It seems to be a site worth exploring. The premise of Davidson's story is that on a night when she is exhausted, but unable to sleep, she goes online to browse on amazon.com. So far, no news....who has not done the same? The amazing thing is that she is able to order books which have not yet appeared--
For a day or two I felt pretty strange. But I soon decided to keep it to myself. If I was losing my mind, this was after all an exceptionally pleasant way to do so. And what I found over the next few months was that if I sat down at the computer in the right state of bleary-eyed mental receptivity, opening my mind up to what I most wanted to read in the world and sticking a book in the cart without looking too closely, I was sure to get something good.
In this way I obtained Jonathan Lethem's massive and totally heartbreaking novel about Stanley Kubrick and Neil Gaiman's hilarious and yet also outrageously moving tale about the Wild Boy of Aveyron (the cover had blurbs from J. M. Coetzee and Margaret Atwood and a sticker proclaiming it the winner of the Booker Prize for 2009) and Robin McKinley's sequel to the vampire novel Sunshine. (It wasn't a sequel, actually, more like a prequel about the heroine Rae's father set twenty-some years before Sunshine begins, bearing a roughly comparable relation to that book as The Hero and the Crown does to The Blue Sword , but it was absolutely delightful and I wasn't going to complain about it, was I?)
After a little while I realized it could work for dead authors as well as living ones. I got the last novel in Rebecca West's tetralogy, the series that begins with The Fountain Overflows (my favorite novel of all time) and continues through two—now three, I guess you'd have to say—posthumously published volumes. I got Byron's Memoirs , and they were even funnier and more amazing than his letters. I got a complete set of the works of Jane Austen in twenty-three volumes.
Clarkesworld.com definitely a site worth going back to often.
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