# Strange Birds *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 30 Mar 2006* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Nicholas Gevers *30 Mar 2006, 15:41* I've now read the new Wolfe mini-collection, STRANGE BIRDS, forthcoming from Dreamhaven Books in April. It's 40 pages, $10, and of interest especially for the second of its two stories, "Sob in the Silence", a masterful deconstruction of gratuitously macabre horror fiction. The first piece, "On a Vacant Face a Bruise", is distinctly weird far future SF, about a boy joining the circus and redeeming it; it's a fine story, but less focused. Wolfe has another avian story in the May F&SF--"Bea and Her Bird Brother", an intriguing allegory (as I read it) of the schism between humankind's spiritual and carnal natures; and forthcoming in the first (June) issue of Jim Baen's Universe is "Build-a-Bear". Animal themes seem dominant in GW's output at present. --Nick Gevers. ---