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Recent Posts
- A Kinrowan Estate story: puppeteers, and their puppets
- What’s New for the 16th of August: Deborah Grabien’s music criticism essays; new Americana and jazz, and some music for the Dog Days of Summer
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Midsomer Strangeness
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Contradances
- What’s New for the 26th of July: Witches in fiction, both books and film; an Americana reissue and some music on a smoky theme
- A Kinrowan Estate story: chicken pot pieces
- What’s New for the 19th of July: Charles de Lint’s Ottawa novels with a quote from Drink Down the Moon, Gary’s review of Nordic fiddle music, It’s Michele Walther and Irina Behrendt playing Aaron Copland’s ‘Hoe Down’ from his Rodeo album
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Midsomer Odd Things
- A Kinrowan Estate story: A Library and Its Librarian
- What’s New for the Fifth of July: Remembering Jane Yolen; some new Americana and jazz music; Fishing Blues
- A Kinrowan Estate Story: Recursive Loops
- What’s New for June 21: Jennifer Stevenson’s ‘Solstice’
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Turkish Coffee
- What’s New for the 7th of June: Foxes in literature, live Balkan music, comforting jazz, Americana jazz, and wonderfully weird fusion jazz; and John Fogerty live
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Bloodied Kings
- What’s New for the 24th of May: Gary’s Review of Elizabeth Bear’s White Space novels, iain’s review of the Lonely Signal Burns novellas by her, she reading her own story, ‘The Chains That You Refuse’, and I see Gary has some tasty music reviews fir us as well
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Our Greensward
- What’s New for the 10th of May: books reviewed by Jennifer Stevenson, music by Teddy Thompson, Americana music from all over, and some live music from John Fogerty
- A Kinrowan Estate story: A Walk
- What’s New for the 26th of April: the nature of Stories; some new and newish SF, plus new world, jazz, folk and Americana music
- A Kinrowan Estate story: A Spring Day
- What’s New for the 12th of April: Some new and recent SF; new Americana, Norwegian folk rock and jazz; and thoughts on War For The Oaks
- A Kinrowan Estate story: A Unified Theory of Libraries (A Letter to Anna)
- What’s New for the 29th of March: Beer and spirits, in song and text, some new Scandinavian fiddle music and jazz flute music, and more
- A Kinrowan Estate story: A Ghostly Librarian
- What’s New for the 15th of March: some DeLint stories for early spring; lots of polskas, Serbian folk rock, progressive jazz, and Nordic music from the archives
- A Kinrowan Estate story: Hedge Witches
- What’s New for the 1st of March: Emma Bull’s War for The Oaks, Rosanne Cash’s ‘Runaway Train’, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, plus new Americana and jazz music
- A Kinrorwan Estate story: Cranachanh
- What’s New for the 15th of February: Some Seanan McGuire fantasy, Alison Bechdel’s latest, Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin; Nordic sounds, old time, Americana and Tex-Mex music
Category Archives: Books
Kurt Wolff’s Country Music: The Rough Guide
The turn of the Millennium seems as good a time as any to release this sort of book, and a better time than any in the past two decades. Country music has been in a transition period since the early … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged Americana music, country music
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Terry Pratchett’s The Truth
The title of the 25th installment in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is, like nearly everything about the book and the series, a sly reference to something in our own world. “The Truth” is the English translation of the Russian “Pravda,” … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged fantasy, science fiction, Terry Pratchett
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Judith Tick’s Ruth Crawford Seeger’s A Composer’s Search for American Music
Ruth Crawford Seeger is a pivotal but little-known figure of American music in the 20th Century. Judith Tick’s biography is a suitable monument to Crawford’s life and work. A pianist, composer, teacher and folklorist, Crawford straddled the worlds of modernist … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged Americana, biography, music lore
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S. Frederick Starr’s Louis Moreau Gottschalk
Louis Moreau Gottschalk was a pioneer of American music, one of our first truly national celebrities and a beloved citizen of the Western Hemisphere. Frederick Starr’s 1995 biography is a work of sweeping scholarship, all the more impressive for its … Continue reading
David Barbour and Richard Raleigh’s Shadows Bend
Imagine, if you will, Conan the Barbarian taking on Cthulhu and its inhuman minions, with the fate of the world at stake. Quite an image, isn’t it? Admittedly, it does sound like something you’d find in a straight-to-video movie, or … Continue reading
Hy Bender’s The Sandman Companion: A Dreamer’s Guide to the Award-Winning Comic Series
Lahri Bond wrote this review. In December 1988 a comic book debuted, which would change the face of the medium forever. The comic did not feature a superhero in brightly colored costume, a la Batman or Spiderman, nor was it … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Graphic Literature
Tagged comics, Neil Gaiman, urban fantasy
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Fred Saberhagen’s Merlin’s Bones
Rebecca Swain wrote this review. Merlin’s Bones, by the prolific Fred Saberhagen, is a wonderful fantasy with touches of science fiction. Saberhagen uses several narrators to tell a story that takes place both in the 21st century and in the … Continue reading
Molly Gloss’s Wild Life
The Bigfoot or Sasquatch has been a major figure in the folklore of the American Pacific Northwest — Oregon, Washington and Idaho in the U.S. and British Columbia in Canada — since before white Americans arrived in the early 1800s. … Continue reading
Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon
Wes Unruh wrote this review. Not your average technothriller, Cryptonomicon has nothing to do with the eldritch gods of H. P. Lovecraft. Instead, it is the best treatment of cryptography since Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Gold Bug,” and a hundred … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged science fiction, speculative fiction
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Allison Thompson’s Dancing Through Time: Western Social Dance in Literature, 1400-1918
Dance is an important window onto a culture: its mores, ethics, relations between the sexes, and social customs. The trouble is, dances and the social rules that govern their practice aren’t often written down — they’re most often passed on … Continue reading