Category Archives: Books

Philip Freeman’s Celtic Mythology: Tales of Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes

The Library here at Kinrowan Hall has hundreds of books, pamphlets and more ephemeral material concerning Celtic mythology such as Audrey L. Becker and Kristin Noone’s Welsh Mythology and Folklore in Popular Culture, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt’s Gods and Heroes of the … Continue reading

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Ursula Le Guin’s The Selected Short Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin: The Found and the Lost and The Unreal and the Real

I think the first piece of fiction I read by Ursula Le Guin was The Dispossessed followed closely by The Left Hand of Darkness. Sometime after that I read the original trilogy of novels that would eventually be seven novels … Continue reading

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Dominic Parisien and Navah Wolfe’s The Starlight Wood: New Fairy Tales

Some books you buy for the stories within, some books you buy for the sheer joy of what they look like, such as the British edition of Charles de Lint’s Someplace To Be Flying for its cover art as I did, or … Continue reading

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James Stoddard’s The High House and The False House

Welcome to the House that God built. Evenmere, the High House, that unending ever-changing building which crosses and contains worlds. It is, and represents, all Creation, an enigma, a parable, a mystery. Within its halls and rooms, passages and basements, … Continue reading

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Richard A. Straw and H. Tyler Blethen, eds., High Mountains Rising: Appalachia in Time and Place

“Perhaps all the stereotypes of Appalachian folklife ought to be discarded. The culture of Appalachia is neither unqiue nor monolithic.” Thus Michael Ann Williams summarizes her chapter on Appalachian folklore in High Mountains Rising, a broad, even panoramic study of … Continue reading

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Peter S. Beagle’s The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances

Peter S. Beagle lives and writes in a universe where anything can happen, and probably will. He is also one of those writers whose books should carry a warning label. However, I can’t tell you what the warning label should … Continue reading

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China Miéville’s The City & The City

China Miéville calls himself a writer of “weird fiction,” in the tradition of Lovecraft, and that works for me, since he seems to otherwise defy easy categorization. Dark contemporary fantasy/steampunk/mystery/horror is how I’ve described Perdido Street Station to friends in … Continue reading

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Otto Penzler’s The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps 

This formidable anthology is subtitled The Best Crime Stories From The Pulps During Their Golden Age — The ’20s, ’30’s And ’40s. With a couple of exceptions, that is a fairly accurate description. At its best, pulp fiction works like a … Continue reading

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Ray Bradbury’s Death Is a Lonely Business

Craig Clarke penned this review. In 1985, over twenty years since the publication of his last full-length work, 1962’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury reentered the novel-writing world with the release of Death is a Lonely Business, his foray into a … Continue reading

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Jeff Siegel’s The American Detective: An Illustrated History

Mark Cenczyk penned this review. The course taken by American mystery fiction can politely be described as circuitous. The genre has been regarded largely as second-tier reading by the greater public, a fact that can be confirmed by even the most … Continue reading

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