It amuses me deeply in the lump of coal that exists where my heart should be that the late misogynist novelist Norman Mailer has been awarded this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction award.

If you’re planning to apply for the Clarion and Clarion West Science Fiction Writers workshops, mark your calendar.  

The Clarion workshop will be June 29 to Aug. 9, 2008, at the University of California San Diego. Nalo Hopkinson will be among the instructors. Applications will be accepted between Jan. 1 and March 1.    

Clarion West will run June 22 to Aug. 1. Sheree Thomas is one of the instructors. Apply before Feb. 1 and you’ll get $100 off the registration fee. The final application deadline is March 1.

In this week’s NYT Book Review:  

Nigerian-American author Uzodinma Iweala reviews Matthew Eck’s The Farther Shore. 

On the “editors’ choice” list:
Blonde Faith, Walter Mosley   

Black authors on the various best sellers lists:

Slash, Slash with Anthony Bozza
My Grandfather’s Son, Clarence Thomas
Quiet Strength, Tony Dungy with Nathan Whitaker
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (169 weeks!)
Blink, Malcolm Gladwell  

This is the trailer (featuring my beloved Octavia Butler) for M. Asli Dukan’s Invisible Universe, about contributions to speculative fiction by the African diaspora.

A couple of years ago, Dukan attended a meeting of a sci-fi book club to which I belonged (it met at Hue-Man bookstore in Harlem). IIRC, she even filmed a bit of our meeting. She spoke briefly, but excitedly, about this project. Although the mister and I have moved back to my native Florida and have missed all subsequent events related to the film, we’ve still been eagerly anticipating getting some way to see it ever since.

I contacted Dukan a few weeks ago to find out when she’d have a fundraiser to get the documentary on its feet. She wasn’t sure when that would come together, but thought it likely would be an online fundraising drive.

For now, interested parties can donate here, but I’ll keep my eyes open for a formal campaign.

This is the trailer for Francis Ray’s Only You, her newest book in the Grayson family series. Already I’m amused by the fact that the people in the trailer bear no resemblance to Blade and Sierra, the hero and heroine, as described in earlier books in the Grayson series (Sierra in particular was described somewhat as though she looked something like the model Selita Ebanks).

When I get around to it, Only You is likely to be the next romance I review here.  

Slow Burn
Brenda Jackson
St. Martin’s Paperbacks
2007  

Brenda Jackson, my fellow Floridian, is a machine. Anybody who cranks out 50 mostly readable books in less than 15 years gets nuff respeck for that. 

Slow Burn, the latest in Jackson’s Madaris family series, also is on USA Today’s Best-Selling Books list. I may be wrong, but I think it’s the first time she’s been on the list. 

Sadly, this isn’t one of Jackson’s best efforts, y’all. Oh, yes: I should warn you before I start that here be spoilers.  

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You may already have noticed the trend of ass-tastic covers — which includes Minion, by L.A. Banks, above — on paranormal/fantasy books. I don’t know which body-part cliche is most annoying, though.

What’s next, clavicles? Elbows?

But when book designers are hitting on all cylinders, they can do some really creative stuff. Joseph Sullivan of The Book Design Review names some of his favorite book covers of the past year. (h/t Galleycat)

Barbara Vey at Publishers Weekly asks and answers whether men are capable of writing decent romance novels. 

Sci Fi Wire speaks with Nigerian-American young-adult speculative-fiction (whew!) writer Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu. 

She describes her new book, The Shadow Speaker, as “African fantasy with elements of science fiction.” 

In this week’s New York Times Book Review, Jabari Asim, formerly of the Washington Post and now of The Crisis, manages to wrap his arms around a book with which I’ve been struggling, Walter Mosley’s Blonde Faith.  

Mosley has said this is the last in his Easy Rawlins series. I really enjoy the character of Easy, but you know what? It’s time.

Just once, I didn’t want the specter of Mouse lingering around Easy. And I was so put off by Easy’s midlife regrets and moroseness (undertones that also bothered me in Cinnamon Kiss and Mosley’s stab at erotica, Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistential Novel) that they almost distracted me from Mosley’s major strength: kickass, era-appropriate dialogue. One more woe-is-me-Bonnie-doesn’t-want-me-anymore thought and I was going to reach through the pages and stab Easy in the heart with a pencil. Asim has more to say.

Black authors on the NYTBR’s various best sellers lists this week:
My Grandfather’s Son, Clarence Thomas
Slash, by Slash with Anthony Bozza (new!)
Quiet Strength, Tony Dungy with Nathan Whitaker
Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell