I haven't made a fiction recommendation in a few weeks because I haven't read anything new. Instead, I've been collapsing into bed every night, attempting to read the thriller I referenced below, then tossing it aside to reread Doris Lessing's "The Summer Before the Dark" and an old Doonesbury collection. I even fell off the radar for some of my regular publicists; It's been over a month since I got an unsolicited galley in the mail.

But I'm happy to report I've got the scent again. Due to the instigation of one of my editors, I immersed myself last night in upcoming-book research. I can honestly now say there are stacks of books due out in the summer and fall that I want to read: crazy books, small-press books, experimental narratives...that sort of thing. I started poking publicists' hives with a crooked stick and, soon, the new galleys should be buzzing through the air (accompanied, of course, by the usual spurious and breathless press kits and follow-up calls--irritating yet somehow strangely comforting). 

Were you worried about me? Did you think I'd given up trying to find books worth reading and had resigned myself to the "Eat, Pray, Love", Barnes and Noble, I-can-read-while-I-knit American literary condition? Bless you for caring. I'm back.