A nice surprise in the mail and some links

I got a really nice surprise in my (snail) mail today, when I found a thick envelope from my cousin in my mailbox. Inside were a birthday card (a little late, because we’ve been having postal strikes last week) and a chapbook with classic poems about spring, ranging from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Paul Celan.

In other news, I have been interviewed by Ben Dixon and Sam Campbell at Take a bite. We talk about writing and the zombie apocalypse, so drop by and say hello.

The Hugo and Clarke Awards debate largely seems to have died down, but meanwhile last year’s “SF is exhausted” debate is flaring up again. For at SF Signal, the Erudite Ogre a.k.a. John H. Stevens offers a somewhat belated response to the “SF is exhausted” claim Paul Kincaid made last year and postulates that the “perceived” exhaustion of the SFF genre could also be viewed as an opportunity.

The New York Times has an extensive profile of John Le Carré who is still writing at the age of 81. Though personally, I prefer Le Carré’s classic spy novels from the 1960s and 1970s to his later work.

Deutsche Welle has an interesting article about Indian publisher Naveen Kishore whose company Seagull Books publishes foreign, mainly German and French, literature in translation and is indeed the largest publisher of translated German literature in the world. This article also shows how a small publisher can find and thrive in a niche that isn’t deemed profitable enough by the big publishers.

The Atlantic has an article on the decline of the pronoun “whom” in the US. Found via The Passive Voice. Personally, I no more understand the vehement dislike for “whom” than I understand other American language obsessions such as the dislike for adverbs and the passive voice. I also use “whom”, where correct, though I do try to avoid it in dialogue unless the speaker is the sort of formal person who would use “whom”.