Vegetarian notes: Gardein brand vegetarian entrees and Collingswood, NJ's best vegetarian restaurant

Gardein brand vegetarian entrees are pretty tasty, but are the most annoyingly packaged food products I have encountered...the soy and wheat Tofurkey-like stuffed globes and any acompanying sauces and rice beds are all in plastic pouches that can only be sloppily opened, with scissors or knife...you will, to at least some small degree, be wearing your foodstuffs, which makes their utility as office lunches rather more limited than it needs to be.

The all-vegetarian The Green House in Collingswood, NJ, is currently my favorite Chinese vegetarian place in the area, and that's facing some stiff competition in Philly proper. It's also next to a fine Thai restaurant, the Thai Basil, if you or your party Must have some meat along with...they share an outer door. Excellent food, good service (if anything, too hospitable, but not in an intrusive way), and the only downside is the slightly repetitive AORish music piped in (not too loud). (856) 854-0896, and a nicely varied menu. They will refer to bok choi as greens.

The Rick Robinson Meme: Literary Acquisitions

In the past week:

Magazines:
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
The American Scholar
Asimov's Science Fiction
Black Clock
Boulevard
Bust
Downbeat
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
Esquire
JazzTimes
Locus
Mystery Scene
The Nation
The Paris Review
Sight and Sound
World Literature Today
Z Magazine
Zoetrope All-Story

Books:
Bernheimer (ed.): My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales
Conlon (ed.): He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson
Cramer & Hartwell (ed.): Year's Best SF 15
Eggers, et al. (ed.): The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010
Gorman: Stranglehold
Lansdale: Dread Island
Malzberg & Resnick: The Business of Science Fiction
Penzler & Ellroy (ed.): The Best American Noir of the Century
Penzler & Child (ed.): The Best American Mystery Stories 2010
Pitlor & Russo (ed.): The Best American Short Stories 2010
Sturgeon (edited by Sturgeon fils): Case and the Dreamer: Volume XIII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon

Audio:
Black: Stark Raving Black

Friday's (Not) Forgotten Books: Wise & Fraser: GREAT TALES OF TERROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL (1943); Healy & McComas: ADVENTURES IN TIME AND SPACE (1946)

contents, courtesy of British Horror Anthology Hell...I don't believe the UK edition was different in content from the US original. See also this ISFDB page for a partial accounting, at least, of original publication sources.

Great Tales of Terror & the Supernatural edited by Herbert A. Wise & Phyllis Fraser

Tales of Terror
Honore de Balzac - La Grande Breteche
Edgar Allan Poe - The Black Cat
Edgar Allan Poe - The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Wilkie Collins - A Terribly Strange Bed
Ambrose Bierce - The Boarded Window
Thomas Hardy - The Three Strangers
W. W. Jacobs - The Interruption
H. G. Wells - Pollock and the Porroh Man
H. G. Wells - The Sea Raiders
"Saki" (Hector Hugh Munro) - Sredni Vashtar
Alexander Woollcott - Moonlight Sonata
Conrad Aiken - Silent Snow, Secret Snow
Dorothy L. Sayers - Suspicion
Richard Connell - The Most Dangerous Game
Carl Stephenson - Leiningen versus the Ants
Michael Arlen - The Gentleman from America
William Faulkner - A Rose for Emily
Ernest Hemingway - The Killers
John Collier - Back for Christmas
Geoffrey Household - Taboo

Tales of the Supernatural
Edward Bulwer-Lytton - The Haunted and the Haunters
Nathaniel Hawthorne - Rappaccini's Daughter
Charles Collins & Charles Dickens - The Trial for Murder
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Green Tea
Fitz-James O'Brien - What Was It?
Henry James - Sir Edmund Orme
Guy de Maupassant - The Horla
Guy de Maupassant - Was It a Dream?
F. Marion Crawford - The Screaming Skull
"O. Henry" - The Furnished Room
M. R. James - Casting the Runes
M. R. James - Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad
Edith Wharton - Afterward
W. W. Jacobs - The Monkey's Paw
Arthur Machen - The Great God Pan
Robert Hichens - How Love Came to Professor Guildea
Rudyard Kipling - The Return of Imray
Rudyard Kipling - "They"
Edward Lucas White - Lukundoo
E. F. Benson - Caterpillars
E. F. Benson - Mrs. Amworth
Algernon Blackwood - Ancient Sorceries
Algernon Blackwood - Confession
"Saki" (H. H. Munro) - The Open Window
Oliver Onions - The Beckoning Fair One
Walter de la Mare - Out of the Deep
A. E. Coppard - Adam and Eve and Pinch Me
E. M. Forster - The Celestial Omnibus
Richard Middleton - The Ghost Ship
Karen Blixen ("Isak Dinesen") - The Sailor-Boy's Tale
H. P. Lovecraft - The Rats in the Walls
H. P. Lovecraft - The Dunwich Horror

The Contento/Locus index:

Adventures in Time and Space ed. Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas (Random House, Aug ’46, $3.00, 997pp, hc); Second Edition, 1953, omits last five stories, also as Famous Science-Fiction Stories. Derivative Anthology More Adventures in Time and Space.
xi · Introduction · Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas · in
3 · Requiem [D.D. Harriman] · Robert A. Heinlein · ss Astounding Jan ’40
20 · Forgetfulness · Don A. Stuart · nv Astounding Jun ’37
46 · Nerves · Lester del Rey · na  Astounding Sep ’42
115 · The Sands of Time · P. Schuyler Miller · na Astounding Apr ’37
144 · The Proud Robot [Gallegher] · Lewis Padgett · nv Astounding Oct ’43
177 · Black Destroyer [Beagle] · A. E. van Vogt · nv Astounding Jul ’39
207 · Symbiotica [Jay Score] · Eric Frank Russell · nv Astounding Oct ’43
249 · Seeds of the Dusk · Raymond Z. Gallun · nv Astounding Jun ’38
276 · Heavy Planet [with Frederik Pohl] · Lee Gregor · ss Astounding Aug ’39
286 · Time Locker [Gallegher] · Lewis Padgett · nv Astounding Jan ’43
308 · The Link · Cleve Cartmill · ss Astounding Aug ’42
320 · Mechanical Mice [ghost written by Eric Frank Russell] · Maurice G. Hugi · nv Astounding Jan ’41; given as by Maurice A. Hugi.
344 · V-2: Rocket Cargo Ship · Willy Ley · ar Astounding May ’45
365 · Adam and No Eve · Alfred Bester · ss Astounding Sep ’41
378 · Nightfall · Isaac Asimov · nv Astounding Sep ’41
412 · A Matter of Size · Harry Bates · na Astounding Apr ’34
460 · As Never Was · P. Schuyler Miller · ss Astounding Jan ’44
476 · Q.U.R. [as by H. H. Holmes] · Anthony Boucher · ss Astounding Mar ’43
497 · Who Goes There? · Don A. Stuart · na Astounding Aug ’38
551 · The Roads Must Roll · Robert A. Heinlein · nv Astounding Jun ’40
588 · Asylum [William Leigh] · A. E. van Vogt · nv Astounding May ’42
641 · Quietus · Ross Rocklynne · ss Astounding Sep ’40
655 · The Twonky · Lewis Padgett · nv Astounding Sep ’42
676 · Time-Travel Happens! · A. M. Phillips · ar Unknown Dec ’39
687 · Robots Return · Robert Moore Williams · ss Astounding Sep ’38
698 · The Blue Giraffe · L. Sprague de Camp · nv Astounding Aug ’39
721 · Flight Into Darkness · Webb Marlowe · nv Astounding Feb ’43
741 · The Weapon Shop [Isher] · A. E. van Vogt · nv Astounding Dec ’42
779 · Farewell to the Master · Harry Bates · nv Astounding Oct ’40
816 · Within the Pyramid · R. DeWitt Miller · ss Astounding Mar ’37
825 · He Who Shrank · Henry Hasse · na Amazing Aug ’36
882 · By His Bootstraps · Anson MacDonald · na Astounding Oct ’41
933 · The Star Mouse [Mitkey] · Fredric Brown · ss Planet Stories Spr ’42
953 · Correspondence Course · Raymond F. Jones · ss Astounding Apr ’45
972 · Brain · S. Fowler Wright · ss The New Gods Lead, Jarrolds, 1932

So, here are two anthologies Random House offered during the '40s, which helped establish canons in their respective fields, in part because both anthologies were kept in print consistently as part of the Modern Library or other Random House extensions.

As I've been checking through a number of the major anthologies of suspense fiction over the decades, I didn’t till being reminded of it the other day recall how much of the Fraser & Wise volume is devoted to non-supernatural tales of menace, mostly though not entirely in the “Tales of Terror” grouping. It’s remarkable how many of these have become chestnuts…essentially all of them…and I have to wonder how many were already common coin in anthologies by the time this one was first issued in 1943. However, along with August Derleth and Donald Wandrei’s efforts at Arkham House, this book was probably the first great exposure H. P. Lovecraft received (along with some early paperbacks), as far as the larger reading public is concerned, and was almost certainly the first time Lovecraft and Hemingway were anthologized together (though Dashiell Hammett came close with his horror anthology Creeps by Night [1931]). Also notable, at least in the latter-day British TOC offered here, is the “outing” of Karen Blixen rather than credit of her story to her pseudonym, Isak Dinesen. Even by the time I read this anthology, in a library-sale copy of a 1970s Modern Library edition (with the tamest cover it would get, I suspect), most of the stories were familiar from other anthologies, but not all…to carry another W. W. Jacobs story, aside from “The Monkey’s Paw,” is a small gift in and of itself. Happily, the Modern Library still has this one in print, in the US.

The Healy & McComas wasn’t the first sf anthology from a major publisher in the US, what with Donald Wollheim’s and, just barely, Groff Conklin’s efforts preceding it, along with such mixed selections as Philip Strong’s, but Adventures was one of the most prominent and widely influential, again not least because Random House and eventually the Modern Library imprint were behind it, and Ballantine when purchased by the RH folks did paperback editions with overblown blurbs. As the annotated TOC suggests, John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction was almost ridiculously overrepresented, even given how much good material it had published and how important that magazine under that editor had been in the development of magazine sf in the late 1930s and ‘40s…however, one (1) story each from Planet Stories and Amazing and none from any other magazine (the Unknown essay reprint was the kind of borderline crackpottery that Campbell would pollute Astounding with in the 1950s onward, rather than a story, and very out of place here), and only one entry not from the magazines, don’t make this a particularly representative anthology of the time…and the absence of Theodore Sturgeon, Leigh Brackett, Hal Clement, Clifford Simak, and C. L. Moore (except to the extent that she had input on “The Twonky”) are all telling (and most might wonder where’s the Bradbury?), in a book that makes room for the Phillips article. But, nevertheless, as with Lovecraft in the other volume, this was among the first exposure many of these writers and much of this fiction had for the larger reading public, and much of it holds up well. Unfortunately, this volume hasn’t been reprinted in its Modern Library edition since the ‘80s.

For more of today's selections, please see Patti Abbott's blog. Bill Crider's FFB item this week, in honor of Bouchercon in part, is a memorial volume edited by J. Francis McComas's widow Annette Peltz McComas, collecting from and documenting the birth of McComas's most lasting legacy, co-founding The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with Anthony Boucher...a very good book all but orphaned by its publisher at birth.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Katha Pollitt: LEARNING TO DRIVE (2007); Erica Jong: SEDUCING THE DEMON (2006)

So...two memoirs by two of our poets...one better known for her political essays, the other for her sexually liberationist novels. One a collection of essays, the other a unitary memoir that began as a writing manual. Both, despite a bit of furor over the Pollitt and the supposed "bestselling" status of the Jong, are already out of print, at least by the measure of primary Amazon availability...

The hassle over the Pollitt came mostly from such quarters as the dancer and repressed-anger sexual submissive Toni Bentley (whose most famous recent work is a fussily-written account of a no-strings/fetishistically all-anal-sex affair and how that helped her find her spiritual self) who was shocked, shocked that Pollitt would be such a man-hater as to “cyberstalk” (actually, just engine-search and read about) her ex-boyfriend. Bentley was accorded considerable space in the New York Times Book Review to expound on this thesis and the other obvious sins of Pollitt, who seems an oddly unembitteredly heterosexual target for such a backhanded slap at feminism. Pollitt’s book is actually a rather cheerful, for the most part, collection of essays about her life at various times, including accounts of good and bad affairs, her early life and her parents’ marriage, her literary career and particularly her early gig as an editor for a soft-core porn novel publisher in the 1970s, a decent source of pay for a young poet and rather eye-opening in several ways. Also, she learns, rather late in life, how to drive a car…happily, this is not employed in any distended way as a metaphor. Those who have read Pollitt’s essays in The Nation and elsewhere can expect a rather similar mix of down to Earth sensibility and incisive observation. It’s typical of our most overrated paper, and certainly of its ridiculous literary desk, that they so eccentrically hoped to sink it…and perhaps they helped.

Jong’s book is less sharply-written than Pollitt’s, as is perhaps not too surprising…poets, and particularly poets who have found greater success with prose, often are relatively lax in the “looser” form, one which less obviously demands (though it still demands, for artistic success, for the craft) concision or at least a sense of when concision can be temporarily forgotten. Jong’s still has a bit of the writer’s guide about it, while mostly being a series of anecdotes about her affairs and passage through the literary world, writing erotica rather than editing it but otherwise not treading too terribly different a path in many ways than Pollitt…just, perhaps, a somewhat more public life, and certainly one which saw an early infusion of cash and attention. I couldn’t shake the sense that Jong is a bit less happy than Pollitt, who seems to have found a rather comfortable place for herself emotionally by her narratives’ end, but both books provide a useful and entertaining opportunity to know a bit of the lives of two of our more engaging feminist literary lions.

(Pollitt’s most recent Nation column on the stands deals with the debate over Jonathan Franzen and Gary Shteyngart’s publicists arranging for their work to suck up all the Literary Hype Opportunities of late; she’s kind enough to refer to Franzen as a good writer, though the current Atlantic features B. R. Myers's review of Franzen’s Freedom that rather forcefully states something akin to my own perception of the man’s work as second-rate, at best, ersatz Philip Roth with a few hints of Robert Coover tossed in.) Jong's book was rather negatively reviewed in the NYT as well, as she notes in this reflection on her life after its publication...

For more of today’s selection of “Forgotten” books, please see Patti Abbott’s blog.

October 1st's "Forgotten" Books:
Paul Bishop: This Girl For Hire by G.G. Fickling
Bill Crider: The Gone Man by Brad Solomon
Scott Cupp: Dread Island by Joe R. Lansdale
Ed Gorman: The Dead Beat by Robert Bloch
Randy Johnson: Enchanted Night by Steven Millhauser
George Kelley: Four Color Fear edited by Gregg Sadowski
Todd Mason: The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
Richard Robinson: 12 Worlds of Alan E. Nourse by Alan E. Nourse

Friday's Rapidly Vanishing Books: THE FINAL SOLUTION by Michael Chabon (THE PARIS REVIEW, 2003)

Michael Chabon, who among other things has guest-edited two of the best issues of the eclectic fiction magazine McSweeney's (and those issues subsequently republished as anthologies, covers below), also has written my favorite bit of Sherlockiana..."The Final Solution," a novella first published in The Paris Review in 2003 and published in a surprisingly unpopular chapbook (cover at left) the next year, involves the very elderly but still game Holmes (who is never named in the story) trying to plumb the mystery surrounding a child refugee from the Nazi pogroms, and his pet parrot. Thus Chabon's chief obsessions, from the systematic attack on Europe's Jews to pop-culture heroes (particularly in a fantasticated crime-fiction context), are mostly if not all exercised, and in fine and charming prose, with ready wit and only a late slip into the entirely fantasticated that I think slightly weakens the story, but the critic and novelist John Clute has argued with me that that little bit actually sums and reinforces the very point of the story...you probably won't be sorry to see which of us you agree with more, if you're game and can find a copy afoot (unlike most of my FFBs, this one is still readily in print, I believe...just not nearly as readily available as nearly every other Chabon book).

Patti Abbott's taking the week off, so look to her eventual listing, and perhaps I'll put one together when for a breath I tarry...these are the Chabon McSweeney's issues in their book form:

October 1st's "Forgotten" Books:

Paul Bishop: This Girl For Hire by G.G. Fickling

Bill Crider: The Gone Man by Brad Solomon

Scott Cupp: Dread Island by Joe R. Lansdale

Ed Gorman: The Dead Beat by Robert Bloch

Randy Johnson: Enchanted Night by Steven Millhauser

George Kelley: Four Color Fear edited by Gregg Sadowski

Richard Robinson: 12 Worlds of Alan E. Nourse by Alan E. Nourse