Well it would appear that December is a good month for Rune Works.  R.J. Huneke has eight new publications in print that are available now. 

The Stony Brook PRESS featured a Fall 2010 Literary Supplement highlighted by four R.J.H. poems, and the Stony Brook University Literary Magazine "Spoke the Thunder" has successfully launched with three R.J.H. photos and one short story, tilted "The Bottle". 

All of these pieces are in print and available in the Stony Brook University Union, among other places around Long Island, NY.  Read more from them here.

Catherynne M. Valente's novel "Palimpsest" creates an altered state of being in the reader wherein pleasure and pain dance across a city that dissolves the very idea of utopia and gives birth to a monstrously real and wonderful well of experiences.  The very notion that a work can tear itself up into subtle and stark minutiae and, from that, form such intricately woven and rapturous stories, like the palimpsest process, is truly remarkable.

Valente's innovation: the city, tales, lives, waters, ink and war of Palimpsest; to craft such an original vision through such formidably real, addictive, desiring and afflicted characters is utter genius.  To gain entrance to the mystical city of Palimpsest, a place of dreams where colors, tastes and worlds merge brilliantly, is to pay a price.  The initial cost of immigrating there is to have sex with someone who has been there.  Ink tattoos a section of map that will forever mark the immigrant who desires, above all else, to get back to the contrasting hideously beautiful city that is Palimpsest. 

Valente addresses many issues that are rank in the world, through this book, and the author asks an important question of all who read this:  what price would you pay to achieve your deepest and darkest desire?

Reading "The City and the City," by Mieville, is like walking into a dream.  Stark realism and a vivid murder investigation starts the tale off as James Patterson might.  The story builds with the investigation, the police-life in the Eastern European country of Beszel and subtle details about a bordering country that is off limits to everyone in Beszel. 

The horrific murder mystery swirls amidst stranger circumstances that build on top of one another bewildering the tenacious Inspector Borlu.  The reader is taken from a point of detailed city cop life to something that is hazy and does not quite make sense in Beszel, though it is not clear just what that is.  It is exactly like being dropped into a dream.  The underworld of the city is exposed in all of its scarred detail, but there is more going on just beyond...there is something weird about the bordering land...