonderful cook, has put together a cookbook that combines her love of African food with recipes from across the continent. It's a feast for the senses and the mind! It's available from Amazon.

A Stranger in Olondria

My wife's gorgeous first novel, A Stranger in Olondria, is now shipping! It's the story of Jevick, the Tea Islander who learns to read, and the ghost who haunts him, and the journey they must make together. It contains great sorrows and great joys, told in the finest prose this side of Angela Carter. You'll love it.
It's available as a paperback, hardcover, and ebook. Sofia also now has a nifty website where you can learn a bit about her and meet all the books she likes.

The Book on Fire on Kindle

 
The Book on Fire is now available as a Kindle ebook. This is the updated version and includes the story "City of Bones."
For those who have other ereaders, Smashwords offers several options. It is also available for Barnes & Noble's Nook.

Fahrenheit 451 Cover Design

This is designer Elizabeth Perez's cover for Fahrenheit 451. The spine is a striking surface, and it includes a match.

Sausages: Food of the Intelligentsia

From Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson:
A letter to Einstein's first lover, Mileva: "We understand each other's dark souls so well, and also drinking coffee and eating sausages, etcetera."
Elsa [Einstein's second wife, and cousin!] "'recognized the need for keeping all disturbing elements away from him,' a relative noted. She would make his favorite meal of lentil soup and sausages, summon him down from his study, and then would leave him alone ..."
From Youth by J.M. Coetzee:
"His diet is unvarying: apples, oats porridge, bread and cheese, and spiced sausages called chipolatas, which he fries over the cooker. He prefers chipolatas to real sausages because they do not need to be refrigerated. Nor do they ooze grease when they fry."
"And what is the upshot of this lack of heat, this lack of heart? The upshot is that he is sitting alone on a Sunday afternoon in an upstairs room in a  house in the depths of the Berkshire countryside, with crows cawing in the fields and a gray mist hanging overhead, playing chess with himself, growing old, waiting for evening to fall so that he can with a good conscience fry his sausages and bread for supper."
The image is a Literaturwurst by Swiss artist Dieter Roth. It's the complete works of Hegel, ground up and made into sausage. 

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby

Here's the first paragraph of one of my favorite stories, "Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby," by the great Donald Barthelme. You can read the whole thing here. Jessamyn.com has many more Barthelme stories (used by permission).

Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn't pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging. He said he'd think about it but it would take him a while to decide. I pointed out that we'd have to know soon, because Howard, who is a conductor, would have to hire and rehearse the musicians and he couldn't begin until he knew what the music was going to be. Colby said he'd always been fond of Ives's Fourth Symphony. Howard said that this was a "delaying tactic" and that everybody knew that the Ives was almost impossible to perform and would involve weeks of rehearsal, and that the size of the orchestra and chorus would put us way over the music budget. "Be reasonable," he said to Colby. Colby said he'd try to think of something a little less exacting.

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 .

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 Moneyand 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.