Orcs and Oulipo – TLS piece by Peter Hoskin on Fighting Fantasy
There’s an affectionate piece on Fighting Fantasy books on the TLS website by Peter Hoskin (I am not sure if “TLS Online” means it will not appear in the print…
“the overbearing mother, the emotional repression, the teasing sort-of girlfriend, the constant guilt and fear ” – draft review of The Cure, Rachel Genn, TLS, 2011
The TLS ultimately used a much edited version of this review of a book I evidently didn’t like. Perhaps I was uncomfortable with the line “having sex with Séamus in…
“The story-within-a-story done right” : review of “The World House”, Guy Adams, SF Site 2010
Original here. Despite my enthusiasm here – and what I wrote in the penultimate paragraph – I didn’t read any of the succeeding books in this series. I was never,…
“Genius is a much abused word” – piece on Goethe and the “Great Man” school of history for Eurotimes, 2008
On my other blog I have very occasionally posted copies of reviews I did for Eurotimes, the journal of the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons. Such gems of…
Argentina’s Dark Half-Century: Review of Lewis Shiner’s “Dark Tangos”, SF Site, 2012
I reviewed Shiner’s definitely SF short story collection Love in Vain for SF Site also. This was a highly impressive “mainstream” novel which comes highly recommended as the review hopefully…
A butterfly in the woods: guerrilla forest art in Millennium Forest Kilkenny
Walking in the Millennium Forest in Kilkenny I saw in the distance what seemed like an unbelievably considerate butterfly lying still on a tree trunk: As I approached, it was suspiciously still…
“Something terrifying and majestic at the same time” – From “Broken April’, Ismail Kadare
Without the knocking at the door, everything would be so different that at times he was afraid to think of it, and he consoled himself with the notion that perhaps…
“occultist, explorer, traveler, cannibal, and journalist”
Reading F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up I came across a reference to a William Seabrook: William Seabrook in an unsympathetic book tells, with some pride and a movie ending, of…
Séamus Sweeney 