Sarasota News and Books

Deep in Michigan, a state renowned for its contributions to the automotive industry, a dark magic lurks, bringing the dreams and nightmares of a number of literary magicians to life. Some are well-known and critically acclaimed, some seem to have sprung full-grown from the shadows. The place where all of this happens is a small publisher called Subterranean Press, and it’s been happening since 1995.Almost all of the publisher’s books fit in the horror, mystery, fantasy, or science fiction genres, although not always neatly. For example, Joe R. Lansdale’s work often combines elements of fantasy, horror, mystery, and even westerns. Lansdale publishes a number of his unreleased stories in limited editions through the press, although most titles are sold out as of this writing. [»]

What do Noam Chomsky, Jimmy Carter, Thomas Edison, ad Madonna have in common? They’re all protagonists (or at least central charactersour sympathy for them is sometimes in question) in Lydia Millet’s wondrous new collection, Love in Infant Monkeys. The title comes from the celebrities’ curious co-stars: a collection of animals ranging from hamster and rabbits to elephants and giraffes.The Pulitzer Committee praised Millet’s book for “underscoring the human folly of longing for significance while chasing trifles.” Millet has never been nominated before, but did win a PEN-USA Award for another novel of human folly: 2002′s My Happy Life. The narrator of this book is an unnamed woman trapped in an abandoned mental asylum, who writes her life story on her prison walls. [»]