The New York Stories is Robert Vaughan "Friday Book Porn" and in quite fine company at that.

Short Story Month 2011. Or, how it is that Caleb J. Ross and Jim Ruland came to punch us in the gut.

It is so Short Story Month and that is a wonderful thing indeed. It also comes with a modicum of pain and dread, and this too is a wonderful thing. All of which is to say it got us thinking about short stories that have punched us in the gut, which us got us thinking about the stories "An Optimist is the Human Personification of Spring" and "Brains for Bengo" by Caleb J. Ross and Jim Ruland respectively, which also led us to penning a joint for the Matt Bell led Short Story Month lovefest on his website, which we hope you will take a look at, though if we had to choose what you might look at with your limited time, we encourage you to take a look at these stories in particular, because they are sure to change your life, if only briefly at that.

"I Am Richard Simmons" gets some Short Story Month 2011 love.

Big thanks to TBWCYL, Inc. favorite, This Zine Will Change Your Life contributor and This Podcast Will Change Your Life podcastee BL Pawelek for showing "I Am Richard Simmons" some Short Story Month 2011 review love. Big thanks as well to the Matt Bell for the orchestration and to J.A. Tyler and the ml press for first giving this piece life. And now some excerpt.

"Richard Simmons was me? It was a radical thought which took me a few months to accept. For the same reasons of hope, love, transformation to something better… I thought I was Henry Rollins. Maybe I can be both. Maybe I can be Ben Tanzer too."

These Books Will Change Your Life - Pathologies by William Walsh and Wolf Parts by Matt Bell.

We are more travel. We are more read. And we are more small press love, though please note that today we are all Keyhole Press all the time. First up, Pathologies by William Walsh. The William Walsh does humor, pop culture and sex as well as anyone in this collection, but one thing we are always struck by regardless of what we're reading of his, is Walsh's almost restless curiosity, which always seems to pop off the page, all fertile, authentic and vibrant. We would add, that this is the second collection this week we've read with a piece that was originally run in This Zine Will Change Your Life. In this case the terrific story Revision. Quite cool indeed. But we're not done, because we also have Wolf Parts by Matt Bell. Bell is also working the sex thing with this take on Little Red Riding Hood, and yet similar to his killer novella The Collectors, this is a story about compulsions, and despite the focus on Little Red Riding Hood, it's specifically about the sexual and arguably violent compulsions of men and how these compulsions not only warp men, but force women to react and mold themselves to these compulsions. Once again, good and interesting stuff across the board, and like the work of Tim Hall and Aaron Burch that we riffed on earlier this week, books we think just might change your life if you let them.

Wolf Parts by Matt Bell. You want some?

TBWCYL, Inc. favorite Matt Bell has a new minibook coming out from Keyhole Press called Wolf Parts. It is a "fragmentary re-telling of Little Red Riding Hood in forty short fictions," and we think its sound pretty cool indeed. We also think it just might change your life.

The TBWCYL, Inc. 2009 Top Ten Lists are coming and today you get our Top Ten Books. No for real, you do. Just look below.

As there was much work travel and work furlough in 2009, there was much reading, hence we terribly excited to roll-out TBWCYL, Inc.'s 2009 Top Ten Books List, the first of our 2009 Top Ten lists, all of which we intend to post over the next couple of weeks. As with previous years, most of these books are from indie presses, which makes us happy, and many are written by friends, which makes us biased, though luckily, we love being biased almost as much as we love being self-absorbed. In terms of housekeeping, please note, that unlike our other end of the year lists, we do not limit ourselves to books published in 2009. Further, pretty much all of the following books were written about or blurbed here at This Blog Will Change Your Life, so, while we will keep the verbiage to a minimum today, we will be hyper-linking like there's no tomorrow. And who knows, maybe there won't be.

(1) Radiant Days/Michael A. Fitzgerald
(2) Stories/Scott McClanahan
(3) Big World/Mary Miller
(4) Dear Everybody/Michael Kimball
(5) Put Your Head in My Lap/Claudia Smith
(6) The Collectors/Matt Bell
(7) The Understory/Pamela Erens
(8) The National Virginity Pledge/Barry Graham
(9) When the Cats Razzed the Chickens & Other Stories/Mel Bosworth
(10) Conquering Venus/Collin Kelley

Some additional 2009 literary love (albeit in no particular order): Safelight/Shannon Burke, Full of It/Tim Hall, When I Moved to Nevada/Jamie Iredell, Bad Monkey/Curtis Smith, The Slide/Kyle Beachy, Sunlight at Midnight, Darkness at Noon/Hosho McCreesh and Christopher Cunningham, Some Things That Meant the World to Me/Joshua Mohr, Tranny/Steve Lafler, Fast Forward/Eric Spitznagel, You Must Be This Happy to Enter/Elizabeth Crane, Questionstruck/William Walsh, Talking Heads: 77/John Domini, Too Young to Fall Asleep/Sally Wiegel, Oh Baby/Kim Chinquee, One of These Things is Not Like the Others/Stephanie Johnson, The Complete Collection of People, Places & Things/John Dermot Woods, All the World's a Grave/John Reed.

And finally, for your retro viewing pleasure:

TBWCYL, Inc.'s 2008 Top Ten Books List

TBWCYL, Inc.'s 2007 Top Ten Books List

The Collectors by Matt Bell.

Travel. Time. Read. Repeat. We continue to be on the road and we continue to consume books. Which brings us to The Collectors by Matt Bell. Haunting. Beautiful. And rife with compulsions writ both big and small. Really, really, good stuff. And available from Caketrain as a free E-book. Get it now. There you go.