Oct 12 2026
What Work Is was my introduction to Philip Levine, back in 1991 when it was new and I was working at the late and lamented Oxford Books of Atlanta, Georgia. Oxford was the largest independent bookstore in the Southeast, and something of a pioneer of the superstore model, bookstores that kept 100,000 or more titles …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/10/12/what-work-is-by-philip-levine-2/
Oct 11 2026
Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi was born in Hamburg in 1926, son of a working-class German woman and a son of the Liberian consul general in the city. The liaison that produced him did not last — both mother and father were young to be parents, and his father returned to Ireland to continue his studies in law …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/10/11/hanschen-klein-ging-allein-by-hans-j-massaquoi/
Oct 10 2026
I found it a little hard to believe that The Hedge Knight is closing in on 30 years since its first publication in Legends, an anthology edited by Robert Silverberg. (I haven’t read it, but the table of contents looks great.) I think the conversation around the television series “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/10/10/the-hedge-knight-by-george-r-r-martin/
Oct 04 2026
I feel kinda bad for the people charged with writing the back cover copy for Villain, Natalie Zina Walschots’ sequel to Hench. That novel showed a world with superheroes and supervillains, told from the perspective of a disposable henchperson. But Anna Tomedlov was her own person, center of her own world, and did not feel …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/10/04/villain-by-natalie-zina-walschots/
Oct 03 2026
When River Cartwright’s final training exercise went publicly pear-shaped, he was only kept on the rolls of Britain’s spy service because of his grandfather, David Cartwright, a legend of the service’s Cold War days. Now, though, the Old Bastard, as he is widely known — sometimes affectionately, sometimes less so — is showing his age. It’s …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/10/03/spook-street-by-mick-herron/
Sep 24 2026
Back in April when the finalists for the 2026 Hugo Awards were announced, your Frumious Consorters talked about what we liked in the nominations, what we were excited to find out more about, and what we hoped to actually read. Curious to discover how things turned out and what the Consortium thought? Read on! Doug: …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/09/24/hugo-awards-2026-winners/
Sep 19 2026
Victor Sebestyen offers a readable, one-volume history of Budapest from its Roman beginnings as Aquincum (plus a little more than a page on pre-Roman findings) through the time of the book’s publication in 2022, although it is very light on the years after the anti-communist uprising of 1956. Out of the book’s 377 pages, the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/09/19/budapest-by-victor-sebestyen/
Sep 13 2026
“But life works in such a way that social progress and a better future can only be achieved if a certain number of people are willing to pay the price for their right to have their own beliefs. The more of them there are, the less everyone has to pay. And the day will come …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/09/13/patriot-by-alexei-navalny/
Aug 30 2026
As a relatively uninformed reader of The Odyssey — one trip through it unaccompanied while traveling across Central Europe in the mid-1990s; I don’t even remember which translation I read, only that I was mesmerized — I was happy to read all of Emily Wilson’s introductory material before embarking on the poem itself. What is known about …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/08/30/crossing-the-wine-dark-sea-by-emily-wilson/
Aug 22 2026
I picked up A Parish Chronicle because I had never read anything by Halldór Laxness, and this looked short enough to be a low-investment place to start. Mission accomplished, then, for the publisher Vintage Classics, who issued the book as part of their “Brief Encounters” series, which they flag as “Short books. Timeless stories.” Other …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/08/22/a-parish-chronicle-by-halldor-laxness/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire