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
- Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire — 6 comments
- Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch — 6 comments
- The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin — 6 comments
Author's posts
How to talk about We Never Talk About My Brother? First, note that it predates Bruno by more than a decade. But then what? Considering the astonishing range in this volume’s nine stories and single sequence of poems? Praising the characters’ odd corners that mark them as real people even when they’re inhabiting the best-known …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/02/26/we-never-talk-about-my-brother-by-peter-s-beagle/
I imagine that Michael Axworthy’s brief for this book ran something like this: Write a one-volume history of Iran, from as early as possible up through as close to the present as is practical. (The hardback edition was published in 2008; the edition that I have was published in 2010 and has an epilogue that …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/02/19/a-history-of-iran-empire-of-the-mind-by-michael-axworthy/
The Red Scholar’s Wake is, by turns, a romance, a meditation on loss, a political intrigue, a story of starfaring pirates, an examination of parenthood, and a tale of interplanetary adventure. That sounds like a lot, maybe too much for fewer than 300 pages, so let me look at it from a slightly different angle. …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/02/12/the-red-scholars-wake-by-aliette-de-bodard/
Just write the fun parts. Take a science fiction premise — that evolution ran differently on an alternate earth giving rise to kaiju (Godzilla and company, I didn’t know the term before I had heard of this book) — and just write the fun parts. That’s The Kaiju Preservation Society. The parallel earths, two among presumably …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/02/04/the-kaiju-preservation-society-by-john-scalzi/
Things, moments, people, poems. Heaney finds inspiration for the poems in District and Circle in things that he encounters or imagines, moments he hopes to preserve or evoke in others, people he remembers, and poems he either recalls or translates. Places, which loomed larger in other collections, are less present here, though of course they …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/29/district-and-circle-by-seamus-heaney/
Dave Hutchinson, like William Gibson, is an artiste of the slightly funny deal. They run all through Cold Water, and trying to figure out just who is running a caper on whom is one of the pleasures of the novel. Carey Tews, the novel’s main protagonist, is a Texan who’s been in Europe for decades …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/28/cold-water-by-dave-hutchinson/
Even by the standards of European monarchs, many of the Romanovs were terrible people. Peter the Great had his oldest son killed by torture. Earlier, Peter’s half-sister Sophia had tried to prevent him from assuming the throne, and if he had lost that contest he might well have paid with his life. Ivan VI succeeded …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/15/the-romanovs-by-simon-sebag-montefiore/
Events at the end of Black City left Erast Fandorin, the Sherlock Holmes of Tsarist Russia, in a coma. The beginning of Not Saying Goodbye reveals that he has been in that state for a bit more than three years. Masa, his faithful companion for more than a quarter of a century, has watched over …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/13/not-saying-goodbye-by-boris-akunin/
I owe my favorite book of 2022 to the Hugo nominators who got Light from Uncommon Stars onto the finalist list, and the publishers who generously provided an electronic copy to all voters. Without those two groups of people, I would have missed out on a wonderful book and never been the wiser. The book …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/01/taking-stock-of-2022/
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By Doug Merrill in Alternate History, Art, Doug, Dystopia, Eastern Europe, Philosophy, Politics, Post-Apocalypse, Science Fiction, Short Takes
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December 30, 2022
Time for some short takes to clear the desk for the coming year. Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk. Nobel winner Tokarczuk uses very short chapters, each titled “The Time of …”, to depict life in an archetpyal Polish village from just before the outbreak of the First World War through the last years …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/30/wrapping-up-3/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire