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Recent Posts
- What’s New for the 22nd of June: books about baseball, air travel most unusual, some music about baseball (and some not)
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Handfasting (A Letter to Katrina)
- What’s New for the 8th of June: kibbles and bits — lots of fairy tales, steamy anime, a Cairo comic, new jazz, an archival grab bag, and a Kitchen tale
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Our Cats
- What’s New for the 25th of May: new and notable SFF books; Murderbot on TV, and some Star Wars prequel movies; new jazz music and some tasty archival selections; food & steelworker strikes; and a novel Tarot deck
- What’s New for the 11th of May: Special Jack Zipes edition on fairy tales; an obsure Tam Lin film treatment; songs that tell stories; new jazz, Danish fiddle tunes, Norwegian women’s vocal music; Russian and Eastern European food and cooking, and more
- What’s New for the 27th of April: Tim Pratt & Heather Shaw’s fiction and Flytrap zine; Tea with Jane Austen; a fine French fairy tale film; some new jazz and archival francophone music reviews; and the Stones!
- A Kinrowan Estate story: A Most Beguiling Cookbook
- What’s New for the 13th of April: Anthony Bourdain in print and video; Calexico, Giant Sand and related music; new recordings of ragas, Nordic songs, and vocal jazz, ‘The Night They Drive Old Dixie Down’ performed by The Band
- A Kinrowan Story: We Lost The Cheshire Cat
- What’s New for the 30th of March: Space Opera by Niven & Pournell, Arkady Martine, C. J. Cherryh, Elizabeth Bear, Simon Jimenez and more; Kage reads for us ‘The Empress of Mars’, a novella she wrote; a grab bag of music including new Buryat folk music; The Ukrainians; live music from the Scottish band Iron Horse; Gail Simone graphic novels; Farscape; and of course chocolate
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Our Rooms
- What’s New of 16th of March: A variety of mysteries; some new Scottish music by an old band, new jazz, and splendid archival reviews; ballads in graphic novel form; and chocolate in Paris
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Pub Ghoulies
- What’s New of 2nd of March: Kibbles and Bits including ghostly stories, the Hotel California, music picked by Gary of course
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Quotes that aren’t
- What’s New for the 16th of February: Books by and about Bob Dylan, and music by Dylan and others; plus some new world music and jazz
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Unreliable Narrators
- What’s New for the 2nd of February: All about the Oz books, green man lore, and gargoyles; Baltic polyphony, East-West ambient psychedelia, and a grab bag of other music
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Knit One, Purl Two
- What’s New for the 19th of January: Go Ahead, Be Pleasantly Surprised At What’s Here
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Ancients and Venerables of Guild of St. Nicholas
- What’s New for the 5th of January: A look back at books Gary reviewed in 2024; some seasonally appropriate Nordic music and a little new jazz
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Biscuits
- What’s New for the 22nd of December: A Solstice Story, Crow Girls, Scrooge, Marley, Elizabeth I, Revels and more festive holiday reading; The Lion in Winter on stage and screen; Jethro Tull, Steeleye Span, Christine Lavin, swinging jazz and more holiday sounds
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Fireplaces
- What’s New for the 8th of December: Elizabeth Bear fiction; some holiday related offerings including new music from The Unthanks, Americana tinged jazz, Polar Express, and more
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Eggnog
- What’s New for the 24th of November: Norwegian winter holiday music, archival jazz, new roots music from around Europe, and more; books and what not about things fictional & medæival
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Pudding
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Category Archives: Books
Ivan Day’s Ice Cream: A History
Ask anyone waving around a Drumstick cone or Klondike Bar where ice cream comes from, and you’re lucky if you get a smart-aleck response like “the freezer.” Ice cream may be near universally loved (there’s an ice cream truck going … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Food and Drink
Tagged food and drink, ice cream
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Three 2025 novels from notable authors
Egyptian Motherlode by David Sandner and Jacob Weisman, Tachyon Press 2025 This book is a series of acid trips taken during a series of concerts by a series of people who are all connected, who perform in the same concerts, … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged 60s funk, A Far Better Thing, A Tale of Two Cities, acid trips, artificial universes, David Sandner, Dickens, Egyptian Motherlode, H.G. Parry, Jacob Weisman, Mary G. Thompson, multiverses, music, One Level Up
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Daniel Karaczun’s Out of This Kitchen: A History of the Ethnic Groups and Their Foods in Steel Valley
Food is part of the daily life of everyone, but the labouring class that worked in particularly dangerous occupations such as mining and steel making came to consider food more than something that you ate to keep going: food was … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Food and Drink
Tagged American sports history, food and drink, history
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Lesley Chamberlain’s The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe
I have previously reviewed The Food and Cooking of Russia, and I am finally ready to tell you about Chamberlain’s companion volume, The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe. Both are reissues of books initially released in the 1980s. This … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Food and Drink
Tagged food and drink
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Lesley Chamberlain’s The Food and Cooking of Russia
I decided to stretch my reviewing muscles and try something a little different this time around, by accepting two regional cookbooks. The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe is now out as well, but today, from the same author, we … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Food and Drink
Tagged food and drink
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Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus’s The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad
A while back Gary Whitehouse reviewed a compilation CD entitled The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad here in these very pages. It was a CD containing twenty American “ballads.” The book of the … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Music
Tagged folk music
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Alison Lurie’s Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter
“It often seems that the most gifted authors of books for children are not like other writers: instead, in some essential way, they are children themselves. There may be outward signs of this condition: these people may prefer the company … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged Children's literature, fairy tales
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The Brothers Grimm and T.A. Dockray’s Grimm’s Grimmest; introduction by Maria Tatar
So you want read a nice, pleasant story with a happy ending to your daughter as she drifts off to sleep? Let’s see what offered up in Grimm’s Grimmest… Hmmm… There’s the story of the woman who decapitates her stepson, … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Graphic Literature
Tagged fairy tales, folklore, the brothers grimm
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Maria Tatar’s The Annotated Brothers Grimm
I can’t even guess how many editions of The Brothers Grimm there have been printed since the Victorian Era. Hundreds would be a safe guess, but if I’d add in the various chapbooks and the like that printed illustrated versions … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged fairy tales, the brothers grimm
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Jack Zipes’s The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature
Do come in. Just give me a moment to mark my place in Patricia McKillip’s Solstice Wood, the novel I’m reading just now. Did you know that she started her exemplary career writing young adult fiction, including The House on … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged Children's literature
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