Dec 10 2022
The Best of Connie Willis brings together her shorter works of fiction — short story, novelette and novella — that have won either the Hugo or Nebula award. That she could fill a full-sized collection exclusively with award-winners is a testament to her skill as a storyteller and to the regard science fiction fans and writers …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/10/the-best-of-connie-willis-by-connie-willis/
Dec 05 2022
The first time I read The Odyssey, I was on a bit of an odyssey myself: from Budapest to Helsinki, and thence to DC via London. It didn’t take ten years, and I didn’t feel the need to plot a bunch of murders when I reached my new home. Nor did I lose my ship …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/05/the-odyssey-translated-by-emily-wilson/
Dec 04 2022
Usually when I am reading one of Seamus Heaney’s collections, I use a slip of paper as a bookmark and note the poems that strike me as particularly interesting or effective, so that I can have them fresh in my mind when I write about them for Frumious, or as a guide when I return …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/04/the-spirit-level-by-seamus-heaney/
Dec 03 2022
Once I got into it — this winter, after failing last winter — this went by fast, and why not, it’s a collection of short autobiographical, ostensibly seasonal snippets from a Norwegian author who’s often mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate. As an object, the edition of Winter that I have is a lovely book: thick …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/03/winter-by-karl-ove-knausgaard/
Nov 30 2022
Not quite 30 years ago I was backpacking around southeastern Europe when something unfortunate happened: I ran out of books. Well, technically, I did not run out of books; my backpack still held what a reasonable person would probably consider more than enough books. But since I had last replenished from the freebies at a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/11/30/the-brothers-karamazov-by-fyodor-dostoevsky/
Nov 20 2022
A country and a century, told through what happened to a family, narrated by a member of that family’s next-to-youngest generation, dedicated to a member of the youngest generation who is trying to both escape and understand the legacy she is bearing. In The Eighth Life (For Brilka), Nino Haratischvili brings her native Georgia to …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/11/20/the-eighth-life-by-nino-haratischvili/
Nov 03 2022
The Grief of Stones begins with the execution of a murderer uncovered by Thara Celehar in The Witness for the Dead. His friend Anora is trying to talk him out of attending, saying Celehar is punishing himself, and Celehar replies that he believes he has a responsibility. The friend loses the argument, though both of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/11/03/the-grief-of-stones-by-katherine-addison/
Oct 29 2022
In the first hundred pages of the book of her translation of The Odyssey, Emily Wilson introduces readers to this three thousand year old epic poem that is one of the foundations of Western literature. She opens doorways to the poem for readers not already well versed in Homer, but she also makes clear that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/29/premature-evaluation-the-odyssey-translated-by-emily-wilson/
Oct 26 2022
Czeslaw Milosz has a captivating mind. In Native Realm he invites readers to join him on what his subtitle calls “A Search for Self-Definition,” and is a journey from the wooded interior of what is today Lithuania, where he was born into a family of Polish-speaking gentry, through his young adulthood in interwar Warsaw, past …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/26/native-realm-by-czeslaw-milosz/
Oct 23 2022
Seldom does a book’s title fit so perfectly, so terribly as Inhuman Land by Jozef Czapski (pron. “Chop-ski”). He was born into an aristocratic Polish family in Prague, at a time when that city was ruled from Vienna as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Czapski grew up near Minsk, in present-day Belarus; he finished his …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/23/inhuman-land-by-jozef-czapski/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire