Horizontal Connections returns after an extra week, mainly due to fund drive busyness. The two-week schedule should resume now. (Apart from anything else, I'm travelling next week, and won't be able to put a post together.) In the meantime, as ever, let me know if you come across suitable links.

• Ursula K. Le Guin on A. S. Byatt's Ragnarok ("Though I miss the austerity that leaves visualisation to the imagination of the reader, this insistent brilliance might be just the thing to catch readers used to being shown everything in colour") and Christopher Priest's The Islanders ("It's a bit too much like the small, dusty history of Sark that you found was the only thing to read by the 25-watt lamp in your hotel room").
• Fantasy Matters interviews Helen Oyeyemi about the fantastic Mr Fox (sorry), reviewed here by Andy Sawyer last week
• Aishwarya Subramanian reviews Jane Rogers' The Testament of Jessie Lamb and has me nodding in agreement: "I’d like to think it’s a rare reader who will agree with Jessie’s choice or the reasoning behind it. Underneath it all are the twinned associations of martyrs and suicide bombers. Yet we see every step of the road to this decision. And as awful as it is we are made, after a fashion, to respect it."
• Reviews of Reamde: Lev Grossman enthuses in Time; Andrew Leonard is wistful at Salon; Tim Bissell is uncertain in The New York Times; and Janet Potter finds it a book with two faces at The Millions
• Anne at Pornokitsch on By Light Alone by Adam Roberts
• The Notes From Coode Street podcast has an interesting discussion running over the last three episodes about the mechanisms by which books gain traction
• Scott Esposito on The Curfew by Jesse Ballat LARB: "The Curfew’s shortcomings perhaps demonstrate why the minimalist dystopian novel has yet to find a successful practitioner"
• Andrew Wheeler really really did not like Mira Grant's Feed
• Abigail Nussbaum's thoughts on the new US TV season, part one and part two
• Phoebe North reviews an interesting-sounding YA novel, Tankborn, from the diversity-led Tu Books, and interviews the author, Karen Sandler
• Speculative poetry roundup: the fifth issue of Stone Telling has been published, and reviewed at Versification; elsewhere, Rose Lemberg has posted the contents of the forthcoming Aqueduct anthology The Moment of Change
• Reviews of The Night Circus: Adrienne Martini references Neil Gaiman in Locus; Claire Messud is won over in The Guardian; Nicholas Tucker is unconvinced in The Independent; Mary Crockett detects darkness in The Scotsman
• Sholto Byrnes' review of Ahmed Khaled Towfik's Utopia makes me nervous (I distrust the use of the word "masterpiece" in reviews), but is the only review of the book I've seen, and I'm grateful for having it brought to my attention.
• Eric Rosenfield on why he hates Ray Bradbury
• And to finish, a video of Donna Haraway accepting the SFRA Pilgrim Award