Writer, editor, translator, project manager, reformed bookseller. Currently based in Berlin, following stints in Moscow, Tbilisi, Munich, Washington, Warsaw, Budapest and Atlanta. Previously blogged at A Fistful of Euros, though that is now largely lost to link rot.
Most commented posts
- The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison — 9 comments
- White Eagle, Red Star by Norman Davies — 7 comments
- Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch — 7 comments
- Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire — 6 comments
- The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin — 6 comments
Author's posts
Well I suppose that Jakob von Gunten is a bildungsroman because it follows its young and eponymous first-person narrator through his later school years and ends with his departure from the Institut Benjamenta. On the other hand, its 144 pages raise some doubts about whether it qualifies as a Roman, although the Süddeutsche Zeitung published …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/03/08/jakob-von-gunten-by-robert-walser/
with an introductory essay by Owen Hatherley After two books on Soviet bus stops, an eccentric topic from a world that’s receding into history, photographer Christopher Herwig turned his attention to a slightly more expected topic: stations of various metro systems across the former Soviet Union. This book echoes its predecessors in size and style. …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/03/07/soviet-metro-stations-by-christopher-herwig/
Nine Goblins is not just the story of nine goblins, one elf, and some weird things that happen, it’s also the origin story of T. Kingfisher. Under the author’s real name of Ursula Vernon, she had a successful and award-winning webcomic named Digger and more than a dozen published children’s books. But she had more …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/02/22/nine-goblins-by-t-kingfisher/
T. Kingfisher’s third Sworn Soldier novella — following What Moves the Dead and What Feasts at Night — takes Alex Easton and their* batsman Angus to America at the urgent behest of their friend James Denton, a doctor last seen by readers not far from where the House of Usher had fallen. He had returned home, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/02/01/what-stalks-the-deep-by-t-kingfisher/
Most years, I set aside a couple of books that I have gotten a decent way into and decide that I am just not going to finish them. (Each year since 2020, it’s been either one or two.) This year, I’ve already DNF’d two and it’s only late January. I’m not one of those people …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/01/31/a-brief-visit-to-dnfland/
Shortly after the end of the events in A Surfeit of Guns, Sir Robert Carey receives a letter from his father, commanding him to come to London post-haste. More than filial piety is at stake, for Lord Hunsdon, as Henry Carey is called throughout the novel, is also Lord Chamberlain to the Queen herself. Sir …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/01/18/a-plague-of-angels-by-p-f-chisholm/
2025 turned out to be a year of reading easily. I remember thinking at the end of 2024 that I was going to make sure I read for enjoyment at least as much as for satisfaction or a sense of accomplishment. My reading, especially in the first half of the year, reflected that desire. I …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/01/04/taking-stock-of-2025/
In the two most recent Singing Hills books — The Brides of High Hill and A Mouthful of Dust — Nghi Vo takes her protagonist, the historian Cleric Chih, to much darker places than in the three previous books of this series that I have read. (Those are, in order, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, When …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/28/two-from-the-singing-hills-cycle-by-nghi-vo/
I’m glad someone told me that nothing much happens in Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s novella that won the 2024 Booker Prize. If I had been expecting action — anything from a mechanical crisis as six astronauts in the ISS orbit the earth to an alien encounter – I might have been disappointed. The book relates one …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/27/orbital-by-samantha-harvey/
Luke 2:1-14, Old English: Soþlice on þam dagum wæs geworden gebod fram þam casere Augusto, þæt eall ymbehwyrft wære tomearcod. Þeos tomearcodnes wæs æryst geworden fram þam deman Syrige Cirino. And ealle hig eodon, and syndrige ferdon on hyra ceastre. Ða ferde Iosep fram Galilea of þære ceastre Nazareth on Iudeisce ceastre Dauides, seo is …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/25/merry-christmas-5/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire