T is for...

. . . and for "Where is the Asian Justin Timberlake?" as asked in today's Sunday Styles. Who knows? But researchers think they've found today's Asian Let's Active...or Long Ryders...or something?

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. . . and for The Girl Detective, a new play based on Kelly Link's delightful deconstruction of a story that closes out her first book, Stranger Things Happen. I need to see this!

I'm recently back from the AWP in Atlanta, where I happily bumped into Kelly and Gavin Grant, outside a packed panel on "literary gossip"; we then traveled (with the proprietress of Pinky's Paperhaus) to an agreeably odd, Costco-sized grocery store in Decatur. I witnessed mad Link/Small Beer love at AWP: One of my Poetry Foundation colleagues, upon seeing Kelly's name in the conference catalog, gushed with enthusiasm; the One Story table was keeping Kelly's amazing "The Great Divorce" out of sight, because it was too popular—you had to ask for it by name, you had to know it was there, it was almost illegal; on the way back to New York, someone was reading Stranger Things Happen, rapt . . .

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U is for . . .


. . . and for Up Is Up, But So Is Down mastermind (and—more importantly—Dizzyhead) Brandon Stosuy, who gives a great interview over at 3:AM Magazine.

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And V is for Believer Goddess Vendela's second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, which I read on the plane to Taiwan (I was about to say that I devoured it in a single sitting, but there was a stopover in Seattle in which I walked around and did vague leg stretching exercises, dismantling the sitting position). As the title suggests, the time to read this is now—it's a winter book, with an appealing brittleness of emotion, funny and devastating in turns...and often at the same time:

I looked over her shoulder at what she'd traced in the salt and pepper. I thought it would be a clue, a postscript to what she'd told me. In large capital letters, she had scrawled: BUY MILK.