Hello, dear readers! As promised in my last Tantalizing Tales column, today we have an excerpt of the recently published examination of the life and works of the famed English poet and artist William Blake, and how relevant the lessons we can learn from those still are today. Philosopher and psychotherapist Mark Vernon’s new book …
September 2025 archive
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/10/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination-by-mark-vernon-excerpt/
Sep 09 2025
Come Home, Indio by Jim Terry
So happy to celebrate five years of Street Noise’s dissident graphic novel publishing by featuring a review of this incredibly moving autobiographical tale! I’m not gonna lie, the first four parts of Jim Terry’s deeply personal graphic memoir Come Home, Indio, are tough reading. Jim, or JT as he’s often called, was born to an …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/09/come-home-indio-by-jim-terry/
Sep 08 2025
This Skin Was Once Mine and other disturbances by Eric LaRocca
I have recently remarked on how my reading brain seems to have pivoted away from classic/cozy murder mysteries to punchy short horror stories as a sort of mental palate cleanser between books, likely due to the shift of my literary consumption to a minimum of three mystery novels per week. So Eric LaRocca’s This Skin …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/08/this-skin-was-once-mine-and-other-disturbances-by-eric-larocca/
Sep 07 2025
Cetaganda by Lois McMaster Bujold
In Cetaganda Miles Vorkosigan, who is all of 22 years old, is sent to represent his home world of Barrayar at the funeral of the Cetagandan Dowager Empress. Accompanying him is his cousin Ivan Vorpatril, who is not much older. Cetaganda possesses a sprawling empire, by the terms of the Vorkosigan series, “eight developed planets …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/07/cetaganda-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/
Sep 06 2025
Portrait with Keys by Ivan Vladislavić
Ivan Vladislavić paints his Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked in a pointillist style, dividing up not quite 200 pages of main text into 138 anecdotes and observations, each of which shows some aspect of his life in the city in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The sections are numbered, enabling the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/06/portrait-with-keys-by-ivan-vladislavic/
Sep 05 2025
Tantalizing Tales — September 2025 — Part One
Happy September, friends! I’m ngl, I enjoyed summer, tho I’m certainly glad that my kids have gone back to school so I can have some peace and quiet around the house again. The difference has been, like the title of our first selection this month, Night & Day (lol, sorry, couldn’t resist.) Acclaimed horror editor …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/05/tantalizing-tales-september-2025-part-one/
Sep 04 2025
A Drop Of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
How serendipitous that I could finally dive into this right as the preceding book in the Shadow Of The Leviathan series (also an Ana And Din mystery) deservedly won the 2025 Hugo for Best Novel! I’d venture to say that A Drop of Corruption is even better than The Tainted Cup, and not just because …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/04/a-drop-of-corruption-by-robert-jackson-bennett/
Sep 03 2025
The Gift Of Animals by Alison Hawthorne Deming
subtitled Poems of Love, Loss, and Connection. Truly an interesting, holistic take on how humanity’s relationships to animals speak to our own existence as individuals. Divided into seven parts — Praise; Lament; Companionship; Fear And Vulnerability; The Least Among Us; The Sacred, and The Future Of Animals — each section begins with an ancient text …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/03/the-gift-of-animals-by-alison-hawthorne-deming/
Sep 02 2025
Hurricane Heist by James Ponti
These covers always confuse me a little. I want to say The Sherlock Society: Hurricane Heist every time I see one — and I get that this is the best way to market any series novel aimed specifically at children — but the fact that the series name is so large in comparison with the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/02/hurricane-heist-by-james-ponti/
Sep 01 2025
Translation State by Ann Leckie
I never did finish writing my review of Ancillary Mercy, the final book of Ann Leckie‘s Imperial Raadch trilogy, but here is part of its beginning: Presger Translator Zeiat may be my favorite character in science fiction from 2015. I’ll have to think about it a little while more to be sure, but she is …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/01/translation-state-by-ann-leckie/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire