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
Though it contains tales of considerable violence, The Empress of Salt and Fortune remains in my mind as an almost restful story. It’s set at a secluded compound near Lake Scarlet, a nearly perfectly round lake formed by a falling star, and named for a glow that sometimes appears at sunset, starting faintly and then …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/26/the-empress-of-salt-and-fortune-by-nghi-vo/
Many things have transpired at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children since I read the debut novella, Every Heart a Doorway, but I did not feel lost at all. My thanks to Seanan McGuire for making subsequent installments of her series inviting even to people who do not hang on its every word. The Home …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/25/come-tumbling-down-by-seanan-mcguire/
Who hasn’t wondered whether all those twists on the path through Ikea might not lead somewhere else entirely? In Nino Cipri’s Finna, the Ikea stand-in LitenVärld (it means “little world” in Swedish) has a recurring problem with wormholes opening within its stores and leading to LitenVärld analogues in parallel universes. Not that management tells anyone, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/21/finna-by-nino-cipri/
Fittingly, if annoyingly, I have mislaid my copy of The Lost Pianos of Siberia, so this will have to be from memory, just like many of the stories that Sophy Roberts collects over the course of the book. The conceit of the story is that Roberts was spending most of a summer with a German …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/20/the-lost-pianos-of-siberia-by-sophy-roberts/
I read Invisible Cities ages ago when I worked for a bookstore in Atlanta and was reading more consciously literary things. I picked it up again recently thanks to a Twitter thread. Jo Walton had been doing a series of 50 manipulated images of Venice. As she wrote, “In honour of Italo Calvino’s Le Citta …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/14/invisible-cities-by-italo-calvino/
It’s 1922 and the Ku Klux Klan is marching in Macon, Georgia. The Klan I know from history is bad enough, but the Klan in Ring Shout is supplemented by literal monsters that Clark’s first-person narrator Maryse Boudreaux and her friends Sadie and Chef can see through the human form that the Ku Kluxes have …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/13/ring-shout-by-p-djeli-clark/
Circassians! The father of Allie, title character and first-person narrator of Courtney’s novel, comes from a Circassian family. They’re an ethnic group originally from the Northern Caucasus. After their encounter with an expanding Russian Empire went the way of most encounters between small peoples and the empire, the vast majority of Circassians were expelled to …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/07/all-american-muslim-girl-by-nadine-jolie-courtney-2/
For a certain kind of person, this book is a source of great joy. Fortunately, I am that kind of person, and I have kept coming back to it since I bought it in February. I first became aware of Art & Arcana when I flipped through an electronic version that came as part of …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/06/dungeons-dragons-art-arcana-a-visual-history-by-michael-witwer-et-al/
Harrowhark Nonagesimus, generally and more pronounceably known as Harrow the Ninth, is one weird chickadee. Even among advanced necromancers, a company not generally known for bland probity, Harrow stands out. Readers of this book’s predecessor, Gideon the Ninth, know it; anyone wandering in on this book as the starting point in the Locked Tomb series …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/30/premature-evaluation-harrow-the-ninth-by-tamsyn-muir/
I admired the conception of Das Erwachen (The Awakening) more than I enjoyed its execution. As Josef Ruederer’s widow Elisabeth wrote in an brief introductory note, “[He] wanted to portray life — history and people — in his home city through the nineteenth century up to the present [1916] in a four-volume novel.” Unfortunately, he …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/17/das-erwachen-by-josef-ruederer/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire