I think this illustrated version of Fahrenheit 451 is both outstanding in its own right and has made me love the original even more. The artwork uses noirish design to great effect and never overdetails its world, letting the words do their own work. Illustrator/adaptor Tim Hamilton has judiciously cut the text to give us, for the most part, the strongest and most evocative lines. Some scenes allow for silence. Fire has, as in the book, a life and presence that threaten the characters. This is excellent work.

Read some more of John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar. It is, unlike the last two science fiction novels of the New Wave that I read, a book for grownups.

Last night I read the first story in Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, "The Twenty-seventh Man." The story manages to have the quality of both a "tale" and an authentic occurrence, seeming strangely fantastic and realistic. Englander throws together 27 Jewish writers (all but one of whom are widely famous) all caught simultaneously in the net of Stalin's paranoia. We see their final hours as they await doom. Excellent story.

News about my own publication: My novella (at least, I think that's how it's being considered) "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" will run in the March 2010 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, coming out mid-January.

Yesterday I received a rejection from The Greensboro Review. Three other stories of mine remain out for consideration.

Finished the gloriously strange Three to See the King, by Magnus Mills. To say anything about the plot of a Mills book is to, possibly, ruin it, the same as telling someone who's never heard of Little Red Riding-Hood that the story is about a wolf taking the place of a little girl's grandmother. That's the whole plot, and you shouldn't know anything about it until it's too late. The only thing I'll let slip about this Mills novel is that its protagonist lives in a house of tin of which he is very proud. End-stop. The other novel of his that I've read, Explorers of the New Century, is about men on an expedition. That's all I'll say. His novels combine dream logic and fairy-tale bluntness about the true nature of the world using spare yet evocative language. He's amazing.

Following that joyful experience, I'm facing the daunting prospect of reading John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, which is anything but spare. I'll give it a try.

I also finished Camus's play State of Seige. It's very formal and melodramatic in its language and staging, like opera or Greek drama; I can't imagine what it would be like to perform. There are huge monologues by individuals and choruses. Death and pestilence come to a city and impose an austere existence plus totalitarian rules. Only Diego fights them, pushing other people to do the same. It has some interesting moments, taken as a commentary on the politics of the time, but its emotions are so overstated, there's little feeling to be found.

Today I read Jennifer Haigh's story "Desiderata," which appears in (and is the entire contents of) the latest edition of the journal One Story. (The subscription is a gift from one of my daughters.) The story was fine, but not great . . . and perhaps I'm being generous with "fine." It's rather schematically structured, so you can see what's coming and no surprises are in store. There's nothing ultimately either mysterious or revelatory or puzzling about the tale. It takes absolutely no risks, but is simply solidly realistic, with no interesting choices in tone or voice or structure or content. A few lines struck me as quite clever. The dialogue was handled well. Nothing was wrong with the story, particularly, though I don't know why what the character has realized already is withheld for so long—as if we would be surprised. What's disappointing is that these folks publish one short story a month. Nothing more interesting (if flawed) came down the pike?

I've been reading poetry by Paul Muldoon from his collection Moy Sand and Gravel. Interesting. They're not work to read, exactly, but I'm not pulled in, for the most part. That he is able to toss a bunch of evocative-sounding Irish town names into his poems seems like a terribly unfair advantage.

Started reading an outstanding and absorbing novel by Magnus Mills, Three to See the King. I have no idea where this is going. What fun. Totally strange. I read his Explorers of the New Century a few years back; that was one of my most enjoyable reading experiences. It's like reading modern fables, this guy's work.

Worked on some short fiction today. Hope to do a little more before bed.

In his book Awake in the Dark, Roger Ebert writes that "A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it . . . ." This is a useful way to think about something I just finished and something I've recently begun.

Since this occurred to me while reading the latter, I'll start there: David Eggers's novel/memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is supposedly about his parents' deaths and the resulting effects on his family, but it's really the title that tells you what it's about by revealing how it's going to go about its business. The details are not the issue, but rather the effect the story will have on you and how impressed you'll be by the work itself. However, Eggers immediately, in the hilarious prefatory matter, undercuts this aims and tells you that parts of the book don't work very well and that, yes, he's reductively aware of his own self-consciousness about this story. As it turns out, how he goes about telling this story has, so far, less heartbreak than humor and less genius than . . . well, again, humor. It reads like sitcom writing. He attempts to break your heart through the juxtaposition of ironic distance and horrible details—though this actually results, for me in any case, in a sense of irony rather than emotional connection. These, though, are the subjects of the book.

Thomas M. Disch's On Wings of Song . . . I'll admit, I don't know what he wants the book to be about. I think he wants it to be about the facades that people construct and the falseness of dreams. But the book goes about this in such ham-handed fashion and with such an inconsistent tone and voice (not to mention a plot that loses track of itself) that the book is about how not having a clear vision results in derailment. That's what happens to the character; that's what happens to the book.

Read a good, small short story from Bonnie Jo Campbell's collection American Salvage. I have no idea why I ordered this at the library. This happens from time to time. Thus I find myself in the odd position of having a wish granted though I'm not conscious of any lingering desire for the a-wished object.

I'm working on two short stories simultaneously, though I hadn't planned to. (This also happens from time to time.) "Machine Age" is an old idea I've written about several times; I'm hoping this approach gets me somewhere more final. The newest thing, on which I've only written the opening, is "Rhetorical Lad." Both have adolescent protagonists. Hm. A consequence of teaching middle schoolers?

I've been reading, with diminishing pleasure, Thomas Disch's On Wings of Song. The discussion of this is viewable in the "Books and Stories" threads of the Asimov's forum.

I've been revising two poems and gave one to a friend for critiqueing. My concern, beyond whether I can competently write poetry, is whether there's a reason for me to write it. The more I write, the more I start thinking in its forms and rhythms, which is certainly a good thing, but do I burn to write it? Is that the question one should ask?

Perhaps this (long) weekend I can get some work done on a short story. Two of my stories-in-progress have been on my mind a lot, as have three of my novels-in-progress. World enough? Time?

I finally finished Dexter Filkins's The Forever War, having read it in a kind of steady drip over the the course of many weeks. Extremely well written, it gave me a set of images and a context to complement the film The Hurt Locker (about an American bomb defusal squad in the present Iraq conflict). A friend and colleague with whom I saw The Hurt Locker feels that the film withholds a true point of view; that is, it fails to make clear its moral position in relation to the Iraq conflict. I don't agree, and believe that the film's position—that its main character defines himself in terms of danger and conflict, though he does not know why—provides a lens for judging the war itself. Whatever its initial or subsequent causes, it exists in all its horror in a kind of amoral place, operating with an awful momentum that does not allow for moral reasoning. (This, in itself, is a moral condemnation, I'd argue.) In any case, while discussing the film in light of Filkins's book, I said that the film's tone is a kind of reportage rather than narrative storytelling, which my friend says is exactly his point. The Forever War does not say "this war is wrong" or "these causes are just" or any such thing. It faces, instead, the situation of soldiers, insurgents, government workers and ordinary citizens caught in the conflict. Filkins says, "This is how life becomes when we enter war." He saves, I think, his most cutting outrage for the Taliban in Afghanistan, but perhaps that's because, by the time Iraq has descended into a succession of suicide bombings and all-out internal Islamic conflict, his outrage has become too stunned to fully function. What he finds, I think, is the nihilism at the heart of the conflict—and he names it as such at one point. As in Graham Greene's "The Destructors," people seem intent on acting merely for the purpose of pulling the world down upon everyone's head. Filkins's sympathies are with all those simply trying to do the right thing, even if "the right thing" remains morally problematic.

I've been reading other things: some of Bruno Schulz's strangely haunting and narratively truncated short stories; an outstanding, beautifully rendered story by Melanie Rae Thon, "Survivors," in issue 69 of AGNI; Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," with its sense—so close to any writer's thinking—that death's victory is in taking away what we meant to say; and Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," which wisely follows "Kilimanjaro," again taking us to metaphors expressing the meagerness of light and the kind of blank dread that's possible outside that light.

I mailed a group of eight short stories, jointly titled The Last Revelation, I Swear, to the Iowa Press for its annual short fiction competition. My collection contains four published (or soon-to-be-published) stories and four unpublished stories.

Mary Kinzie makes me feel stupid. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I often appreciate it, coming from her. I don't appreciate it coming from the poems in the new issue of Poetry.

I'm reading Kinzie's book A Poet's Guide to Poetry. She actually explains everything quite well, and she chooses wonderful poems to scan and unpack. However, her sentences often have one or two more terms in them than I find helpful all at once (I find this on reading science, especially physics), and I have to reread and then mentally paraphrase. This is pretty much how I approached the study of German in college (a woefully unsuccessful venture, but Northwestern made students in the College of Arts and Sciences take a foreign language).

I had Kinzie as a teacher at NU; she was brilliant. Some students feared her. I vividly recall a young woman saying something utterly uninsightful in a class on women poets and having her severed head handed to her without ceremony. I didn't take Mary's poetry writing classes—I was in the fiction seminars—but I did take her women poet's class (Moore, Bogan, Bishop, Glück and . . . hmm . . . Dickinson?). Great class. She was, in addition, my advisor for three years.

As for the latest issue of the journal Poetry, I can't figure out why the first writer was given space for four poems, two of them quite short (as the journal won't print more than one poem on a page, and the print seems smaller than it used to a few years ago, this is particularly galling). The first poem, I couldn't judge. I have no clue about it. Two of the others seem simply bad.

I do reread poems; I don't simply give something one look and judge it. However, if there's no way in to the poem on first reading—either narratively or imagistically or through beauty of the language—then it's likely I'm not finding anything the second time. Wallace Stevens is a poem who often befuddles me, but he does so in good ways, hitting at least one if not two of the conditions above at first blush. This lets me return to him in hopes of more. If you're not offering any of those three, I have no idea what you're doing, because I can't respond.

Just sold a piece of fiction, though I won't say anything more about that here, yet. But I'm trying to return to poetry as well, and when I find poetry that simply stymies me—and yet was deemed publishable—I'm left feeling stupid, as we do in a dream when we find ourselves in a game with unknown rules.