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
Three cases present themselves to the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in The Great Hippopotamus Hotel, the twenty-fifth book in Alexander McCall Smith’s long-running series. Well, if not necessarily cases then situations that Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi feel obliged to untangle. Maybe not three, either, more accurately two and a half, given that one …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/11/30/the-great-hippopotamus-hotel-by-alexander-mccall-smith/
A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East by László Krasznahorkai belongs to the branch of literature that’s more “do unusual things with words” than “tell a story.” I picked it up on a recent trip to Frankfurt because Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/11/22/a-mountain-to-the-north-a-lake-to-the-south-paths-to-the-west-a-river-to-the-east-by-laszlo-krasznahorkai/
The problem with telling a story, of course, is that you already know that I’m telling you about something significant that happened. It’s not as if we sat down together and you said, “Alex,” tell me a tale where you had a pleasant trip to your homeland and the worst menace you faced was the …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/11/16/what-feasts-at-night-by-t-kingfisher/
Doug Merrill: Hi everyone! Emily Lauer: Hello! Doug: Hi Emily! Doreen Sheridan: Hello, all! I can confidently say that I’m happy they started a poetry category (and that my favorite won, lol) Doug: I’m glad that there’s a poetry category, too, and glad that it seems to have gone over well this year. Now to …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/11/09/hugo-2025-chat/
Interstellar Megachef was another 450-page book that I thought held a 250-page story. Often when I have that feeling about a book, I consider what I think should be cut but I usually draw a blank and offer the slightly lame explanation that if I knew where and how to trim novels, I would be …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/11/08/interstellar-megachef-by-lavanya-lakshminarayan/
In Rituale — Rituals to give the book its English title — Cees Nooteboom begins in the middle, goes back to the beginning, and then skips a bit to get to something of an ending. As middle beginnings that might well be endings go, the first sentence in Rituals is arresting: “On the day that Inni …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/26/rituale-by-cees-nooteboom/
When T. Kingfisher, whose real name is Ursula Vernon, was re-reading “The Fall of the House of Usher” two things struck her. The first, as she writes in her author’s note at the end of the book “was that Poe is really into fungi. He devotes more words to the fungal emanations than he does …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/25/what-moves-the-dead-by-t-kingfisher/
In deepest, darkest Kent, Coopers Chase is a retirement community built from what was once a convent. As part of its sale to private investors, the development has kept its original chapel and the burial ground where the sisters were laid to rest from the 1870s until the late twentieth century. Coopers Chase is bucolic, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/12/the-thursday-murder-club-by-richard-osman/
Where Miklos Banffy spends nearly 1500 pages of his Transylvanian Trilogy chronicling the life of Hungarian nobility across their half of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, in The Confusions of Young Törless, Robert Musil compresses much of the experience of the Austrian half into less than a tenth of that in a tale of life in a …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/05/die-verwirrungen-des-zoglings-torless-by-robert-musil/
One of the things about living in a country where English is not the dominant language is that when books turn up at your local English-language bookstore, you snag them because there may not be another chance any time soon. (People will say that a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, I am …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/04/three-from-t-kingfisher/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire