"Jay Lake - American Sorrows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

least not recognize like you would Portland, Texas, or New Albion, but it's a place you'll recognize
emotionally. This is a child's world told from a young person's sensibility. It's a world of brothers playing
together, investigating river currents and the mystery of adults.

But where I think Jay excels best as a storyteller is that he has a love of things. Sandra McPhearson, a
poet I admire, once said that a poem can be judged by its “thing count.” If you consider a poem as an
envelope, how many things does it have in it? Can you open the envelope and shake a pile of things out?
If you can't, then the poem might be lacking. Stories can be considered that way too. Jay's stories are
filled with things to see, touch, taste, smell and hear. There are elusive green parrots and Panthera tigris
sumatrae and dirigibles and ragged dragons, and a host of other solid, concrete persons, places and,
well, things.

Jay is a thoughtful and articulate person. I've heard him expound on writing theory with the best of them.
He knows his way around the academic version of the writers’ world, where sometimes it seems that
writers don't consider themselves to be successful unless they are writing a work that only the smartest
five-hundred people in the world can appreciate. Jay's stories aren't like that. They're informed by his
profound thinking about language and narrative, but they are always stories first.

If this book is your introduction to the work of Jay Lake, and it leaves you wanting more, rest assured
that there is a lot of it out there. Jay has been writing up a storm. Reading a Jay Lake story is like settling
in around the campfire. The wood crackles cheerfully; the smoke curls pleasantly into the forest around
you; the stars glitter with that special hard edge that mountain air provides, and just when you are
comfortable, Jay joins you at the edge of light. “I have a story to tell,” he says.

And he does.

James Van Pelt

July, 2004
Author's Foreword
Writing is a sufficiently challenging journey in its own right to daunt all but the most foolish. And then there
is publishing. Courage does not even begin to describe the requirements for that peculiar endeavor.
Willful blindness, perhaps, and a deep and abiding love for the word made story.

Here is a new publishing experiment for me, then: an e-book with my name upon, with thanks to the
support of Bridget McKenna and Marti McKenna of Scorpius Digital. I've been all about the electronic
press in my career to date, yet curiously never managed to land in this outlet before.

That this book exists at all is through the good offices and strong encouragement of Deborah Layne,
publisher and editor of Wheatland Press. Deborah has played a large role in my career since before I
even had one. She has been friend, confidante, cheerleader, marketing guru par excellence, and above all
the one who has kept me honest.

American Sorrows was Deborah's idea. I'd been grumbling about the difficulties of marketing a novella I
quite liked, and she pointed out that there had been increasing interest of late in longer works by various
authors in the field. So we noodled tables of contents for a collection of novelettes and novellas to be
built around my Hugo-nominated novelette “Into the Gardens of Sweet Night."

A little while later, through the intestinal magic of publishing, the excellent Jim van Pelt produced a kind
introduction, Aynjel Kaye supplied a stunning cover photo, and suddenly we had a book. I say “we"—I