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One of the best parts about being a bookseller is getting to sift through all the ARCs that we get shipped to the store from various publishers. I've never grown out of the stage in my life in which free=awesome, and so the novelty of ARCs has not worn thin for me yet. Reviewed below are three ARCs I've read in the last couple of months that I got a kick out of:

My threshhold for paranormal romance is very, very low, but I was invited to a dinner with Andrea Cremer, the author of Nightshade, by the awesome Penguin sales rep so I read it despite the subtitle: She can control her pack but not her heart, which gave me serious pause (as did the cover, which has more sparkles than I can reasonably tolerate). And even though I didn't end up making it to the dinner (softball game > free dinner) it was worth the read. Cremer utilizes the now familar trope of one girl/two-different-but-both-attractive guys to nice, tense effect, and despite the fact that I am not interested in the subject matter, and did not even particularly care for the sentence level writing style, I was still sucked into the story, in which romance and twists are plenty. The protagonist, Calla, is an alpha female set to mate with the alpha of a rival pack (Ren) in order to create an alliance, and her strength and comfort with her own power made her an appealing lead. But, of course, there's a new boy at school, who's smart (as his pedantic in and out of class eruptions are meant to illustrate) kind and handsome, and Calla finds herself struggling to give herself over to Ren, the cocky, lady-killer, babe-wolf with whom she's been matched. Lust, suspense and monsters aplenty ensue, Calla makes her choice, and a sequel looms on the horizon. A fun, light read with the page-turning propulsion of romance, I would totally recommend this book to lovers of Twilight, Shiver and other vamp/wolf/angel/fairy/zombie/ghost/whatever romances.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, was one of the few books of 2008 I felt actually deserved the hype it got. The hype for its sequel, Catching Fire, began almost immediately, with the buzz lately reaching a roar as Advance Reading Copies have gone out to the lucky (relative) few.

My librarian pal S. shared an amusing comic from Shelf Check about the frenzy. All I can say is: let's hope it doesn't come to that. Me, I'll patiently wait my turn. It's not like there aren't five million other great books out there for me to read in the meantime.

As a last treat before you start your weekend, you gotta read this brilliant piece by Colson Whitehead about being a writer in Brooklyn. He lives here (in Fort Greene), he loves it, but he hilariously pierces the hype about "Brooklyn writers."

Sometimes it's a relief to admit it's just the same here as everywhere else.

And Whitehead ends with an extended metaphor from The Warriors. What could be better?

Enjoy, you kooky literati borough-dwellers. And happy reading.

I started reading Roberto Bolaño's work last year, beginning with his short story collection Last Evenings on Earth, and it was love at first sight. Actually, no. I think I had to read a couple of stories before I was entranced -- I remember reading the first story and wondering what all the fuss over Bolaño was about, but by the end of the second I was developing a crush, and by the end of the third I was head-over-heels. From there, it was on to Distant Star and By Night in Chile -- the last a bittersweet experience, because some bastard had written in the Dartmouth Library copy, defacing it with underlining and marginal notes, inserting their own dull presence between me and the words of mi novio. (I have since gotten a fresh copy of my own, but still, the pain lingers.) (I've not yet read Amulet, but soon, soon... ) (I've been reading the translations, though I've glanced at the Spanish-language originals. My Spanish is, unfortunately, at best functional -- enough to let me get the gist of most newspaper articles, but not much more than that. I keep practicing, though.)

A copy of the latest book of Bolaño's to appear in the U.S., The Savage Detectives, is, I hear, on its way to me, and I am preparing to put all the other books in my life aside so that I can spend some quality time with it and it alone. After the short assignations that are Bolaño's other books in English, The Savage Detectives will (I hope, I expect, I dream) allow a longer-term relationship.

What is the nature of this passion of mine? Any love is difficult to explain fully, to analyze or dissect, but I have some idea of what it is about Bolaño's writing that makes it so attractive to me. His diction (in Chris Andrews's translations, at least) is disarmingly colloquial, creating a poetic effect that heightens ordinary speech and expression without churning it into lyrical goo. This is, to be honest, my favorite sort of style, but one I am wary of, because most of the time it is used by writers who don't know what else to do. Bolaño's stories drift around, often as monologues -- and since I was once an aspiring playwright, I have a weakness for monologues. I am happiest when hearing characters talk. His characters talk, and they talk about each other talking, and their talk is the substance of their stories.

But this is not all that attracts me -- such writing might be enough to spark a crush, but it is not, on its own, enough to fuel a passion. I am also enraptured by Bolaño's mix of the odd and the ordinary, the easy movement he makes between the logic of modernity and the logic of dreams, the willingness he has to indulge in goofiness and absurdity, and the general refusal in all of his work (that I have read) to turn terror and evil into simple melodrama. And I adore his allusions -- no literary geek like me could fail to fall in love with all the names dropped through the pages like confetti from The Reader's Encyclopedia. No-one with a sweet tooth for metafiction could fail to be charmed by the twists and turns of Bolaño's fictive realities, their palimpsests and funhouse mirrors, their chuckles and winks.

I do not suffer passionate love for the critic James Wood, whose spleen sometimes bursts with ridiculous generalities about What Fiction Should Do And Be, but when he writes in praise of a writer (as Carrie just said, too) he's at his best, and able to isolate many of the elements that make a particular piece of writing work. Thus, I was pleased to see he likes Bolaño, whom he calls a "wonderfully strange Chilean imaginer, at once a grounded realist and a lyricist of the speculative" and so has named my love in exactly the words I would have used, had I been less love-struck and more concise. He quotes a sentence from By Night in Chile and then follows it with a marvelous array of insights -- the sentence is about a pigeon-killing falcon named Ta Gueule:

"Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and stooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the color of sunsets seen from an airplane, or the color of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet's femoral artery, or the planet's aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over Avignon, the blood-stained flight of the starlings, Ta Guele splashing color like an Abstract Expressionist painter."

Much of the most successfully daring postwar fiction has been by writers committed to the long dramatic sentence (Bohumil Hrabal, Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald, José Saramago). Bolaño is in their company: the quotation here is broken off of a phrase that takes about a page in the book. The musical control is impeccable, and one is struck by Bolaño's ability to nudge on his long, light, ethereal sentence -- impossibly, like someone punting a leaf -- image by image: the falcon, the red hue, the sunset, the dawn, the dawn seen from a plane, the femoral artery, the blood vessel, the abstract painter. It could so easily be too much, and somehow isn't, the flight of fancy anchored by precision and a just-suppressed comedy. (In Spain, amusingly, the falcons are too old or docile for killing, and the priests have none of the dangerous elegance of their French or Italian counterparts.) Likewise, this fantasia about falcons in every European city might have been thuddingly allegorical or irritatingly whimsical, and isn't. It is comically plausible, and concretely evoked; the surrealism lies in the systematic elaboration of the image. The Catholic Church is likened to a bird of prey, murderous and blood-red in its second capital, Avignon, and we are free to link this, without coercion, to the Chilean situation and the ethical somnolence of Father Urrutia.

• Bolaño's story "Gómez Palacio"
• Bolaño's story "Dance Card"
• Bolaño's advice on writing short stories (PDF)
  
• A profile of Bolaño from the San Francisco Bay Guardian
• A memoir of Bolaño and friends from The Nation
• "Poor Poets: Roque Dalton and Roberto Bolaño"
  
• Overview of Bolaño's work by Wendy Lesser at Threepenny Review
• "Borges, Bolaño and the Return of the Epic" by Aura Estrada
• Review of The Savage Detectives in BookForum
  
• Biography and review of The Savage Detectives at The New Yorker
• Official Bolaño Spanish-language site
  
• Wikipedia entry