The mouse that roared

My apologies for my silence over the past couple of months: despite good intentions about getting back to regular posting after two months trapped in the time vortex of school holidays I’ve ended up swamped with work, which has rather slowed me down.

I suspect that situation isn’t going to change any time soon, not least because I’m now working on a new book and at least two sets of short stories on top of my usual reviewing commitments (which is exciting but more than a little consuming) but with luck I’ll still be able to keep things at least ticking over here.

I’ll link to some of those stories as they appear (in case you missed it I had one in Get Reading’s 10 Short Stories You Must Read in 2011, I’ve got one in the next Overland, another in a forthcoming anthology designed to raise funds for The Sydney Story Factory, and two which are being published as part of digital initiatives: a story in the second volume of The Review of Australian Fiction and a novelette which will appear next month as part of something I’m not really allowed to talk about yet).

In the meantime you might want to check out a few of my recent reviews (though many are now hidden behind The Australian’s paywall), in particular my pieces on Colson Whitehead’s terrific zombie novel, Zone One, Dana Spiotta’s electric Stone Arabia and Margaret Atwood’s deeply flawed In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination.

And finally, if you haven’t seen this outstanding video of the savage grasshopper mouse, I recommend you watch it now. Apparently they’re carnivorous mice that let out their piercing shrieks before moving in for the kill, and you can read all about them over on Wired’s Laelaps blog, but basically they’re just made of awesome.