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
- Süddeutsche Series — 7 comments
- Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire — 6 comments
Author's posts
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/
After introducing readers to the lost world of Hungarian nobility before the Great War in They Were Counted, Miklós Bánffy continues their stories toward the great catastrophe that is coming, that only a very few of them can see looming on the horizon. These two books, along with They Were Divided form Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/28/they-were-found-wanting-by-miklos-banffy/
No Longer at Ease follow Things Fall Apart a generation later, although that is not immediately apparent. What is immediately apparent is that Obi Okonkwo is in a heap of trouble. He is in the dock, on trial in a case that has been the talk of Lagos for weeks, and the only thing remaining …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/27/no-longer-at-ease-by-chinua-achebe/
Things Fall Apart grabbed me from its very first page, even though nearly 70 years have passed since its first publication. It had fallen into the category of reputed classics that I have never quite gotten around to, what with there being a lot of books both old and new, and if not for the …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/21/things-fall-apart-by-chinua-achebe/
The Tomb of Dragons is that rare third book of a trilogy that makes me view the first two books very differently. All three of the “Cemeteries of Amalo” share a world and time with Addison’s classic, The Goblin Emperor. The first-person narrator of the trilogy is Thara Celehar, a cleric of Ulis and a …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/20/the-tomb-of-dragons-by-katherine-addison/
Peter Grant and Beverly Brook have survived the first two years as parents of twins, and unsurprisingly they are in need of a vacation. Peter’s family being what it is, and his job being what it is, the trip up to Scotland more closely resembled a circus caravan than a cozy family outing. To be …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/14/stone-sky-by-ben-aaronovitch/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire