The first and the last

A Lover’s Almanac is performative, dizzying, richly layered, like some fabulous brocade. By the time The Rags of Time emerges, the writing has taken a long journey, through the bittersweet and intoxicating Big As Life, through the sad rich quiet of The Silver Screen. Each volume succeeds in transforming its season into something foreign, unknown. And, like the seasons, each book expands and alters the stories that came before it. Because the seasons are cyclical instead of linear, this is, potentially, an infinite process. At the end of the forth book I wanted to begin all over again-I wanted to revise my reading with re-reading. What could the first volume say about the last? What could the early lives tell me about the later ones?

—Emily Austin on Maureen Howard's The Rags of Time, in The Faster Times

Disambiguations™ for August 27, 2009

I. My student Rebecca has a new column at The Faster Times on...vampires! There is actually an interesting backstory that I hope she will write about in a future column...Don't worry, I am putting on the pressure!

II. My student Elijah alerts me to a Donald E. Westlake science fiction story, "The Risk Profession."

III. I love the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks—excitingly, my Beatlesque submission has been accepted for publication!

IV. S. Kirk Walsh's piece at Slate's XX site, a review of Dan Chaon's latest book, mentions ye olde Personal Days, along with works by David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith.

V. Adrian Tomine on Sixteen Candles et al. (via various FB posts)—it's primo Tomin-o!