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
“Does what it says on the tin” is a lovely Britishism for a lovely British book because The Sinister Booksellers of Bath keeps the promises that it makes. It’s a direct sequel to The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, picking up a few months after the end of that story. Merlin and Susan are still together, …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/03/23/the-sinister-booksellers-of-bath-by-garth-nix/
What would Jazz Age America be like if it had a large and powerful Native American state in the Midwest, with its capital a thriving city called Cahokia, descendant of the largest Indigenous settlement north of Mexico? In 1922, the great Mound is still the symbolic center of the city, as it has been for …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/03/03/cahokia-jazz-by-francis-spufford/
With Marzahn Mon Amour Katja Oskamp aims for a double re-evaluation: of her own writing, seemingly derailed after two novels and a story collection are followed by publishers’ rejections of the novellas that followed, and of the district of Marzahn in the northeastern corner of Berlin, far from the city’s hip party places or its …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/03/02/marzahn-mon-amour/
At the beginning of Eine blaßblaue Frauenschrift (In a Woman’s Pale Blue Hand), life is going very well for Leonidas Tachezy as he celebrates his fiftieth birthday. Thanks to a lucky break in his student days, his natural abilities and discipline have led him to a high station in Austrian society in 1936. He is …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/25/eine-blasblaue-frauenschrift-by-franz-werfel/
As settings for a post-apocalypse story go, the Moscow Metro is pretty cool. It’s vast, it’s full of secrets, parts of it were actually designed to survive a nuclear war, it lends itself to an episodic tale with lots of changes of scenery. I’m not sure that a whole lot more thought went into it …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/24/metro-2033-by-dmitry-glukhovsky/
Vasily Grossman is one of the great writers of the twentieth century, and The Road is a very good place to start reading his work. Born in the Ukrainian city of Berdychiv when it was part of the Russian Empire, Grossman experienced the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing civil war as a teen. He began …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/11/the-road-by-vasily-grossman/
Before Lucius Shepard had published stories, he had the idea of a dragon who was 6,000 feet long, immobilized but not killed by a wizard’s spell ages ago, now more or less a part of the landscape with towns and villages on and around his body, which was difficult to distinguish from the other hills …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/10/the-dragon-griaule-by-lucius-shepard/
Or, more properly and to give the book its full era-appropriate title, The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz, A Romance in Eight Days, by Johann Valentin Andreae in a new version by John Crowley Cheekily claimed as a special 400th anniversary edition, The Chemical Wedding is a new version of one of the founding Rosicrucian …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/19/the-chemical-wedding-by-john-crowley/
The more my eyes went up and down the list of books I read in 2023, the more they came to rest on We Never Talk About My Brother by Peter S. Beagle. The call from Stockholm doesn’t come for people who publish books with titles like Lila the Werewolf or The Innkeeper’s Song, but …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/03/taking-stock-of-2023/
Introducing her translation of The Iliad, Emily Wilson gets right to the heart of the matter. “The beautiful word minunthadios, ‘short-lived,’ is used of both Achilles and Hector, and applies to all of us. We die too soon, and there is no adequate recompense for the terrible, inevitable loss of life. Yet through poetry, the …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/12/31/the-iliad-translated-by-emily-wilson/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire