Apr 25 2021
I have to confess that I didn’t get a lot of, or get a lot out of, Firstborn, the debut collection of poems from Louise Glück. It was published in 1968, when she was 25. Fifty-two years and a dozen or so collections later, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Like my reading of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/25/firstborn-by-louise-gluck/
Apr 24 2021
Wasn’t this fun! Susan Arkshaw has grown up in a rural corner of southwestern England, with an absent father and a very absent-minded artist mother. Two minutes before The Left-Handed Booksellers of London opens — on May 1, 1983 — Susan turns 18. She’s also just had one of her recurring dreams, full of giant …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/24/the-left-handed-booksellers-of-london-by-garth-nix/
Apr 14 2021
I’m glad that Leo de Hartog did not title this biography A Life of Genghis Khan because there is astonishingly little life between its covers. I would have thought the biography of someone who rose from a tribal noble to rule the largest land empire this world has ever known would be positively gripping, but …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/14/genghis-khan-by-leo-de-hartog/
Apr 06 2021
In 1999, Gail Simone made a list “when it occurred to [her] that it’s not healthy to be a female character in comics. … These are superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator. Some have been revived, even improved — although the question remains as to why …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/06/the-refrigerator-monologues-by-catherynne-m-valente/
Apr 01 2021
When Cordwainer Smith first began publishing stories in the early 1950s, the genre was much further from the mainstream than it is today. Writing for magazines such as Galaxy or Worlds of If would have been considered extremely odd for one of America’s leading experts on psychological warfare and a Johns Hopkins professor of Asiatic …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/01/charges-daffaires-by-cordwainer-smith/
Mar 28 2021
In his preface to this, fourth, edition of Georgia: In the Mountains of Poetry, Peter Nasmyth writes that he has seen the book migrate from the Travel section of bookstores over into History. Likewise Nasmyth has transformed from a footloose twentysomething seeker, happening to stop in Moscow on his way from India back to England, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/28/georgia-in-the-mountains-of-poetry-by-peter-nasmyth/
Mar 25 2021
Hrimland, an alternate Iceland, sighs under its exploitation by Kalmar, a Nordic union that in history lasted from 1397 to 1523 but extends into the unspecified present of Shadows of the Short Days. Garún feels that exploitation more keenly than most; half human and half huldufólk, she’s an outcast among the oppressed. Worse, she left …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/25/shadows-of-the-short-days-by-alexander-dan-vilhjalmsson-2/
Mar 24 2021
More than any other book I can think of Wolf Hall impressed upon me the number of people constantly present in a pre-modern household of any size. The first book of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell, it teems with people coming in and out the main character’s presence, from its unforgettable …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/24/the-mirror-and-the-light-by-hilary-mantel/
Mar 21 2021
There’s a scene in “Before Sunrise” where the young couple encounters two Austrian guys who tell the visitors about a play they are putting on, an eye-rolling bit of Continental pretension. Man with tie: This is a play we’re both in, and we would like to invite you. Céline: You’re actors? Man with tie: No, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/21/die-olympiasiegerin-by-herbert-achternbusch/
Mar 14 2021
Ödön von Horváth was born in 1901 in what was then the Austro-Hungarian port city of Fiume and is now known as Rijeka, Croatia. His name and his family background reflect a Mitteleuropa that was thriving (at least for some people) when he was born, was damaged by the First World War, and practically destroyed …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/14/der-ewige-spieser-by-odon-von-horvath/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire