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A Visit From The Goon Squad: Charting New Territory

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 Credit - Tessie Girl I recently finished A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and it's one of the best books I've read in a while.  It flows from one character to another in a kind of narrative relay.  At first it's disorienting and honestly I lost track of who the focus was or was supposed to be - the point, I think - and it required me to stop and start again once or twice.  The book also caroms from one era to another.  This narrative river just flows along and then washes ashore deep in the future, providing a brief, sober glimpse of the fate of the character we follow, before retreating back to the sea of the present.  At some point you almost long for a chart mapping out all these people, these places and times, and then as if on queue, Egan actually depicts an entire sequence of the book in a succession of flow charts.  I wa struck at how effective, and affecting, this was; the PowerPoint slides gradually became thought bubbles...
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Doing The Peanuts Happy Dance

My life is feast or famine. Ask anyone, they'll tell you. Good things in clumps, bad things in clumps. Today, this year hopefully, considering the last, seems to be the start of a good clump. I learned today I sold two short stories (commences with Peanuts Happy Dance to celebrate selling two stories in one day). The first, "Paper Man", will appear in a forthcoming issue of Shimmer . The story is about a young blind woman named Millie who sees the world through the things she makes of paper. The second is "Black Eyed Moon," about best friends who go in search of fallen moon rocks after an asteroid strikes the moon and the debris falls to earth. This will appear in the summer '06 issue of Fantasy Magazine . I want to take a moment and thank E. Sedia for her confidence in me and this story, and all her help. I really appreciate it. Back to happy dance...
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George Lucas (Insert Your Opinion Here) My Childhood

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Harry Knowles, whose reviews I generally avoid for their lack of perspective, provides quite a bit on the new Star Wars Blu-rays over at his website. The discussion among fans has basically reduced the films, particulary the original trilogy, to the sum of its parts. As George Lucas has dissected the films, amputated them and grafted on new parts, a large group of fans have done the same. These films have been broken down and analyzed to the breaking point. People forget why they loved them in the first place - or they identify what they loved, and consequently, their childhood - with the parts Lucas excises.
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