the night has a thousand saxaphones

Antipodes, short stories by David Malouf (the Australian guy).

These shorts remind me of nothing so much as the Dubliners.  They are small, self-contained, sparse and brightly polished, centering on moments of epiphany (So pretty much exactly the Dubliners).  I sometimes think that they are a little too overwrought for the depth of the epiphany they are actually dealing with, and some of them are a little too concerned with being deep and obscure, I think.  But thought provoking and at times beautiful. 

Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman may be following in the Neil Stephenson path of “got too famous and now his editors are afraid of him.”  Fragile Things has some incredible, vibrant, creepy, ingenious, imaginative stories that only Neil Gaiman could have written.  The Lovecraftian ones are especially welcome, as Gaimon writes Lovecraft-style oblique horror a lot better than Lovecraft ever did.  The Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft crossover (yes, I’m serious) is exactly the sort of crazy crossover done perfectly that one expects from really good fanfic.  I love those moments when published sci-fi authors reveal themselves to be just big fanboys like us, you know?  Anyway, that’s some of them.  But there are also a LOT of stories in this collection that read like a draft (or worse yet, just a sketch of an idea) that he found in a shoebox in his attic, old stories he couldn’t publish then, but he can NOW, because now he’s famous and no editor will tell him to dump them.  I don’t know, maybe that’s partly my bias against poetry talking, but even aside from the poetry there were stories in here that just shouldn’t have seen the light of day.  I know Gaiman is capable of much tighter and more polished work than a lot of them, and I just wished this collection had a little more discipline.