Astral Weeks

"There are many types of genres," declares the busy spine of Dash Shaw's monumental 2008 graphic novel, "Bottomless Belly Button" (Fantagraphics: 720 pp., $29.99) "This is: family comedy/drama/horror/mystery/romance." It's as much taxonomical cheat sheet as it is a boast: in being so reductive, Shaw also broadcasts his ambition. Formally inventive and emotionally acute, "Bottomless Belly Button" indeed proves to be all those things: as fascinating and affecting a depiction of family ties as Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" or Wes Anderson's "The Royal Tenenbaums."

If you're still looking for a reading strategy for the new year, might I suggest reading a science fiction story a week? The best way to do this is to get "The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction" ( Wesleyan University Press: 767 pp., $39.95 paper), which conveniently offers 52 stories for your 2011 self-improvement regimen. It's more than just an ideal survey of the genre, reaching from the 19th century (Hawthorne, Verne, Wells) through the pulps, new wave, cyberpunk and the too-soon-to-classify morsels of the decade that just ended.

Van Morrison's nothing if not a patient man -- at least when it comes to his landmark 1968 album "Astral Weeks." The collection established him as one of rock's most revered singers and songwriters after his initial bout with fame and commercial success a few years earlier with his band Them. But it wasn't a big hit -- it never cracked Billboard's Top 200 Albums chart -- and took 33 years to reach gold record status, denoting sales of 500,000 copies. Come November, to mark the 40th anniversary of the album's release, he's doing two shows at the Hollywood Bowl performing the album in its entirety, something he never did originally.

The succinct title of Jon Armstrong's second novel, "Yarn" (Night Shade Books, 309 pp., $14.99), does double duty: It's a yarn about yarn, a tale about textiles in a furiously imagined far future in which the delirious thrills of white-hot couture get their naked-lunch close-up. It's a book for devotees of Lady Gaga and William S. Burroughs alike ? if those groups aren't already secretly one and the same thing. Armstrong embroiders his chronologically scrambled, globe-trotting story with yards of power-pop prose.

Not a short story, not quite a novella ? wasn't that a Britney Spears song? ? the oxymoronic long short story is an underemployed literary form. (For argument's sake, let's say the long short story ranges from 30 to 60 pages.) F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (1922) is a perfect example of the length's virtues: the story, covering the whole of a character's life, is ample enough to be divided into chapters, yet the execution retains an antic swiftness that lofts the bizarre premise.

The late Douglas Adams' unstoppably popular 1979 novel, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (HG2G), is about, among other things, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," "one of the most remarkable books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor," an idiosyncratic interstellar how-to for those interested in hitching rides on spaceships and generally surviving on 30 Altairian dollars a day. What does it mean when a book about...

The succinct title of Jon Armstrong's second novel, "Yarn" (Night Shade Books, 309 pp., $14.99), does double duty: It's a yarn about yarn, a tale about textiles in a furiously imagined far future in which the delirious thrills of white-hot couture get their naked-lunch close-up. It's a book for devotees of Lady Gaga and William S. Burroughs alike ? if those groups aren't already secretly one and the same thing. Armstrong embroiders his chronologically scrambled, globe-trotting story with yards of power-pop prose.

"I am submitting the enclosed short story 'LIFE-LINE' for either 'Astounding' or 'Unknown,'" Robert A. Heinlein wrote to editor John Campbell in 1939, "because I am not sure which policy it fits the better. " The former magazine published science fiction, the latter fantasy. Heinlein's short story ? the first he had attempted professionally, at age 31 ? concerns a machine that can predict when a person will die. That he sold this neophyte production, on first submission, to a top pulp editor (kicking off an intense friendship and correspondence)

I like it when the full import of a title is felt only at the very end of a story, or in the space just beyond -- think Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49." Laura Kasischke's seventh novel, "In a Perfect World" (Harper Perennial: 310 pp., $13.99 paper), is such a brisk and engaging read that I forgot about its tepid handle till I hit page 207, about two-thirds of the way in. By this point, the deadly and mysterious Phoenix flu has caused a breakdown in American society, if the small Midwestern town of St. Sophia is any indication.

My heart sinks when I open a new SF or fantasy novel for potential review, only to see the word " Prologue." Though not necessarily long, these scene-setters can be inscrutable, particularly when you realize you're holding Volume 3 in the second of four linked star-faring trilogies. "Ten thousand years have passed since the S'rwrwa annexed the outer colonies of the Confederation," one of these might begin, "enslaving its peoples by means of superior firepower and the Naxx, an antiquated form of mass hypnosis perfected by the rogue wizards known as the Qmzic.

"I am submitting the enclosed short story 'LIFE-LINE' for either 'Astounding' or 'Unknown,'" Robert A. Heinlein wrote to editor John Campbell in 1939, "because I am not sure which policy it fits the better. " The former magazine published science fiction, the latter fantasy. Heinlein's short story ? the first he had attempted professionally, at age 31 ? concerns a machine that can predict when a person will die. That he sold this neophyte production, on first submission, to a top pulp editor (kicking off an intense friendship and correspondence)

Not a short story, not quite a novella ? wasn't that a Britney Spears song? ? the oxymoronic long short story is an underemployed literary form. (For argument's sake, let's say the long short story ranges from 30 to 60 pages.) F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (1922) is a perfect example of the length's virtues: the story, covering the whole of a character's life, is ample enough to be divided into chapters, yet the execution retains an antic swiftness that lofts the bizarre premise.

It's Wednesday morning, oops, afternoon, and the deadline for this month's column is sort of breathing down my neck, but I'm actually not that worried about writing this review of Charles Yu's time-travel novel, "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" (Pantheon: 240 pp., $24), because reading the book has made me understand that my review already exists in the future. It's really not a problem! I just need to get the future Ed Park (the impossibly relaxed one, the one who's completed the punishing labor of writing this column and is enjoying his traditional celebratory beverage)

"There are many types of genres," declares the busy spine of Dash Shaw's monumental 2008 graphic novel, "Bottomless Belly Button" (Fantagraphics: 720 pp., $29.99) "This is: family comedy/drama/horror/mystery/romance." It's as much taxonomical cheat sheet as it is a boast: in being so reductive, Shaw also broadcasts his ambition. Formally inventive and emotionally acute, "Bottomless Belly Button" indeed proves to be all those things: as fascinating and affecting a depiction of family ties as Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" or Wes Anderson's "The Royal Tenenbaums."

Matt Kindt's new graphic novel, the grimly topsy-turvy "Revolver" (Vertigo: 192 pp., $24.99), starts with the sort of 9/11 nightmare that's become a permanent feature of our headspace. In a nameless Midwestern city, a hungover Sam reports to his dismal newspaper job (he edits party photos) as buildings explode all around him. His own office spews smoke; everyone evacuates save his boss, Jan, who sits stunned at her desk. There is no love lost between them ("I'd fire you, but no one else wants your job"[19]

In Don DeLillo's latest novel, the weirdly exciting "Point Omega," a character is "trying to read science fiction but nothing she'd read so far could begin to match ordinary life on this planet ... for sheer unimaginableness." With another writer, you might coax an unsurprising aesthetic from this point of view: Ignore the attractions of extraterrestrials and dystopia — the way we live now is more than ample fodder for the fiction writer's art. The catch, of course, is that DeLillo has written science fiction and written it memorably.

While assembling my notes for a review of the Library of America anthology "American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny" (Library of America, two volumes, edited by Peter Straub: "From Poe to the Pulps," 746 pp., $35; "From the 1940s to Now," 714 pp., $35), I noticed a peculiar thing. The quotes that I had quarried seemed to assemble themselves into a sort of ur-story, a template of the unheimlich. As I stitched together sentences from the works of writers as varied as F. Scott Fitzgerald and H.P. Lovecraft, John Cheever and Kelly Link, something about the common gambits and rhythms, across nearly two centuries, sent a chill through me. The following text has been constructed entirely from sentences found in "American Fantastic Tales."

For the past several months, my home page has been James Maliszewski's blog Grognardia. Though it's nominally about "the history and traditions of the hobby of role-playing" -- Dungeons & Dragons and its ilk -- it's also an invigorating meditation on aesthetics. Maliszewski is an adherent of the "old school" movement, which favors flexible, elegant gaming systems (the original D&D, circa 1974, a.k.a. OD&D, published in "little brown books") to those that pile on so many supplementary rules and tables that they begin to feel restrictive rather than prescriptive.

I like it when the full import of a title is felt only at the very end of a story, or in the space just beyond -- think Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49." Laura Kasischke's seventh novel, "In a Perfect World" (Harper Perennial: 310 pp., $13.99 paper), is such a brisk and engaging read that I forgot about its tepid handle till I hit page 207, about two-thirds of the way in. By this point, the deadly and mysterious Phoenix flu has caused a breakdown in American society, if the small Midwestern town of St. Sophia is any indication.

"Though the tradition of realistic fiction is a rich and a verdant one, it is a mistake to believe that it exhibits the oldest or grandest trees in the forest of literature," writes novelist Kevin Brockmeier in his introduction to the new anthology "Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy, Volume 3" (Underland: 318 pp., $14.95). Brockmeier cites an august lineage of writers and stories drawing on "the magical and otherworldly," including Homer, Ovid, "The Thousand and One Nights," Poe, Ballard and García Márquez.