Dec 07 2018
Not every fantasy features swords and sorcery, though most of them involve a mythical creature of one sort or another. Amor Towles names his in the title: A Gentleman in Moscow. In midsummer 1922, following a brief trial, Count Alexander Rostov is not ordered immediately shot as a class enemy. It seems that senior Bolsheviks …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/07/a-gentleman-in-moscow-by-amor-towles/
Dec 02 2018
“We made the journey in 1997, at the end of October. The winter had set in early that year, and even St Petersburg had its first covering of snow. Outside the city, and especially as we travelled north, the snow had taken over the landscape completely, levelling the gentle contours of the forest floor and …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/02/night-of-stone-by-catherine-merridale/
Nov 30 2018
Connie Willis at her best tells tales of engaging characters in surprising situations and then lands an emotional blow that can still be felt a decade or more later. I can’t, offhand, think of another author who has done what Willis does two-thirds of the way through Passage. When she’s merely very good, Willis can …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/30/crosstalk-by-connie-willis/
Nov 29 2018
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent queen?” is something that Elizabeth I of England does not ever quite say in Schiller’s five-act verse drama, Maria Stuart, but the sentiment lurks behind practically everything that she does say. The play begins with Mary, Queen of Scots, under house arrest in Fotheringhay, the place that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/29/maria-stuart-by-friedrich-schiller/
Nov 28 2018
Oof, I did not expect The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps to end as a tragedy, nor when it did. Looking back, though, I am not at all sure that the ending is a tragedy, at least from the perspective of the principal characters. Glancing at my review of Kai Ashante Wilson’s other novella set in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/28/the-sorcerer-of-the-wildeeps-by-kai-ashante-wilson/
Oct 23 2018
Bless Me, Father turned out to be just the thing for an autumn weekend afternoon. It’s short, light, breezily written and genuinely funny in places, which I hadn’t entirely expected — despite the recommendation that landed it in my set of books to read — from a book published forty years ago about events twenty years …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/23/bless-me-father-by-neil-boyd/
Oct 21 2018
Every now and then, I like to read a book that is of interest mainly to specialists. Malte Rolf’s work uses the parades and other mass events in the Soviet Union as a lens for examining how that society developed over the course of its existence. Celebrations reveal a great deal about a society — what …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/21/soviet-mass-festivals-1917-1991-by-malte-rolf/
Oct 15 2018
Here is Ursula K. Le Guin on life in pre-Roe America: My friends at NARAL asked me to tell you what it was like before Roe vs. Wade. They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/15/words-are-my-matter-by-ursula-k-le-guin/
Oct 14 2018
You know what would be really scary? A novel written from the point of view of one of the women who believed wholeheartedly in the tenets of the Republic of Gilead, who rejoiced in the work they were doing, who revelled in her role as helpmeet, as implementer of God’s will on an earth that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/14/the-handmaids-tale-by-margaret-atwood/
Oct 14 2018
It often happens that the very best books are hardest to write about. I discovered TNC’s blog fairly early in his tenure at The Atlantic, and I made sure to keep coming back. Time zones — I lived in the South Caucasus at the time, even further from US schedules — meant that I missed much of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/14/we-were-eight-years-in-power-by-ta-nehisi-coates/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire