Writer, editor, translator, project manager, reformed bookseller. Currently based in Berlin, following stints in Moscow, Tbilisi, Munich, Washington, Warsaw, Budapest and Atlanta. Also blogs at A Fistful of Euros, though less frequently than here these days.
Most commented posts
- The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison — 9 comments
- White Eagle, Red Star by Norman Davies — 7 comments
- Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire — 6 comments
- Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch — 6 comments
- The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin — 6 comments
Author's posts
Brayan’s Gold is a novella that forms part of the back story for the main character in a set of novels by Peter V. Brett, which I have not read. It began as a reference tossed into the first of those, “reminding people that Arlen had a ton of adventures back when he was young …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/09/brayans-gold-by-peter-v-brett/
After looking at the power of stories in Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett turns to some of the greatest stories ever told: religions, and, somewhat more incidentally, philosophy. Small Gods, the thirteenth Discworld novel, takes place in and around Omnia, an austere land on the edge of a great desert. The church of the Great God …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/08/small-gods-by-terry-pratchett/
In 2015, I decided to read in three major science fiction and fantasy series that I had somehow missed over the previous twenty years or more. While I had been happily reading other things, they had grown into monuments of the field, and I only knew second-hand what they were all about. So I decided …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/01/05/taking-stock-of-2015/
This book wasn’t for me. I thought it might be — 10 million fans can’t be wrong — I had heard good things about it, the title stayed lodged in my brain, and I thought about buying the book several times over the course of this year. So I picked it up, not entirely on impulse, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/11/03/the-fault-in-our-stars-by-john-green/
I had been thinking how terribly young the soldiers were that Ryszard Kapuściński wrote about in Another Day of Life when he brought me up short by noting that they were the same age as many of the fighters in the Warsaw Uprising at the end of World War II. Alexander Hamilton raised an artillery …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/31/another-day-of-life-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/
Most of the rest of Connie Willis’ writing would lead a reader to expect that Remake, her tale of Hollywood endlessly recycling classic movies and classic actors through digital magic, would be a screwball comedy that packed an emotional wallop. But no, this is as close to dystopia as Willis gets. As the back cover …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/29/remake-by-connie-willis/
Between the time when Ryszard Kapuściński saw the revolution in Iran in 1979 and when Shah of Shahs, his book on the subject, was published in 1982, his home country of Poland lived through its own revolution, one that started with strikes at a shipyard in the northern port of Gdańsk but collapsed as the …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/28/shah-of-shahs-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has observed that while plot is a literary convention, story is a force of nature. In Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett explores some of the things that can happen when these forces of nature latch on to people in his most unnatural of settings. People think that stories are shaped by people. In …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/27/witches-abroad-by-terry-pratchett/
There isn’t a zeppelin on the cover to let readers know this is an alternate history, but by way of making up for it, Elizabeth Bear sets the book’s first story on board hydrogen-filled German airship. The Hans Glücker is on its way from Calais to the jewel of British North America, the eponymous New …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/21/new-amsterdam-by-elizabeth-bear/
By the time Ryszard Kapuściński returned to Ethiopia, the revolution had already swept Emperor Haile Selassie from power. He engaged in something like journalistic archaeology, digging up the people of the Palace from where they had gone to ground to avoid execution in the violence that followed the revolution. The Emperor reads as if it …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/19/the-emperor-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/
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