Writer, editor, translator, project manager, reformed bookseller. Currently based in Berlin, following stints in Moscow, Tbilisi, Munich, Washington, Warsaw, Budapest and Atlanta. Also blogs at A Fistful of Euros, though less frequently than here these days.
Most commented posts
- The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison — 9 comments
- White Eagle, Red Star by Norman Davies — 7 comments
- Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch — 7 comments
- Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire — 6 comments
- The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin — 6 comments
Author's posts
In some distant and ultimately irrelevant future, humanity has mastered time travel and discovered not a single causal chain through the unity of time and space, but a vast multitude of timelines. They cluster in groups of similar development. In some, humanity spreads to the stars; in others, humanity remains more tightly tied to its …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/23/this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-by-amal-el-mohtar-and-max-gladstone/
A City on Mars asks in its subtitle “Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?” When I read part of the book to decide how to vote on its place in the 2024 Hugo Awards category of Best Related Work I thought that the answers were “probably …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/16/a-city-on-mars-by-kelly-and-zach-weinersmith/
Agreeing with Anne Applebaum tends to worry me. Her book Gulag is well regarded (Pulitzer Prize, for example), but I found that the closer it got to the present day and events that I knew a fair amount about, the more tendentious and rightward-slanted I thought her account. That made me uncertain about the earlier …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/02/autocracy-inc-by-anne-applebaum/
Stop in and have some tea with Mma Ramotswe, or maybe head out to the orphan farm for a piece of Mma Potokwani’s fruitcake, or perhaps head into downtown Gaborone for lunch at the President Hotel with a side order of people-watching. In many ways, the books of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/01/from-a-far-and-lovely-country-by-alexander-mccall-smith/
Since Rivers of London was first published in 2011, the series has grown to nine novels, five novellas, and 12 graphic novels. Along the way, Aaronovitch wrote a fair number of shorter stories that were set in the world of the series; sometimes he was asked to write them, as when Waterstone’s published special editions …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/02/22/tales-from-the-folly-by-ben-aaronovitch/
This slim novel — titled Une jeunesse in the French original and Young Once in English — opens as a thirty-fifth birthday celebration for Odile is winding down. She and her husband Louis have run a children’s home in a village at the foot of the Alps for a dozen years, but now that their own …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/02/09/eine-jugend-by-patrick-modiano/
Ruthanna Emrys joins contemporary authors such as Kij Johnson, Victor LaValle and Matt Ruff in taking up the ideas and storylines of H.P. Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror, looking at them with twenty-first-century eyes and writing tales that wind up in very different places. Who would worship the inhuman and often malevolent gods from Lovecraft’s …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/02/08/winter-tide-by-ruthanna-emrys/
Well this is rather embarrassing. The best book I read in 2024 — They Were Counted by Miklós Bánffy — is one that I have singularly failed to write about. I keep thinking that I will sit down and write about it stages until I have given the work its due, and hasn’t happened in the several …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/01/04/taking-stock-of-2024/
I have more than a sneaking suspicion that Ben Aaronovitch wrote Amongst Our Weapons to deliver one particular joke. People who recognize the source of the book’s title will expect that some variation on the joke is coming, but they will have to wait until page 287. Nightingale delivers the setup in Latin, though he …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/28/three-in-the-rivers-of-london-series-by-ben-aaronovitch/
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By Doug Merrill in Alternate History, Auf Deutsch, Doreen, Doug, Eastern Europe, Fabulous Ones, Fantasy, History, Literature, Music, Mythology, Novella, Russia, Short Takes, Urban Fantasy
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December 27, 2024
Time for some short takes to clear the desk for the coming year. In Urs Widmer’s Der Geliebte der Mutter (My Mother’s Lover) the first-person narrator tells the story of his mother’s life, beginning with the death of her lover, many years after her own death. Erwin died as he lived best, leaning over a …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/27/wrapping-up-4/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire