I guess this post can be seen as an epilogue of sorts to my posts about the John Byrne reboot of the Superman titles in the mid-1980s. Essentially, I came across this 1988 issue of Superman from near the tail end of Byrne’s run: …where you might see this oddly-formatted blurb in the corner: Now around this time, DC Comics was making a big promotional push to let folks know the series was about to be released on a biweekly basis. To wit: Amazing Heroes #133 (the “Preview Special”) from earlier…

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was born in Nth Shropshire, learning at Shrewsbury Technical School. He went to Birkenhead Institute Liverpool & Shrewsbury Technical College, then worked as a pupil-teacher in a poor rural parish. So he had to start teaching in Bordeaux to earn money, just as war broke out in mid-1914.He enlisted in the British Army in 1915 and by Jan 1916 he saw active service in the trenches on the Western Front. Owen wrote poetry during this time, and his work was heavily influenced…

A Garden Of Spheres by Linnea Sterte is one of the best things I have read all year, and I've had a pretty good year of reading things. It is my favorite ever graphic novel. It is a near wordless science-fantasy journey across realms and generations, and has a story but you really shouldn't read for one. It is self-evidently one of the most beautiful things I've laid eyes on.

Aaron Worth (editor)British Library From the peaks of Eryri to hidden valleys and haunted mines, the storied landscapes of Wales have inspired centuries of myth and folklore. Over time, these tales of the unexplained and the Otherworld have formed a unique strain of weird fiction. Continuing the British Library's 'Gilded Nightmares' series of lavish hardbacks is this rather fabulous collection of stories exploring the darker side of Wales. One only needs to glance at the Welsh flag to…

Omniscient Reader's Viewpointby Sleepy-C, Umi, singNsongGenres: Fantasy, Manga Pages: 248 Series: Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint (manhwa) #3 Rating: Synopsis: With all the food destroyed by the goblin, Dokja’s group is forced to venture into the dark tunnels teeming with vicious creatures. But in the cruel new world, monsters are not the most dangerous enemies. When the atrocities committed by the “Major Group” come to light, chaos ensues in Geumho Station. And amidst the bloodshed, Huiwon’s…

"I used to send a list of 40 books of novels and poetry to the newly accepted students." — Juhani Pallasmaa, Designers & Books This morning I woke up reading a passage from Desiderare, a novel by the Italian neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara. In the passage, two characters are waiting for a bus near the ancient Temple of Segesta in Sicily. One of them begins describing an imaginary garden. The passage brought me immediately back to Juhani Pallasmaa. As he wrote in The Atmospheric Sense: "When…

I've been working all month on the story for the Indie Web Fiction carnival, which I am hosting, but the plot got so good, that I am on draft 4... I hope to finish by the last day of October even if I do not revise it; I reserve the right to change it after a month when I actually revise... it might be too long to revise in one day. ????#writing #indieweb_carnival #sunflowers #fictionThank you for following my feed! ♥ Leave a reply here.

Please do not understand me too quickly. Came across this quote via an old interview with Richard Ayoade when he was asked what he would change in the world. “I suppose maybe, maybe a slight slowing down.” “Of the world?” “Yes, of quickness, to feel that comprehension has been reached.” The quote is originally from André Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican. « Ne me comprenez pas si vite, je vous en prie. » Not sure I have the stamina for it right now but would like to read it eventually. Apparently…

Since the early days of crime fiction dogs have been a part of the picture, on the page and in the lives of the authors who wrote such works. Some authors had pet dogs such as Agatha Christie, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Georgette Heyer. James Norman, in fact, used his dogs as a means of discouraging dinner guests from returning, by having his pets lick everyone’s dishes clean before putting them back on the shelves (one hopes he washed them properly after his, no doubt, horrified guests left).…

So – as I mentioned elsewhere, this project is based on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die books. And I do mean “books” – there have been multiple editions, and each time we get a new edition, the editors make some updates. Instead of picking one of the editions (there have been a little over 20 since the first one), I decided to include every movie that was included in any version of the book. They were coming out every year or so for a good while – but in 2021 they stopped. ….And…

This is an experiment. At an online Homebrew Website Club on Wednesday talk turned to week notes, the ones we liked, why we liked them, and so on. Some are mostly personal reflections, others are mostly links, and naturally some are a mixture of both. The ones I like tend towards the linky, but when challenged to share some of the links I had myself enjoyed I couldn't. So, an experiment. Each week or thereabouts, a few links I have enjoyed for one reason or another. Here goes, with no promises.…

I’m six weeks out from a book deadline, which means all of my brain is going to be dealing with that and I will have no brain cycles left to do much of anything else, including evaluating new fiction to see if I want to blurb it, so: I am on blurb hiatus through the end of 2026 at least. If you send me an email asking me to consider a book for blurbing between now and, oh, let’s say, January 15, 2027, it’s going to be a pass from me. The issue is not the book, it’s my writing deadline and a…

In fiction face slapping is about getting revenge for past wrongs. There may be some actual physical slapping involved but the revenge is the most important thing. The humiliation of the person or group that once wronged the main character is key. The face slapping trope is tied to Asian culture and is popular in web novels, light novels, mangas, etc. Pick a random web novel from any genre and you’re likely to find someone bullying the main character while they’re still weak and unable to…

The Last Song of Penelope – Claire North Odysseys is back on Ithaca. Things do not go well for the suitors, and thus for Penelope and her maids. And where Christopher Nolan sent Penelope and Odysseys sailing off into the sunset leaving Telemachus to take the reigning reins…. Claire North, and Athena, give us the battle of Laertes’ Farm. A satisfying end to the trilogy. Publisher page: The Last Song of Penelope – Claire North

Literary critics have long discussed Shakespeare’s so-called “problem plays,” meaning the ones that fail to slot comfortably into one of the established genres of comedy, tragedy, and history. (The last of these genres being, of course, another invention of Shakespeare himself.) The Taming of the Shrew is not a problem play by this definition. It is, however, problematic in a whole different way for the 21st-century reader or viewer, what with its plot that revolves around an alpha-male putting…

The cynical part of me wonders whether Helen Ashton had embarked on writing a biography of Jane Austen when she decided it would be easier to make it a novel instead. That’s probably unfair, since she turned her hand to a number of biographical novels for a range of figures – but I’ll admit that I couldn’t quite get the thought out of my head throughout my whole time reading Parson Austen’s Daughter. The ‘novel’ (more on those inverted commas later) follows Jane Austen from before her birth…

Mediocrity rises to the middle… or in the case of this month's Galactoscope, to our first book review installment. Still, if there's nothing exceptional amongst the following SFnal quarter, that doesn't mean they aren't worth noting: By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall Les Guérillères, by Monique Wittig (Trans. by David Le Vay) Uncredited Cover Illustration Do you … Continue reading [October 16, 1971] The Double Molecule Men… (October Galactoscope) → The post [October 16, 1971] The Double Molecule Men……

Slow Fiction sound like a lotta things; there’s all of shoegaze, post-punk, garage rock in there, but you wouldn’t even think about using one of those as a single descriptive adjective for them when there exists the perfect one – New York. Just like the city they hail from can’t be done justice by any […] The post Slow Fiction – “Turning Down Flowers” appeared first on Space Echo.

The plate for Chapter 82, in the pop art style. That’s Samantha and Cooper, running up the road below the cabin. Yesterday Phin and I finished chapter 82 of Zero Knowledge. Counting the chapters I’ve inserted along the way, that’s 116 chapters of the shitty first draft, with 21 to go. The last time I wrote about this here was twenty chapters in, back in July. A lot has changed since then, so I thought I’d do a full update. If you’re new to this, Zero Knowledge is a near-term sci-fi…

by Jonathan Blaustein Taryn Simon has been one of my favorite photographers for a while now. I used her seminal book, “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” as a teaching tool for years, during a lecture about photo books. For the uninitiated, Taryn Simon is an investigative artist, with a team of researchers, (and access to the Upper Class via multiple routes,) so her ability to gain entry to places inaccessible to the rest of us, and put financial and human resources towards…

This is satire … and like all great satire, it exposes the truth but it's not real. Not written by me either. I just copied it into the page. I didn’t know who wrote it but I know now. Peter Girnus (you can easily look him up).“I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.I know. I know. I think about it on the…

I’m not sure if I’ll ever have the same delighted confusion as I did in 2009 when my company, Six to Start, won SXSW’s Experimental award for We Tell Stories. The website for Penguin Books had launched the previous year, a showcase for its authors to tell stories in unusual, online-only ways, like Charles Cumming’s Google Maps-based The 21 Steps and Nicci French’s two-handed live-writing story Your Place and Mine. We were ushered out of the main auditorium to do press interviews for just a few…

this is a collaborative post: concepts and words by Jamie Martinez and josh martinez.Today’s post is the 300th on be the future! I published my first essay here way back in 2019, a time when everyone thought things were the worst they could ever get. My husband Jamie has supported this outlet and my work from the very beginning. They helped me celebrate be the future's 300th post the same we celebrated the 200th and 100th post before it: by co-writing a film essay!For our first essay, we wrote…

A synopsis can’t do it justice, really—and so, while I’m the sort of person who usually scoffs at the Spoiler Police, consider yourself warned: I think you really do have to see Digger cold, which means you have to go through the rug-pull move around a third of the way through and stay with it. (I was warned in advance that there was a rug-pull, though not of its nature—and it was still jarring, but mostly I think in a good way? But I can well believe that a lot of the negative reviews I’ve…

Hot on the heels of reading and enjoying The Mountain In The Sea, I picked up Ray Nayler’s next work, this tightly constructed novella. Once again it deals with inter-species communication. This time it’s de-extincted mammoths. Once again, it’s set in the relatively near future. Many of the same gadgets reappear in this book. It may well be set in the same world. There’s a tangible atmosphere to this story. But despite it’s high-tech premise, it’s not escapist. The narrative is driven by the…

This is the first time that I’ve read a Sherlock Holmes novel. I’d seen several film and TV adaptations over the years, but they never particularly grabbed me. I thought I’d give one of the books a go since I’ve got a new ebook reader and loaded it up with public domain books. The device is an Xteink X4 Pro, which is a tiny little thing. I bought it to keep in my pocket in the hope that I will reach for it over my phone. I want to stop ending up on Reddit reading things that just make me…

Learning about Taiwan's history through period dramas. Growing up as an American kid in the 90s, Anne of Green Gables (1985) was one of the period dramas I enjoyed watching. I read the book first, so naturally I enjoyed the episodes I caught on TV. Later on in high school, a friend lent me her entire VHS collection of Pride and Prejudice (1995). I watched them all, but decided that I had enough of period dramas. Most of the period dramas that my peers watched were about World War II or British…

Can this really be true? The Economist of 10 October insists that Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre is wildly popular with the Chinese government; apparently it was recently decreed as compulsory reading for all students in Chinese secondary schools. The Economist attributes the official popularity of the book to the nation’s falling birth rate. Having abandoned a single-child policy the Chinese government is now encouraging as much and as early marriage and child-bearing as they can…

Charles Issawi, quoted in Bernard Lewis, Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), page number unknown (chapter 10): There are five ages of professors—tireless, tiring, tiresome, tired and retired...

At The Guardian Tom Gauld lays out in graphic form the algorithm which AI will need to follow to give us more Jane Austen novels. © Tom Gauld, The Guardian