Oct 31 2026
The Mystery Knight was originally published in 2010, some seven years after the first appearance of The Sworn Sword. I think I would have liked the third Dunk and Egg novella a bit more if the gap between them in my reading had been, if not quite the full seven years, more than the week …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/10/31/the-mystery-knight-by-george-r-r-martin/
Oct 25 2026
Selena gets out of a bad relationship by gathering up her dog, a black lab named Copper, spending almost the last of her money, and taking a train two and a half days from the unspecified city where she had lived out into the desert Southwest to a settlement called Quartz Creek, to find her …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/10/25/snake-eater-by-t-kingfisher/
Oct 24 2026
I’m glad that T. Kingfisher, a.k.a. Ursula Vernon, is having a publishing moment because I missed The Raven and the Reindeer entirely when it first came out in 2016. It’s a re-telling of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” that is irreverent, tension-filled, funny, scary, and more than a little weird. That’s fitting, though, because …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/10/24/the-raven-and-the-reindeer-by-t-kingfisher/
Oct 18 2026
Two years after the events of The Hedge Knight, Dunk and Egg find themselves at the ass end of nowhere, sworn to serve a knight who’s not far from a hedge himself, while much of the region struggles with a drought. The novella opens with the two of them returning from an errand to buy …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/10/18/the-sworn-sword-by-george-r-r-martin/
Oct 17 2026
I’m not really a blurb person, but as short descriptions of A House With Good Bones go — “(a) funny, (b) scary, and (c) charming. You will gulp this book down like sweet tea on a hot day.” (Charlaine Harris) and a “special blend of horror and snarky mundanity, wherein the not-so-dearly departed demand half-frozen …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/10/17/a-house-with-good-bones-by-t-kingfisher/
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/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire