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
Without a Summer by Mary Robinette Kowal is the third of her Glamourist Histories series, following Shades of Milk & Honey, and Glamour in Glass. The series crosses Regency romances with alternate (but not terribly alternate) history and a dash of domestic magic that may yet admit of industrial applications.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/11/07/without-a-summer-by-mary-robinette-kowal/
One of my commonest complaints about fantasy novels is that the setting is warmed-over England. There is so much fantasy that uses vaguely-English feudalism as its model, that it’s possible for someone to grow up reading almost nothing but, and then to embark on a career of writing in the same genre without necessarily realizing …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/11/06/the-last-wish-by-andrezej-sapkowski/
Ewalt gives his slender volume the subtitle “The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It,” at which point my inner copyeditor immediately reaches for the red pencil to change it to “A Story…” and “Some of the People…” There are a lot of stories of Dungeons & Dragons, and Ewalt surely …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/11/05/of-dice-and-men-by-david-m-ewalt/
This was the immensely satisfying end to a very good trilogy, although I will have to think about it a little longer to say just why. The author thanks her English translator in the acknowledgements to German edition, so she is presumably very happy with its rendering as Inkdeath.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/14/tintentod-by-cornelia-funke/
The Unquiet Ghost is both a terrific historical and journalistic investigation and a historical document itself, as the author acknowledges in a preface written in 2002, some eight years after the book’s first publication. More than eight more years have passed, and the conditions that made the book both possible and urgent slip ever further …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/07/the-unquiet-ghost-by-adam-hochschild/
Glamour in Glass is the second novel in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist Histories series. This review contains spoilers for Shades of Milk and Honey, the first in the series.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/06/glamour-in-glass-by-mary-robinette-kowal/
From the Preface to Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag, by Orlando Figes: Three old trunks had just been delivered. They were sitting in a doorway, blocking people’s way into the busy room where members of the public and historical researchers were received in the Moscow offices …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/03/just-send-me-word-by-orlando-figes/
Delight is something I probably shouldn’t inquire too deeply about, so I will simply say that Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal was a delight. I knew that Regency romances were a Thing, and I knew that not having read Jane Austen is a gap in my education, and so I am …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/01/shades-of-milk-honey-by-mary-robinette-kowal/
“It’s time for me to read Names for the Sea,” I told the friend who had sent me a copy. Some books are like that, resting placidly in the to-be-read pile for months before suddenly announcing, somehow, that it is time to read them. And indeed it was; despite a personal schedule that veers from …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/28/names-for-the-sea-by-sarah-moss/
Walker Percy’s foreword to the book cannot be bettered: Perhaps the best way to introduce this novel — which on my third reading of it astounds me even more than the first — is to tell of my first encounter with it. While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/20/a-confederacy-of-dunces-by-john-kennedy-toole/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire