Inspired by some of the more pathological behaviors on display in the comment section of John Scalzi's blog Whatever, author Steven Brust has created a doggerel epic entitled "John Scalzi's Blog." Here's a sample:

I've done my work for the day,
I've twittered random shit.

Steven Brust's Tiassa is the thirteenth volume in the long-running Vlad Taltos series, a fantasy epic that combines hard-boiled crime-writing with economic critique, revolutionary war, fine cookery, and (naturally) swashbuckling sword and sorcery. Vlad Taltos is an Easterner (a human like us) among Drageareans (immortal, magical faerie folk who belong to one of several noble "houses" that influence their character and profession). — Read the rest

Bestselling author Patrick Rothfuss has pledged to help actor Nathan Fillion buy the rights to Firefly from Fox. Fillion, who starred in the series, has publicly said that if he had the money to get Firefly back from Murdoch and Co, he'd make it free and release it on the net:

Here's the deal.

Growing up, some of my absolute favorite books were the Borderlands anthologies — shared-world stories set in a ficton in which the realm of faerie has returned to Earth, in a city called Bordertown where elves and humans mixed freely and magic and technology worked erratically. — Read the rest

Fish is Popular Science writer Gregory Mone's debut young adult novel. It's a short, quick, immensely fun pirate novel about treasure hunting, questioning authority, and coming of age.

Maurice "Fish" Reidy is sent to Dublin at the age of 11 when his family's farm-horse dies; he's to earn the money to buy a new one by working for his mysterious uncle as a courier. — Read the rest

A non-exhaustive list of books that would be considered fanfic except for the fact that they won the Pulitzer Prize (provided as a service to writers who believe that fanfic is "immoral, illegal, plagiarism, cheating, for people who are too stupid/lazy/unimaginative to write stories of their own" and who feel "personally traumatized by the idea that someone else could look at your characters and decide that you did it wrong and they need to fix it/add original characters to your universe/send your characters to the moon/Japan/their hometown.") — Read the rest

More scenes from a book tour: Steven Brust's kick-ass JHEREG license-plate, on proud display at BookPeople tonight in Austin (so awesome to see so many happy mutants there tonight!).

There's still plenty of schools, libraries, shelters and other worthy institutions hoping you'll donate a copy of For the Win to them! — Read the rest

On my family's Christmas holiday trip to Walt Disney World, I happened upon a copy of the 2002 book Disney's Looking at Paintings: An Introduction to Fine Art for Young People, written by Erika Langmuir and Ruth Thomson to coincide with an exhibition at London's National Gallery. — Read the rest

I've been reading Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books since I was a boy, and nothing pleases me more than discovering a new one on the shelf, as I did this week, picking up the paperback of Jhegaala, the eleventh volume in the series. — Read the rest

Elise Matthesen, conference chair for the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, writes,

From 1986 to 1995, Steven Brust and his friends put on a deep,
intelligent, and intimate convention on the literature of the
fantastic. Its return in 2008 was so much fun that we couldn't resist
bringing it back again in 2009

Fourth Street is a small convention for people who are serious about
good fantasy and good books- serious about reading them, serious about
writing them, serious about appreciating them in all their various
forms.

In my latest Guardian column, "When love is harder to show than hate," I look at the fact that copyright protects critics who want to talk trash about creative works, but gives no real protection to people who want to say nice things about them. — Read the rest