Thank you to everyone who made the 1944 Club such a success! As always, it’s wonderful to see the range of titles that come in – I have a lotttt of reviews to read, and it turns out that my week was very busy, but I loved it. And I’m reading one 1949 title that I didn’t make much headway in, but I’m really enjoying, so watch out for that. We are moving to the 1970s for our next club – here’s your six-month warning for the 1973 Club!

Compare Here and Below If You Can Stand It ...'Tis Another Spook Season --- Part OneHere’s Where We Spot AI From a Mile Away --- To collect lobby cards, you often make do. Pinholes, scuff marks, even paint dabs can be fixed. Fading cannot. Cards sat often in the sun, displayed outdoors to damaging rays. It didn’t take long for Old Sol to do his harm. I got this group scene from Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and tried to kid myself it was OK, self-deception collectors often engage, but no, it…

Alba DeTamble inherited her father’s Chrono-Displacement disorder, and living with that makes for a very complicated life. While I found it far less emotionally satisfying than The Time Traveler’s Wife, it’s an interesting and more complex read. More characters are interwoven, and timelines blur and cross in a more intricate fashion. It’s also a book of our time, themes in it clearly influenced by current events. The ending felt, in parts, somewhat unresolved and vague. Some important events…

Behold, our second two-vote-receiver in the favorite indie comics of the ’90s poll…and it’s a title I’m pretty sure you’re all familiar with: Gen 13 (Image Comics, 1994) Even as the comics industry was collapsing all around us at the time, there were still the Hot Items that would hit the shelves and excite the comic readers who remained and toughed things out. Sure, shops were beginning to rely on POGs and Magic The Gathering cards to help shore up the sales that slipped far away from the Milk…

A fair amount of the Asian literature in translation I’ve sampled in recent years has come courtesy of Columbia University Press, and today’s selection is yet another Asian book that particular publisher offered me a while back. However, my latest choice takes me a little out of my East-Asian comfort zone as we head further south, and away from big city fare, too. Make sure you’ve packed light and brought along some medical supplies as we’ll be doing a fair amount of trekking today. Oh, and…

There is something fitting about Stu McLoughlin finding himself wrestling publicly with artistic self-doubt in a show inspired by Hamlet. For years, Living Spit have occupied a unique position within the South West’s theatre ecology, creating joyfully anarchic productions that combine sharp musicianship, historical irreverence and an almost supernatural ability to extract comedy from things that really shouldn’t be funny. Whether tackling Tudor monarchs, Greek mythology or French fairy tales,…

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. When I try to feed my crows and the gulls muscle in they swallow whatever it is faster than I can imagine. The fur on this squirrel likely slowed this guy down. The squirrel was most likely road kill.

“Would you agree that human translators are becoming less important as technology evolves?” The man asking the question was wearing what seemed to be his only expression: blank, emotionless curiosity. Boone didn’t like him very much, nor did he particularly like the woman who sat to the man’s left, but Boone kept a faint smile on his face. It was a job interview, after all, and he needed the work. Their initial approach to him had been conventional enough, via an email reply to the ad that…

I received these questions from a fellow writer in response to my morning's blog post titled The Enduring Imaginative Life. He writes: “Interesting. So, for you, does the story emerge fully formed, from beginning to end? Or is it more of a sketch, an idea that then develops through the act of writing? Are you ever surprised yourself? Does the story ever take an unexpected turn?” I see many possibilities in answering this. The stories that reside in my head often do emerge fully formed, after…

A few years back, Ahmed Naji (author of ROTTEN EVIDENCE), asked me to provide an illustration for an awesome short speculative satire he wrote for Art of the Working Class. Titled THE TANTA MUSEUM OF WHITE HISTORY, it is both funny and piercingly perceptive, and he just made it available on his substack. Highly recommended reading. #work

Recently I woke from a dream adapted from Nostromo and directed by Joseph Conrad. Something about Martin Decoud in the lifeboat, weighted down with silver ingots. The dream, typically, was fragmentary and out of focus. This is only the second time I can remember having a dream lifted from a work of fiction. The other involved Leopold Bloom embracing Rudy, his dead infant son. Do I find profound significance in these nighttime theatricals? That both involve death? Not really. They tell me that…

“I don’t know what planet they’re on, but I know about the earrings!” We’ve got a very unusual space opera to read through this time around, one that takes questions of empire and identity to interesting places; critic and editor Alexandra Pierce joins to discuss. Credits: Guest: Alexandra Pierce Title: Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee Host: Jake Casella Brookins Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia Artwork by Rob Patterson Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough References: 2026 Le Guin…

You have heard of Mr William Shakespeare right? A rather popular playwright who have quite a few plays across different genres? Apparently, he has a new play out now, and everyone will need to update their Complete Works of Shakespeare collection now. On a slightly more serious note: my favorite Shakespeare’s play is Macbeth. I am not familiar with this Edward III play, but I doubt I will change my favourite soon. To me, these works take a long time to absorb and appreciate. Four hundred years…

I only read 5 books this month. Don't get me wrong. Five books in a month is fine. But I have a minimum of 15 books I want to read before the end of the year, and if I only read 5 a month I won't even finish those. Woe is me.However, with the exception of one book I was very happy with my reading for the month. And the one book I did not enjoy was on my classics list and was a worthwhile read, so I cannot complain too much about that.Here are the five books I read in August:NonfictionCount Them…

There is not one second of action or violence in The Russia House. It’s a very slow burn, mostly full of people talking, but I loved it.Set in the late 1980s, just as glasnost and perestroika were taking hold, Sean Connery plays Barley Blair, a drunken book publisher with a thing for Russia. A woman tries to pass him a manuscript containing nuclear secrets, but it ends up in the hands of British and American intelligence. They use Blair to figure out if the writer is legitimate and if he has…

Courage and chutzpah are needed to follow-up a classic, particularly if the new author is going to continue the classic rather than use it as starting point for something very different. The five novels of The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard published between 1990 and 2013 have been a critical and commercial sense. They tell the story of the upper middle class Cazalet family from the 1930s to the 1950s and are filled with convincing and interesting characters.…

Because water won’t wash away pencil, and chronological order makes more sense Productivity inspiration Michael Stevens has stopped writing his analog notes with a fountain pen, in favour of pencil. Because pencil on paper won’t bleed away into oblivion should the pages get soaked, as his did. Even if the pencil gets smudged, you usually have an impression on the paper that can still be read. Unless you’re going to use a waterproof ink, you might want to consider Michael’s new approach for…

It’s OK to re-read books. If you only want to show off a book count, re-reading sounds like a waste of time. But I usually find myself coming to a good book more than once: The first time because the subject was interesting. And the next time because I really needed the book. This year, I’ve re-read The Power of Now, Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth, Brain Wash, and Sleep. If someone recommends you a book you’ve already read, go read it again. That’s maybe when you really need it. If you want to…

18 Flightless | INDEX | 20 Lounge Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper.

In a recent conversation about genre, my friend challenged me to come up with specific examples instead of speaking in vibes. OK fair point 😉 I decided I’d try the same thing looking at how modern SF connects back to older SF books and films, especially after I couldn’t come up with examples of matriarchal societies in SF recently. I’m of course limited here by what I’ve read / watched. Murderbot (2017) pairs the snarkiness of Alan Rickman’s robot in the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie (2005) and the…

Andrew Rossi at Cowboy State Daily has some exiting news for anyone interested in dinosaurs: "Rex Junior" is a partial but perfectly preserved Tyrannosaurus skeleton found on the Zerbst Ranch in eastern Wyoming. A paleontologist said that the "extraordinary specimen" could rewrite 100 years of knowledge about how the T. rex looked. [...] Many details on Rex Junior are still secret, pending publication, but Sereno said this specimen from the newly discovered "mummy zone" will redefine what we…

A small historical library of my life.Assumed audience: Other little-‘o’ orthodox Christians or folks curious about my faith. (This post is not apologetic or explanatory in nature!) An acquaintance recently asked: What books or resources have been important for your theological formation? The following is a lightly annotated list of what I remember, in the order I remember reading these books. This is not a recommendation list, for two reasons: It should go without saying, but in my experience…

Against/For Translation. For all the ink splattered here to make the words appear, I am flummoxed and frustrated that there is never any excuse for translation. I am against it, for the obvious reasons of lack and limit, the failure to access idiom, to respect meanings and metaphors sipped with mother’s milk into a mother-tongue. There really is no sanity in trying, an impossible madness to try to bridge that gap with grammar or study or learning – you just won’t catch the drift or cadence of…

Darwiniana This plaque greets visitors to Christ’s, the Cambridge college where Charles Darwin was an undergraduate. Last Friday I’d been invited to lunch there by a friend who is a Fellow of the college, and afterwards she asked if I’d like to see the sitting room in his set, which had been restored to the state it might have been in 1828-1831, when he was a student. So we walked up the stairs in G staircase and there it was, complete with his gun in a rack above the mantlepiece. The earliest…

Because most people stop at the ZBut not me! — On Beyond Zebra!, by Dr. Seuss A mysterious gentleman offers to give you a bag containing as many coins of any denomination of U.S. currency as you want. A million quarters? Easy. A billion double eagles, worth $20 apiece? No problem; the magic bag will enlarge itself to make room for them. “How about infinitely many?” you ask hopefully. “Oh, I can’t do that,” says the gentleman, shaking his head. “I can only ever put finitely many coins into the…

Murder in the Mazeby J.J. ConningtonGenres: Crime, Mystery Pages: 240 Rating: Synopsis: When twin brothers Roger and Neville Shandon are murdered by poisoned darts in Whistlefield's famous hedge maze, Sir Clinton Driffield arrives to restore order. He finds two terrified witnesses - visitors to the estate - and clues aplenty in this brilliantly conceived and meticulously realized country-house mystery. J.J. Connington’s Murder in the Maze is the second book I’ve read by him, if I recall…

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Bill Pronzini WILLIAM H. HALLAHAN – The Ross Forgery. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1973. Avon, paperback, 1975. The Ross Forgery, Hallahan’s second novel, is an unusual bibliomystery with a compelling and ingenious premise. New York typographer Edgar Ross, one of those brilliant but unsuccessful types, is approached by tycoon Emmett O’ Kane, who wants him to create a forgery of a nineteen thcentury folio by Thomas Wise. O’Kane’s stated reason: to show up a fellow…

Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating (sic) such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we? Robin Hanson, 1996 or 1998 During the Cold War, it was a commonplace…

The End of Everything by M. John Harrison is a hard book to describe. Many people will want to read it because it’s a finalist for the 2026 Booker Prize. At around 200 pages, it’s a quick read in print, and just under four hours on audio. However, before buying, I highly recommend reading the sample offered by Amazon. I also recommend reading the reviews in Locus Magazine and The New York Times. The writing is clear and excellent, but the story is surreal, metaphorical, and ambiguous. The End…