Some news, as I surface briefly between end-of-semester projects:

I’ll be working at the Harry Ransom Center as a public services intern for the next two years. I’m thrilled about it — everyone I’ve met through the interviewing process has been wonderful and I’m terribly excited about the work I’ll get to do. Expect many more posts gushing about the wonder of its books and manuscripts.

This means I won’t be teaching for those two years, at least not as my main source of support. I won’t be teaching this summer, either, despite my plans to. Instead, I’ll be in Oregon for much of the summer, spending time with my parents, who are heading back to Ashland themselves this weekend from the Stanford Medical Center. My dad’s stem cell transplant has been going well, but his cancer is back, too, and we’re all in limbo waiting to see what his new immune system will do, and what can be done oncologically. I’m going home to see them and to work on The White Silk Tent, my next novel project, which my father is eager to see.

But now I’m in the middle of a project on Austen’s modal verbs, and another on Aaron Hill’s King Henry the Fifth, and another on English perceptions of Dutch in the late Restoration. And grading. I’ll be done around May 16.

To my very dear friend Elizabeth Scott, on the official release of her first novel, Bloom! It’s a wonderful, thoughtful, beautifully observed YA novel, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Here’s Michele Jaffe’s blurb for the book:

Finely drawn, honest, sweet and charming, Bloom is like getting a beautifully wrapped gift — it’s lovely to start with and just gets better as you tear into it.

See? I’m telling you, it’s good stuff — and her forthcoming books are going to be just as good.

Elizabeth’s also been running book giveaway contests on her blog in preparation for the release, which is an excellent idea, and a very collegial thing to do, I think. Anyway, I’m so happy for her that I could burst, and I can’t wait to get my hands on my own copy. BookPeople has it in stock, so this weekend, it shall be mine. (Unless my work eats me first.)

Congratulations, E!