What’re You Up To? (And Thirdbearblurbage)

May 10, 2010

(Cover by Jacob McMurray)

I’m out the full week on deadlines, so please share what you’ve been up to since I can’t. Also, my story collection The Third Bear is scheduled to come out in August from Tachyon, and some very nice people have read it in advance and offered some words. I feel very blessed.

Jeff

â€œCunningly crafted stories full of wonder and intelligence…VanderMeer proves again why he is so essential and why everybody should be reading him.â€
â€”Junot DÃ­az, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

â€œJeff Vandermeer is not to be trusted. He hypnotizes with shiny objects, bizarrely beautiful shapes and phrases, then (more often than not) gently drifts you into very dark places. You won’t know where you’re going till you get there and then, of course, it’s too late.â€
â€”Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy

â€œVandermeerâ€™s stories hit oneâ€™s hindbrain slantwiseâ€”they offer no easy answers and no comfort. Rather they are hard, brilliant gems meant to cut and shineâ€”these are some of the most beautiful, upsetting, and accomplished tales I have ever read.â€
â€”Catherynne M. Valente, author of The Orphanâ€™s Tales

â€œThe Third Bear contains some of my favorite stories of recent years. Thereâ€™s the meticulous workplace surrealism of â€˜The Situation,â€™ the remorseless multi-world cataclysms of â€˜The Goat Variations,â€™ the beautiful eldritch heartsickness of â€˜The Surgeonâ€™s Tale.â€™ [co-written with Cat Rambo]. Jeff VanderMeer is one of the very best.â€
â€”Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead

â€œJeff VanderMeer knows what story can do to human consciousness, as is delightfully evident in his latest collection, The Third Bear. These stories are smart, gorgeous, allusive, and tricky. VanderMeer is a fantasist extraordinaire.â€
â€”Jack Oâ€™Connell, author of The Resurrectionist

â€œAnnexing the weird half-lit spaces between genres, these stories lean sometimes into fantasy and sf, sometimes into metafiction, but are always deft and pleasurable reads. VanderMeer is one of the few writers out there able to coax something startling and necessary from anything…a very strong collection.â€
â€”Brian Evenson, author of Last Days

â€œJeff VanderMeerâ€™s work is subversive and disquieting, possessed of an almost kinetic force in its impact upon the mind. Body horror gone viral, fairytales wrapped in their own entrails, and metafictional murder; these and other images herein are sure to leave their mark and fester in the subconscious. Already a well-regarded fantasist, The Third Bear reveals VanderMeer at his most fearsome.â€
â€”Laird Barron, author of The Imago Sequence and Other Stories

I’m between novel drafts, have all outstanding short stories squared away as of this morning, and tomorrow morning it’s into the void of not-even-sort-of-a-story-waiting-to-be-written. I’m sure something interesting will happen. Everything seems to want to be a novel these days, but I’m biding my time until the current tome is further on down the track.

Also, we picked up a few fine specimens of corydoras punctatus for the aquarium. They have lungs, gills, and moustaches, and they seem awfully jolly thus far.

Can’t wait for The Third Bear. My god, if I’d never heard of you and read those blurbs my head would explode. As it is they still managed to double my anticipation for a book (no small feat) so I decided to pre-order it off Amazon today.

As far as what I’ve been up to, I’ll be graduating from college a week from Sunday. I’ve been reading Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Oh man, it’s good.

About Jeff VanderMeer

Photo by Kyle Cassidy

Jeff VanderMeer has been named the 2016-2017 Trias Writer-in-Residence for Hobart-William Smith College. His most recent fiction is the NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance) from FSG, which won the Shirley Jackson Award. The trilogy also prompted the New Yorker to call the author “the weird Thoreau” and has been acquired by publishers in 28 other countries, with Paramount Pictures acquiring the movie rights. VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.com, Vulture, Esquire.com, and the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference, lectured at MIT, Brown, and the Library of Congress, and serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen writing camp . His forthcoming novel from Farrar, Straus and Giroux is titled Borne. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, the noted editor Ann VanderMeer. You can contact him at pressinfo at vandermeercreative.com. (Author photo by Kyle Cassidy.) More...