Jul 08 2024
Every so often, the publicist Alex Kelleher-Nagorski (hi, Alex!) sends me a book and starts firmly (but gently) persuading me to read it. This is one of those books. I was genuinely afraid that I wouldn’t have time to get into it but Alex assured me that it would be totally worth my time. After …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/07/08/unbecoming-by-seema-yasmin/
Jun 15 2024
How much fury fits into 142 pages? Monika Maron tells her readers from the very first sentence that Herbert Beerenbaum dies, so a good bit of Stille Zeile Sechs (Silent Close Number Six — “Close” in the sense of a small cul-de-sac street, with six as the house number) is finding out who he his, how …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/06/15/stille-zeile-sechs-by-monika-maron/
Apr 10 2024
One of the best things about my favorite local bookstore is the way they host so many cool events and book clubs, and offer the book club selections at 15% off for the month. I’d previously been to an excellent non-fiction gathering to discuss Britney Spears’ The Woman In Me last January, but hadn’t really …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/04/10/bitch-planet-vol-1-extraordinary-machine-by-kelly-sue-deconnick-valentine-de-landro/
Mar 27 2024
subtitled Stories Inspired by J. G. Ballard. And what stories! In fairness, it’s hard to write anything nowadays about climate change, dystopias or class-stratified urbanization (and certainly not technological erotica, vehicular or otherwise) without being able to trace influences back to that same scrappy, complicated kid who was the focus of Stephen Spielberg’s WWII movie …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/03/27/reports-from-the-deep-end-edited-by-maxim-jakubowski-rick-mcgrath/
Feb 24 2024
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/24/metro-2033-by-dmitry-glukhovsky/
Oct 18 2023
In comparison to most of the graphic novels for grown-ups I’ve read recently, this felt quite long, but I think there’s a good reason for that. The original, published in 2020, only collected the first six issues of the series. This follow-up contains those and six more chapters that round out, at least for now, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/10/18/heart-attack-by-shawn-kittelsen-eric-zawadzki-mike-spicer/
Jun 27 2023
Okay, if you’re a Ben Okri fan, then this is likely going to be your jam. I hadn’t read any of his award-winning work before this collection, so I absolutely jumped at the chance to read the latest publication of the first Black, and at the time youngest, winner of the Booker Prize. And it’s …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/06/27/tiger-work-poems-stories-and-essays-about-climate-change-by-ben-okri/
Jun 17 2023
In Apex City, known in former centuries as Bangalore, meritocracy and sound scientific management principles have produced a city that has not only survived the environmental catastrophes, it is home to thriving humanity and extraordinary individuals extending what is humanly possible in many fields of endeavor. In the Virtual society inside Apex City, seventy percent …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/06/17/the-ten-percent-thief-by-lavanya-lakshminarayan/
Mar 02 2023
What a brilliant addition this is to the subgenre of adventuring anthropomorphic animals! In a world seemingly abandoned by humans, an alliance of suburban mice and rats finds their supplies dwindling, even as the pickings from the houses around them grow ever slimmer. All scouts sent to the closest city, meanwhile, have failed to return. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/03/02/scurry-by-mac-smith/
Dec 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 …
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