It’s Snakewood launch day :)
Edited 26.08.22
This page contained a link to the soundcloud audio for chapter 1 of Snakewood.
You can get that and more here.
“But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.” Sofia Samatar I’ve long been fascinated by virtuosi and recently I’ve read two almost without equal. Mark Danielewski and Sofia Samatar are virtuosi,…
This is a story about superheroes in the second world war and beyond, a counterfactual fantasy. At first you will rightly think of Watchmen and X-Men but Lavie Tidhar has created something here that is more bleak and more noir, as though the X-Men had been re-told by John le Carré.
Byron, Keats and Shelley – check. Vampires – check. Life or death adventures through London, Venice, Rome and the Alps – check. As with the other Tim Powers novels I’ve read (The Drawing of the Dark, On Stranger Tides and Last Call), The Stress Of Her Regard pits a hopelessly outclassed protagonist, here Michael Crawford, against…
I’ve been busy finishing my third novel. While I was wrestling with it over the last few months I managed to read a few books I’m now ready to recommend. Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, first published in 1949, is the story of Kit and Port Moresby, Americans full of fashionably existential angst deciding to…
James C. Scott’s fascinating book argues that we have enslaved ourselves to grain production and the ‘civilisation’ that followed. The inevitable outcome of grain cultivation and sedentism’s propensity to increase birth rates has led to both a patriarchal system that reduces women to breeders and promotes warfare to enslave yet more people to sustain the…
Whiteshift, by Eric Kaufman, is an easy book to recommend you read, in part because it is a thoughtful, detailed presentation of some challenging ideas and in part because its subject matter couldn’t (coronavirus aside) be more important. There are aspects to the thesis I don’t accept or understand, but I now accept, more clearly…