Category Archives: Books

Clinton Heylin’s No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny

Chris Woods penned this review. In some ways it’s apposite that a book written about an artist as emotionally charged and mercurial as Sandy Denny should itself have had a difficult and rocky genesis. Some people, myself included, were expecting … Continue reading

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Maryrose Wood’s What I Wore To Save The World 

America’s a melting pot, or so it’s been said.  After a few generations though, things start getting hazy around the edges.  Tales of the Old Country start to fade from memory (if they were ever passed down at all), and … Continue reading

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Avram Davidson’s Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends

I have had the distinct pleasure through the years of being in line for a number of reissues and new editions of works by some of the great writers of the Golden Age of science fiction and fantasy. Maybe it’s … Continue reading

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Melissa Sweet’s Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White

I have to admit, I worried I didn’t know enough about E.B. White to do justice to this book.  I’m a huge fan of Charlotte’s Web; but who isn’t?  Though I needn’t have worried; Sweet did all the work for … Continue reading

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Elizabeth Bear’s Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired

It’s rather odd, from my point of view, to be sitting here after an intensive course in the works of Elizabeth Bear and finally have a chance to consider her first published novels, Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired. These were greeted … Continue reading

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Toby Faber’s Stradivari’s Genius: Five Violins, One Cello, and Three Centuries of Enduring Perfection

One of the most shamefully puzzling phenomena in the history of our continual technological “progress” is the simple fact that a violin maker of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries manufactured instruments that no one has since been able … Continue reading

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Colin Symes’ Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording

One of the fundamental concepts of contemporary critical theory, whether it be post-modern, feminist, post-colonial, queer theory, or whatever subset one has chosen, is “discourse.” Discourse in this sense is not to be taken as mere converse employing words as … Continue reading

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Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren

Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren was originally published in 1974. It was brash, it was overtly experimental, it was greeted with everything from wild hallelujahs to roars of outrage. It was in many ways the culmination of science fiction’s New Wave: … Continue reading

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Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews

A bit of history: I don’t really remember when I started reading Samuel R. Delany’s novels. Looking at the list of his works, I seem to have pretty much kept up with everything through the mid-eighties, which is roughly the … Continue reading

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Alex Vernon’s On Tarzan

Tarzan is one of those icons of popular culture that has taken on a resonance that runs from the personal to the mythic. One of the ironies that underlies Alex Vernon’s On Tarzan is that old question that I confront … Continue reading

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