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
In the two most recent books set in his Old Man’s War universe, The Human Division and now The End of All Things, John Scalzi has been busy shaking up the structures that he set up in the earlier books. Briefly, the galaxy is full of starfaring civilizations, most of them relentlessly hostile to each …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/16/the-end-of-all-things-by-john-scalzi/
Of Noble Family is the fifth book of Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist History series. The series crosses Regency romances with alternate (but not terribly alternate) history and a dash of domestic magic. The series follows Sir David Vincent and his wife Jane, accomplished glamourists; that is, practitioners of the arts of magical illusion known in …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/09/of-noble-family-by-mary-robinette-kowal/
A friend whose taste I respect recommended The Well-Favored Man to me, and, while I didn’t bounce off of it, I didn’t respond with quite the enthusiasm we both thought I might. She zipped right through it and has, I think, re-read it again in the meantime, while I dawdled the weeks away, and read …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/08/the-well-favored-man-by-elizabeth-willey/
They seem such slight things, the Discworld books. Mostly slender paperbacks with the unmistakable art on their covers and the absurd premises piled on one another (it’s turtles all the way down), usually stacked up in the first few pages. Suddenly it’s a couple hundred pages later, there has been laughter, there has been at …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/07/reaper-man-by-terry-pratchett/
Just shy of halfway through Life Among the Savages, Shirley Jackson relaxes and lets her characters — her immediate family, for this is a memoir — tell their stories without too much authorial interference. Before that, the set pieces feel a bit like set pieces, and it has a sense of an author putting on …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/09/04/life-among-the-savages-by-shirley-jackson/
Raising Demons is perfect. There are two other books I can think of that I regularly describe as perfect – Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera — and now I have a third. It is possible that if I took out my jeweller’s loupe, I could find an imperfection, an infelicitous word here, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/08/26/raising-demons-by-shirley-jackson/
Charles Stross’ Laundry series began as an unholy mashup of H.P. Lovecraft, The Office, and spy thrillers, told through the eyes of an initially low-level functionary. Bob, as you know, is Bob Howard, a systems administrator who stumbles onto the secret congruencies between higher math and applied magic. Paraphrasing Clarke’s Third Law, in the world …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/08/24/the-annihilation-score-by-charles-stross/
What could Polish literature do after Pan Tadeusz, a poem that Milosz said, “gradually won recognition as the highest achievement in all Polish literature”? For starters, literary eminence was contested by Mickiewicz’s contemporaries. “Besides his unrequited love, the other passion running through [Juliusz] Słowacki’s life was his desire first to equal, then to compete with, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/07/29/romanticism-and-positivism-the-history-of-polish-literature-by-czeslaw-milosz/
Writing in the mid-1990s in post-Communist Poland, Andrzej Sapkowski produced The Time of Contempt. Writing in the mid-1990s in post-Communist eastern Germany, Ingo Schulze produced Simple Storys (the plural is not correct in German either; it’s symptomatic of the anglicisms and pseudo-anglicisms that entered the language at that time). The two books could hardly be …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/07/27/simple-storys-by-ingo-schulze/
The Time of Contempt picks up the story of Geralt of Rivia an unspecified, but not terribly long, time after the events of Blood of Elves. Sapkowski opens the novel by following a royal messenger through several errands, and he uses that device to deliver to readers a quick burst of exposition about the state …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/07/24/the-time-of-contempt-by-andrzej-sapkowski/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire