Quantcast
Channel: Sweet Freedom
Viewing all 1181 articles
Browse latest View live
↧

links to texts: 2017 Best Short Story Anthony Nominees (crossposted from Bouchercon site)

October 4, 2017, 7:14 am
$
0
0

2017 Best Short Story Anthony Nominees

by admin | Oct 3, 2017 | Anthony Awards | 

With thanks to the authors and publishers, click below to check out the anthologies the nominated stories are in and to read each of the stories nominated for a 2017 Anthony Award for Best Short Story!
                
Click each link below to read the stories and click the covers above to buy the anthologies in which each story is published
↧
Search

Saturday Music Club on Thursday: Spirits

October 4, 2017, 10:47 pm
$
0
0
Suzanne Santo: "Ghost in My Bed"


Kasey Lansdale: "Ghost"


Judy Collins: "Pretty Polly"


The Zombies: "Just Out of Reach"


The Zombies: "Come on Time"

"Come on Time" trailer cut

The Zombies: "Remember You" (soundtrack version)


Serena Ryder: "Electric Love"


Jill Sobule and John Doe & co.: "Down by the River"


Planxty: "When First Unto This Country..."


The New Lost City Ramblers: "He's Coming to Us Dead"


Rainbow Quest: Pete Seeger with guests Doc Watson, Clint Howard & Fred Price (out of sync for the first half)


Jay Terrell & Higher Praise featuring Debbie Austin: "Tis So Sweet"
↧
↧

MAGAZINE OF HORROR, V.1 N.1, August 1963, edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes (Health Knowledge, Inc.); GAMMA V.1, N.1, July 1963, edited by Charles Fritch (Star Press, Inc.)

October 6, 2017, 4:29 am
$
0
0
Two magazines which offered their first issues in the summer of 1963; both were on newsstands in July. Both would offer a mix of fantasy (very much including horror), some sf and (as has often been the case with fantasy-fiction magazines over the decades) some stories that were more fantastic-adjacent than departures from consensus reality.

Both were produced on modest budgets, but Gamma featured a full-color cover and relatively good paper, if a saddle-stapled binding; the first issue of Magazine of Horror (the lack of article in the title has always seemed awkward to me) was on a lower grade of paper, but the first issue, at least, was perfect-bound (glued, with a spine), though not long after, the MOH would also go to staple-binding. 

And, in their mix of new and reprinted content, the two magazines come off rather more similarly than one might expect, particularly as the Magazine of Horror was both economically but also by intent delving largely into public domain reprints from the pulps, most importantly Weird Tales, and earlier fiction from other sources, featuring reprints from Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Chambers and H.G. Wells along with the WT crew, while Gamma (with some if limited visual art within) was devoted to showcasing the "Little Bradburys" of the Los Angeles area, many of whom were screenwriters and not a few in Rod Serling's stable of contributors to The Twilight Zone...hence the prominence, aside from commercial good sense, in highlighting Bradbury's (reprinted) contributions, the Serling interview, and a piece of juvenilia by Tennessee Williams published in Weird Tales (and also conveniently in the public domain); the other reprints in Gamma include decade-old stories from other fantasy/sf magazines and one of the most prominent fanzines of the time, a poem from a regional magazine and one of a number of vignettes commissioned for an advertising series that ran in Scientific American. Chatty headnotes to the stories and other expressions of strong editorial presence are hard to miss in both issues. 































Gamma [v1 #1, #1, 1963] (50¢, 128pp+, digest, cover by Morris Scott Dollens) Editors: Charles E. Fritch, Editor; Jack Matcha, Executive Editor; William F. Nolan, Managing Editor
































Magazine of Horror and Strange Stories [v1 #1, #1, August 1963] ed. Robert A. W. Lowndes (Health Knowledge Inc., 50¢, 132pp, digest) 
Both magazines lead off with stories by the kind of writers who would predominate throughout their runs; unfortunately neither is a first-rate story. Frank Belknap Long's "The Man with a Thousand Legs" is in fact a tone-deaf attempt to do Lovecraftian overstatement (which Lovecraft himself wasn't so good at), clunking along through one clumsy turn of phrase after another (and exactly one good one, when it's suggested a shell game con-man will look upon a potential source of income as his oyster); Charles Beaumont, probably the most widely-respected of the group of writers dismissively tagged "little Bradburys" by some, but who notably could dig a bit deeper in his best work than Bradbury usually was able to, provides something very much like a Bradbury version of a Manly Wade Wellman story set among rural folk coping with a very old and eyeless man, replete with pet raven and guitar, who serves as a warning (harbinger?) of death when he comes down the hill and plays and sings his "Mourning Song" in front of the house of the soon-dead for however many days till the death actually occurs. By 1963, Beaumont was probably already dependent on his friends to finish when not completely ghost his work for him, as the early-onset Alzheimer's which would kill him was already making its presence known. Long's story is among his earliest work, but he did make some judicious rewrites at Lowndes's request (presumably excising some though not all the racist language in the original)...but not nearly enough of them. 

Wallace West is next up in the MOH, with "A Thing of Beauty," a Weird Tales reject that presumably sat in a drawer for three decades, and perhaps deservedly, though it's certainly a better story than the Long; a hunchbacked functionary at a medical school becomes obsessed with the corpse of a young woman, a suicide-by-gas, one of those he's charged with preserving for purposes of med student dissection. His rhapsodies over her nude form allow West to have him recite no little Romantic poetry, the caretaker's other obsession. WT editor Farnsworth Wright supposedly rejected the story as too distasteful, though its frankness is one of its few strengths. In the Gamma issue, Fritz Leiber's "Crimes Against Passion" is a playlet, one of his surprisingly few explorations of that form (given his theatrical background and love of the work of Shakespeare and John Webster, among others). It's also an excuse to rummage about mostly in Shakespeare's plays and to a lesser extent those of Aeschylus, while making weak jokes at the expense of modern psychiatry...this piece is one of the weaker Leiber stories I've read, and feels like the kind of thing that usually would've gone to one of the more literate fanzines normally. Leiber is a better artist than West, but neither is swinging for the fences in these, even given the indulgence in hat-tipping to their literary favorites. The West isn' t horror fiction or at least is non-fantasticated; the Leiber is so much a stage jape that it barely registers as fantasy. 

The next (reprinted) stories in each issues might mark an upturn, but I've yet to read them (an excerpt from The King in Yellow by Chambers, a Bradbury story from the end of  his most productive period); the new Silverberg and Wollheim stories in the MOH are good examples of what these writers can do, and I'm looking forward to the Ray Russell original and Kris Neville reprint in Gamma particularly, while holding out less hope for the Ackerman collaboration, never published with recognition of that collaborative authorship, and supposedly rewritten from a 1953 appearance in the literate fanzine Inside. The Wells story and Twain tall tale are good work, from my memory of them, decades ago...this review will be updated over the next day or so...

For more of today's books (and perhaps more magazines or short fiction), please see Patti Abbott's blog. 


↧

Overlooked A/V: 11 October 2017 Part 1

October 11, 2017, 2:31 pm
$
0
0
Alice Chang:  "NC, Esq." on Titanic; Dark Souls 3

A. J. Wright: Frances Bergen

the Allan Fish Online Film Festival 2017

Anne Billson:  Horror and Women; That Darn Cat  (1965 film)(Cat of the Day); Lav Story: Toilets in Film

The Big Broadcast: 8 October

Bill Crider: The True Story of Jesse James [trailer]; The Purple Mask[excerpt]; Harlan Coben's The Five[promo]; Black Bart[excerpt]; Solomon Kane[trailer]; The Third Man (NTA/BBC tv series); Phantom Lady[trailer];
This is Elvis[trailer]; Bulldog Drummond (1929 film); The Count of Monte Cristo (1956 tv series); Rock! Rock! Rock! [trailer]; Scaramouche (1923 silent film); The Face of Fu Manchu [trailer]; The Four Feathers (1939 film) [trailer]; The Prisoner of Zenda (1952 film) [trailer]; The Prisoner of Zenda (1937 film)[trailer];In a Valley of Violence [trailer]








The Faculty of Horror: Gremlins (1984); 31 Days of Halloween: Andrea,and Alex; Cube

How Did This Get Made?: The Wraith


Much more to come...
↧

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Friday, 13 October 2017: the links to the reviews and more

October 13, 2017, 12:33 pm
$
0
0
This week's selections of books (and magazines, short fiction and poetry) offered for your attention, after receiving too little at least of late, according to the contributors (along with the occasional warning...only two of those this week, I think). Michael Gilbert is the writer of the week, by a nose or a preface. If I've missed yours or someone else's book, please let me know in comments. Patti Abbott will be back at compilation, after coming back from the Toronto Bouchercon, next week...

Hephzibah Anderson: The Great Writers Now Forgotten

Bernadette: A Case of Two Cities by Qiu Xiaolong

Les Blatt: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers

Brian Busby: Edna Jacques, poet

Alice Chang: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Bill Crider: Bloody Vengeance by Jack Ehrlich; The Villa of Mysteries by David Hewson; King Buff by Ellis Christian Lenz

Martin Edwards: Fear to Tread by Michael Gilbert

Peter Enfantino, Jack Seabrook and Jose Cruz: EC Comics, January 1954

Will Errickson: Deathchain by Ken Greenhall

Curtis Evans: Death Came Softly and Crook o'Lune by ECR Lorac

Fred Fitch: Nobody Runs Forever by Donald Westlake

Paul Fraser: Unknown Worlds, December 1942, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr.

John Grant: Dark Passage by David Goodis;Helliconia by Brian Aldiss

Rich Horton: You Shall Know Them by "Vercors" (Jean Bruller) translated by Rita Barisse; Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, January and February 1964, edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli (featuring The Lords of Quarmall by Fritz Leiber and Harry Fischer)

Jerry House: Past Times by Poul Anderson

Nick Jones: The Rediscovery of Mankind by "Cordwainer Smith" (Paul Linebarger); Infinite Stars edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

Tracy K: Bodies Are Where You Find Them by "Brett Halliday" (Davis Dresser)

George Kelley: How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction edited by J. N. Williamson

Joe Kenney: Balzan of the Cat People: The Caves of Madness by "Wallace Moore" (Gerry/Gerard F. Conway)

Margot Kinberg: Close Quarters by Michael Gilbert

Rob Kitchin: Moth by James Sallis

Richard Krauss: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (first edition) edited by Peter Nicholls 

B. V. Lawson: The Abandoned Room by Charles Wadsworth Camp

Evan Lewis: Little Caeser by W. R. Burnett

Steve Lewis: Dead or Alive by Patricia Wentworth; "The Avenging Phonograph" by E. R. Punshon; Why Me? by Donald Westlake

Gideon Marcus: If, November 1962, edited by Frederik Pohl

Todd Mason:  First issues, July/August 1963: Gamma edited by Charles Fritch; Magazine of Horror edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes, and the three other fantasy-fiction magazines then professionally publishing in English

Marcia Muller: Finding Maubee aka The Calypso Murders by A. H. Z. Carr

Neeru: Close Quarters by Michael Gilbert

Juri Nummelin: All the Young Warriors by Anthony Neil Smith

Matt Paust: CannaCorn by Con Chapman

James Reasoner: Never Say No to a Killer by Clifton Adams

Gerard Saylor: Tobacco Stained Mountain Goat by Andrez Bergen; Rusty Puppy by Joe R. Lansdale

Kevin Tipple: Spirit of Steamboat by Craig Johnson

"TomCat": The Haunted Gallery by John Russell Fearn

Prashant Trikannad: secondhand bookselling in Mumbai and nearby

Samuel Wilson: Barbed Wire by Elmer Kelton; "Oysthers" by Gordon Young


↧
↧

2017 Anthony and Macavity Awards

October 15, 2017, 2:43 pm
$
0
0
↧

Your Ed Emshwiller cover painting for the day.

October 18, 2017, 11:08 am
$
0
0
January 1962 issue, edited by Cele Goldsmith. Also features stories by J. G Ballard, Miriam Allen deFord and others. "The Mars Snooper" is journalism by the concept artist Frank Tinsley about a proposed type of atomic-energy-fueled rocket; probably happily, it didn't get too much further into reality than an Estes model rocket kit. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?56381

I haven't read Bova's story, to know at all what his towers might've been inspired by (though Simon Rodia was another son of Italy), but the resemblance to a Watts Tower of the tallest segment in the painting is pretty obviously intentional...

The Estes model kit:

Did you ever fire off model rockets? I was just a little late for Centuri rockets, though had some Estes models. Lost one by putting a too-powerful engine in it, though watching it going up about 3000 feet was arguably worth it (it was one of the lightest, most basic models).



↧

FFM: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1976, edited by Edward Ferman (Mercury Press 1975)

October 20, 2017, 2:17 am
$
0
0
Stories by Joanna Russ, Kit Reed and Stuart Dybek, and the best columnists in the fiction-magazine field.

This was the first issue of F&SF I ever held in my hand. It might not've been the first issue to appear on the newsstand of the Hazardville, CT, drug store where I bought my comic books, then running at an industry standard of a quarter apiece, except for the fatter ones. I had bought a very few paperback books off the spinner rack next to the comics, including a copy of Harry Harrison's anthology of new fiction (and an Alfred Bester memoir) Nova 4 as a birthday gift for my father. That edition was a Manor Book, a reputedly mobbed up outfit that seemed overrepresented on the paperback spinner rack, even as there was never any lack of Charlton Comics in the comic-book spinner (similar accusations). Considering the degree to which magazine distribution in the '70s was often a great source of legit business and money laundering for certain entrepreneurs, it might've been almost surprising how many DC and Marvel and Archie and Gold Key comics were also on the racks, though I'm sure the distribution mobsters weren't going to lose any legit profit just to make their brothers in paperback or comics publishing happier or richer. 
    Meanwhile, the little magazine rack had some items of interest from time to time...I bought an issue of National Lampoon there, I think a bit earlier or later since I road my bike over to do so, less likely in December. My mother confiscated and returned it to the store, and got a refund, delivering a ukase to me and a bored clerk never to attempt a similar transaction again. (I think my father, a Playboy subscriber for some years, must've bought the other two or three issues around the house. I assume my mother bought the Playgirls, or Dad bought them for her...possible she ordered it through Publisher's Clearing House. She never believed you could win their sweepstakes without buying something.)
    And I had certainly been aware of digest-sized fiction magazines. The earliest reading I remember includes a science-fiction pulp reprint magazine, which one I still haven't rediscovered, and a DC sf comic book, likewise; I loved my few copies of Humpty Dumpty and Children's Digest magazines when four and five and six, and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine for some reason was stacked in the young readers' section of the Enfield Library in 1974-76, and a few Analogs were around the house from my father's haphazard collecting. But I'd never seen this title before...and might not've seen it again at the drugstore. What was almost certainly true is that I probably had 50c or 90c on me, rather than a dollar, so I couldn't afford this magazine when I flipped through it. I was even familiar with the magazine by name, and source of stories I had read read in various anthologies and collections. 
First US collections from each writer to include these stories.
    So it was another couple of years before I caught up with it again, through a 1971 back issue in the Londonderry Junior High library, and then the March 1978 issue. Winter's boon, fiction magazines for me in those years, clearly...I'd started buying new AHMMs with the January 1978 issue. And after falling in love, I ordered a box of back issues from the magazine, which never arrived. They were kind enough to send a replacement...and among those warehoused items, smelling fascinatingly of wood and processing chemicals after sitting in huge stacks for a couple of years, was a copy of this issue, so I could read it in, if I'm not mistaken, the autumn of 1978.
    Three stories within made the strongest impression. "My Boat" by Joanna Russ was a fascinating meld of Philip Roth-esque discussion between two Jewish men of a certain age, the protagonist relating his experience of two sdolescent friends and his sort of modified Peter Pan-esque adventures, with an overlay of Lovecraftian flavors. 
resembles Trump.
    Kit Reed's "Attack of the Giant Baby" involves an experiment that goes awry, and an infant with a passion for Malomars who is enlarged, and what can result from that. The attention to wryly sketched-in detail is what made the story both grounded and hilarious, far more so than, say, the film Honey, I Blew Up the Kid...which I believe faced some legal questions for its similarity in certain aspects to this short story.
    Stuart Dybek's "Horror Movie" is an urban nightmare...a young adolescent, not quite raising himself but coming close, has to deal with various sorts of predator including an apparently supernatural one...the basic Geist of horror, a fiction (or other narrative) which was about learning to cope with the terrors we all face, though some of us more than others, was thus made very clear by this story fairly early in my reading. 
    The other stories were pleasant but minor--a slight "Black Widowers" story by Isaac Asimov, rejected by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine but with some tangential relevance to fantastic fiction, so a good reason to have Asimov's name on the cover aside from his monthly pop-science column. Gary Wolf's cover story, or at least the cover by David Hardy, might also have been an ancestor to Bender the robot in the television series Futurama...Wolf's clever, amiable work would eventually include the literary adventures of Roger Rabbit, the rather more sophisticated source for the mixed animation/live action film.
    And I must admit I haven't yet sought out the issue to reread the stories by  Haskell Barkin (an old friend of Harlan Ellison and an occasional fantasist)  or Michael Coney (a Canadian writer prone to sometimes goofy, sometimes quietly effective work)  s neither of which made s strong impression. Good examples of Asimov's science column and Baird Searles coping as best he might with one of the poor 1970s ER Burroughs film adaptations are joined by a cute, grim Gahan Wilson cartoon, one of F&SF's infrequent letters columns, and Algis Budrys's fine assessment of the work of, and reminiscence about, two of the more distinctive older writers in the field, "Lester Del Rey" (actually Leonard Knapp, but known to all his friends and spouses as Del Rey), who had been a mentor to Budrys early in the latter's career, and R. A. Lafferty, who had begun writing and publishing in middle age, in part to keep himself away from alcohol, and had already cleared his own distinctive path through little and fantastic-fiction magazines...and of another veteran, one who came up in the same years as Budrys himself, if a half-dozen earlier, Poul Anderson. 

The ISFDB index:
The earlier UK collection (1978 vs. 1981)
For more of today's books, and mostly actual books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
↧
Search

Received: THE BODY LOOKS FAMILIAR; THE LATE MRS. FIVE by Richard Wormser (Stark House 2018)

October 23, 2017, 8:35 pm
$
0
0



























Book received: Stark House's new Richard Wormser omnibus, to be officially published in January, with a good new introduction by Bill Crider. I had read a few of Wormser's (remarkable body of) short stories, but these will be my belated first novels by him...he picked up a couple of Spur Awards and an Edgar in the later part of his career...not to be confused with the younger documentarian of the same name. 

See Bill's review here; mine forthcoming.
↧
↧

FFM: KNOPF SHORT STORY SAMPLER, Spring 1996, ed. Anon; Algis Budrys essay & interview by Ed Gorman, SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW, February 1978; Fritz Leiber essay & interview by Darrell Schweitzer, MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY'S FANTASY MAGAZINE, Winter 1992

October 27, 2017, 4:52 am
$
0
0
Knopf published only one issue, or volume, of the Knopf Short Story Sampler, offering for Spring 1996 four stories and a set of vignettes from five upcoming collections from five different writers, and crediting no editor. No previous publication indicators, either, so I'm not sure which might've appeared previously in The Atlantic or The Fiddlehead or Antioch Review (I've been able to track a few online, including one from Antioch, as it happens). A loss-leader of a promotional item, its circulation was  limited by design...I ended up with the copy sent along to our bookstore, as I doubt anyone else was much interested. I suspect that it didn't, nationally, do as much to draw attention to the five new collections as was hoped. Also, no one has an image online that I can find of its handsome if functional cover, so I will eventually put one up. 

Contents:
5 * Interference * Julian Barnes * The New Yorker, 19 September 1994; Cross Channel (Knopf 1996)
25 * [group of linked, at least by implication, vignettes] * Diane Williams * The Stupefaction (Knopf 1996)
25 * An Opening Chat
27 * The Key to Happiness
29 * A Shrewd and Cunning Authority *Antioch Review, Spring 1993
31 * The Everlasting Sippers * Iowa Review, Spring/Summer 1994
33 * The Power of Performance
35 * The Blessing
37 * Eero
41 * Papantla * Sam Shepard * Cruising Paradise (Knopf 1996)(story first published 1990?)
53 * The Enchantment * Christine Schutt * Nightwork (Knopf 1996)
67 * Batting Against Castro * Jim Shepard * The Paris Review, Summer 1993; Batting Against Castro (Knopf 1996)

What's interesting to me, at least, about this assembly is the relative similarity of the (somewhat more famous) men's stories, as contrasted with (the certainly not unknown, but not as well-known then nor now) women's, which are also similar (and Williams and Schutt have since worked on the annual magazine Noontogether). The Barnes concerns an English composer in the early 1930s on his lingering-deathbed, in a house at the outskirts of a French village, where he lives with his too-indulgent former-singer life partner, she having given up on her budding career to help him in life some decades previously, as he's going into his final spiral and using that as a means of keeping a grip on her life and that of those around them as much as possible, while still hoping to get her to appreciate his Last Gift to her, a thematic piece of music she hasn't been impressed with, newly recorded and featured on a BBC longwave broadcast they can barely pick up. 

The two Shepards (not related as far as I know, and Shepard was actually the late Sam's middle name) also provide stories of men in other countries, Americans in their cases in a fairly recent adventure in on-location filming in Mexico ("Papantla") and early/mid-1950s winter baseball in the Cuban National League for three marginal Big-League baseball players trying to improve their records or physiques for the next US season. While the Williams is (or at least seems as presented) a series of prose snapshots of a woman undergoing institutionalization after fairly unspecified breakdown, albeit with a sexual component and a more or less growing sense of dissociation as one passes from one vignette to the next (though these vignettes were published in different venues originally, rather than grouped), and the Schutt story is a very allusive account of the events leading up to a violent attack of a young adult daughter on her father, who had been an erratic creature all his life, married three times and, it's fairly clear, conducting an incestuous relation with his daughter in her childhood before she moved in with her grandparents. 

So, the exoticism of the men's stories is mostly in their setting, and about Anglophone men to one degree or another trying (ultimately fruitlessly and never with any true benefit) to impose their will and/or understanding on people in, for them, fairly exotic circumstances, and the women's stories are about extreme reactions to horrible everyday existences among those raised in comfortable domestic US surroundings made terribly unpleasant.

What this says about the editorial decisions being made at Knopf about what short story collections they chose to publish, and what to highlight in them for promotion, in 1996, isn't too surprising, though, again, interesting in its lack of novelty, for all that all the work is well-written, at very least good of its kind. As the bromide instruction for all anthologists is to put your strongest stories first and last, it probably isn't accidental the Barnes leads and the Shepard baseball story bats cleanup. They all seem much of their time, in the contemporary/mimetic publishing scene of two decades ago, even given that the Schutt is also crime fiction and the Jim Shepard is unabashedly historical sports fiction (some knowledge of baseball will help in understanding the references)...and of the current scene as well, though perhaps there'd be more fantasy in such a collection released today, as there would've been twenty years before.



Ed Gorman on Algis Budrys.

As Ed notes in his obituary for Budrys linked to above, they were colleagues not only as writers who were artists but also as workers in the advertising and public relations industries, when he conducted his interview with Budrys in 1977 in Dubuque, not too far from Ed's home in Cedar Rapids and Budrys in town to lecture George R. R. Martin's college writing workshop class. It's a fine interview, digging somewhat deeper in some ways at least than did Charles Platt's interview for Dream Makers (Ed had more space to play with, at least in the finished product), and Ed notes in the introduction t the interview that Budrys could be a difficult, brooding person, which inspired Budrys to write the essay cited on the cover above to follow the interview in this issue, "On Being a Bit of a Legend"...which is about how he interacts with those around him who choose to be importunate or worse as well as those who are consistently polite, and how he will step back inside himself and reconsider others when they seem to profoundly misunderstand him or his work. Budrys notes that his seeming awkwardness in some stressful social situations is as a result of just this sort of reassessment kicking into gear, particularly when others make a point of underestimating him to his face. This certainly resonated with me, as one who like Budrys spent a good part of my youth being bullied and chivvied by those around me, and found that often I was underestimated in several ways by adults as well as fellow children when young, as I would be by colleagues and bosses later in life. Meanwhile, Ed's questions about his adventures in PR lead to a rather charming long anecdote about a publicity stunt in Chicago, near the site of the Picasso stature, where Budrys and some confederates briefly displayed a 12-foot plastic statue of a wet pickle on behalf of Pickle Packers International, a trade organization. (In one of Budrys's most powerful essays, written initially as a book-review column for  Galaxy magazine and collected in Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf (and the 30th anniversary anthology devoted to Galaxy), he describes in detail his experiences while working east coast news desks for the Packers and finding his way back home to the Chicago suburbs during the riots and other aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr....and how that related to sf, the deep-seated desire for power-fantasies inherent in much of the worst and some good and certainly popular sf, and what that augured for the future of us all.) And Ed noted that among his favorite of Budrys's then recent columns in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was his explication of H. P. Lovecraft, whose work Ed had been unable to enjoy before reading Budrys's take on how the man's life informed his work. There are preliminary plans to get issues of Science Fiction Review archived online, though there has been a bit of foot dragging, given how massive most issues are and how full of people willing to put things bluntly, whether about beefs with publishers or other writers, or their view of the world. 
Another writer who had a somewhat more intimate view of H. P. Lovecraft, of course, was Fritz Leiber, who began corresponding with Lovecraft after Jonquil Leiber, Fritz's wife, wrote to HPL via Astounding Stories magazine to note how much she and her husband enjoyed Lovecraft's fiction, and that her husband was an aspiring writer himself (while working mostly as an actor with his father's company and other gigs).  As Leiber writes in an essay for Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, a couple of years before his death, in tandem with a Darrell Schweitzer interview conducted before an audience at the 1990 Philcon, the annual Philadelphia sf/fantasy/horror and related matter convention which these years happens about a mile away from my current residence. In the essay, Leiber discusses how and how much Lovecraft made a difference in his early literary career, and how Leiber and his old friend Otto Fischer devised the characters Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser based on themselves, in part to write independently about them, and how Leiber tried briefly to nudge their first collaborative story, "Adept's Gambit", in a more explicitly Lovecraftian direction. Despite also corresponding with Lovecraft, Fischer was against this and Fischer prevailed, even when the novella was first published in a collection of Leiber fiction from Arkham House, August Derleth's imprint founded to preserve Lovecraft's legacy. In the interview, Leiber goes on to describe his development as a writer both during his year of correspondence with Lovecraft before HPL's early death, and his subsequent work, ranging from early office jobs writing pop science (he was, as is not mentioned here, for some years an editor at Science Digest magazine) and early fiction career publishing in John W. Campbell's magazines Unknown Fantasy Fiction and Astounding Science Fiction till the first folded during World War II, and Campbell in the late '50s took umbrage at Leiber for selling a story with the same basic setting to Galaxy at the same time as a completely different but linked story to Astounding. (Both Budrys and Leiber are very open about their debts to Campbell, and very willing to point out his flaws .)

That I choose to link these Budrys and Leiber items, published fifteen years apart, might be seen as stretching the points, despite the profound effects both writers have had on my ways of thinking about life and, of course, fantastic  fiction (when Budrys was conducting his column in F&SF, Leiber was the books columnist in Fantastic, for further small parallel, though theirs were among the reviews I read most eagerly)...I had just pulled them out of storage boxes, along with Knopf item, over the course of the last couple of days. They are worth finding, or revisiting, if you are, as I am,  lucky enough to have copies at hand for perusal. Digging into the works of all the writers dealt with in this little review could be worth your effort...none of them are trifling with their art, and all are swinging for the fences. 

For today's other books and book-analogs, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
↧

My Hallowe'en and beyond: Early Key Horror Anthologies (for me)

October 28, 2017, 10:48 pm
$
0
0
One of the books I learned to read with (along with Dr. Seuss and Gyo Fujikawa and Little Golden Books): compiled by Oscar Weigle



edited by Wilhelmina Harper, borrowed from the elementary school library in first grade:
  • Publication: Ghosts and Goblins: Stories for Hallowe'en and Other Times
  • Editor: Wilhelmina Harper
  • Date: 1936-08-20
  • Publisher: E. P. Dutton
  • Price: $2.00
  • Pages: 271



  •  Ghosts and Goblins • (1936) • interior artwork by Wilfred Jones
  • 13 • Foreword (Ghosts and Goblins) • (1936) • essay by Wilhelmina Harper
  • 23 • Hallowe'en • (1936) • poem by Molly Capes
  • 25 • The Ghost of the Great White Stag • (1925) • short story by Arthur C. Parker
  • 37 • The Hungry Old Witch • (1924) • short story by Charles J. Finger
  • 52 • The Conjure Wives • (1921) • short story by Frances G. Wickes
  • 57 • Someone • juvenile • (1913) • poem by Walter de la Mare
  • 58 • Ah Tcha the Sleeper • juvenile • (1925) • short story by Arthur Bowie Chrisman
  • 69 • The Woodman and the Goblins • juvenile • (1936) • short story by J. Berg Esenwein and Marietta Stockard [as by J. B. Esenwein and Marietta Stockard]
  • 77 • The King o' the Cats • (1894) • short story by Joseph Jacobs
  • 80 • The Enchanted Cow • (1931) • short story by Mary Gould Davis [as by Mary G. Davis]
  • 88 • Peter and the Witch of the Wood • (1936) • short story by Anna Wahlenberg
  • 105 • The Goblin of the Pitcher • (1931) • short story by Alida S. Malkus
  • 112 • Tamlane • (1894) • short story by Joseph Jacobs
  • 118 • The Ghosts of Forefathers' Hill • (1922) • short story by Raymond Macdonald Alden
  • 131 • The Shadow People • (1917) • poem by Francis Ledwidge
  • 133 • The Black Cat of the Witch-Dance-Place • (1936) • short fiction by Frances Jenkins Olcott [as by Frances J. Olcott]
  • 138 • Tomson's Hallowe'en • juvenile • (1936) • short story by Margaret Baker [as by Margaret Baker and Mary Baker]
  • 156 • So-Beé-Yit • (1936) • short story by Maynard Dixon
  • 165 • The Old Hag of the Forest • (1899) • short story by Seumas MacManus
  • 182 • The Ghost Wife • (1936) • short story by Charles A. Eastman
  • 187 • The Old Witch • (1894) • short story by Joseph Jacobs
  • 194 • Wait Till Martin Comes • (1921) • short story by Frances G. Wickes
  • The Wishing-Well • (1918) • short fiction by Maud Lindsay and Emilie Poulsson
  • The Witch's Shoes • (1929) • short fiction by Frances Jenkins Olcott [as by Frances J. Olcott]
  • 208 • Old Man Gully's Hant • (1936) • short story by Sarah Johnson Cocke [as by Sarah J. Cocke]
  • A Hallowe'en Story • (1936) • poem by Margaret Widdemer
  • The Witch of Lok Island • (1929) • short story by Elsie Masson
  • The Great White Bear • juvenile • non-genre • (1915) • short story by Maud Lindsay
  • The Ghosts of Kahlberg • (1936) • short fiction by Bernard Henderson
  • The Wonderful Lamb • (1930) • short fiction by Nándor Pogány
  • Teeny-Tiny • (1890) • short fiction by Joseph Jacobs




















    • Edited by Hal Cantor:
    Most common cover
    color variations
    edited by Nora Kramer:

    edited by Henry Mazzeo:
    • Publication: Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural
    • Editors: Henry Mazzeo
    • Date: 1968-00-00
    • ISBN: 0-385-09373-X [978-0-385-09373-6]
    • Publisher: Doubleday
    • Price: $5.98
    • Pages: 318
    • Binding: hc
    • Type: ANTHOLOGY
    • Cover: Edward Gorey

    edited by Kathleen Lines:
    • Publication: The House of the Nightmare: and Other Eerie Tales
    • Editor: Kathleen Lines
    • Date: 1967-00-00
    • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
    • Price: $3.95
    • Pages: xii + 250
    • Binding: hc
    • Type: ANTHOLOGY
    edited by Robert Arthur:
    edited by Betty M. Owen
    and then onto Helen Hoke and Son Manley and Gogo Lewis and certainly quite a few more Robert Arthur, Harold Q. Masur and other Hitchcock-branded books, and several more from Betty M. Owen...and Gerald Page's annual The Year's Best Horror Stories...
    ↧

    FFM: some of my favorite eclectic little magazines: TRIQUARTERLY, CONJUNCTIONS, ONTARIO REVIEW, BLACK CLOCK, BOULEVARD, THE PARIS REVIEW, A PUBLIC SPACE and more...

    November 3, 2017, 5:28 am
    $
    0
    0
    From time to time on the blog I've dealt with anthologies taken from, and individual issues of, little magazines, those magazines devoted to literature (including criticism) and often politics and other matters of social import, but particularly those most devoted to fiction...and this week, a brief run through some of my favorites among the current and departed little magazines...not an exhaustive list by any means, either...and for the moment leaving aside such wonderful specialized little magazines as Whispers, Hardboiled, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, or Paradox (or Paramour).

    Boulevard, edited by Richard Burgin

    Beyond the usually lovely and surreal/fantastic covers of this magazine usually lies an engaging mix of good fiction, essays and poetry, albeit in the last issues I've read (and it's been a couple of years, as I was buying this one at Borders, and have been meaning to get a subscription, but I mean to do many things) there was an ongoing problem with proofreading that really needed addressing. Nonetheless, one of the liveliest of the little magazines on the surviving newsstands, and worth seeking out and sampling. (1985-date)





    The Ontario Review, formerly edited by Raymond J. Smith, with Joyce Carol Oates

    Produced by the husband and wife team of Smith and Oates, where Smith was allowed to engage in literature in a way (it sometimes seemed) where perhaps both would feel less uncomfortable than if Smith attempted to launch his own writing career (and the comparisons and complications that might ensue), the magazine, which ran from 1974 to 2008 and ended with Smith's death, was clearly a model for Boulevard and not a few others, usually including a portfolio of photography or other visual art in an issue along with the fiction, poetry and essays. It felt a bit more tucked-in than Boulevard usually does, a bit more polished, and the tone (even given Oates's input and presence in both magazines...Richard Burgin would also frequently contribute to OR) was perhaps a bit lighter, less sardonic on balance. And the issues were slimmer (without being the very quick read an issue of Poetry might be). 




    Conjunctions, edited by Bradford Morrow

    Another entry in the closely-related magazines sweepstakes, Conjunctions has been known to run both Oates and Burgin contributions, with an even wider range than the previous two, as Conjunctions is both a bug-crusher of a magazine, and has a commitment to theme issues, and not infrequently guest editors to go along with those themes (Peter Straub's issue #39, "The New Wave Fabulists" was a fantastic collection in at least two senses, as appears to be guest co-editor Elizabeth Hand's more recent "Other Aliens,"which I've known about but haven't obtained yet). Despite the imposing size of each issue, a certain playfulness is often detectable, such as it probably being no coincidence that issue 69, pictured above, is themed for the consideration of our bodies.  (1981-date)






    Black Clock formerly edited by Steve Erickson
    If any of these magazines can lay claim to have been most indicative of what was New and Fresh in literary culture, Black Clock was probably that magazine, a certain sense of nervous energy was sparked by each issue as it came out, even given that many of the contributors might well appear in certainly the other magazines cited here, and other well-established littles and fellow-travelers such as Harper's or The New Yorker. Issue #10 was a Noir issue, but that kind of playing around in various territories that The Hudson Review preferred to ignore was perhaps part of what alienated Black Clock from its parent institution, Cal Arts (though one might well wonder why). Ran from 2004-2016.




    Though if any magazine had been strangled in its bed, not really crib, by the university it was associated with, Northwestern's bad faith withTriQuarterlyis a particularly galling example, after it had proven itself one of the most adventurous, innovative, influential and interesting of the little magazines in the latter 1960s and '70s ,after refocusing itself from being solely a student/faculty-contributions campus magazine. Featuring some adventure fiction in issue 47, above, western fiction in 48 and science fiction in 49 was too much for some stuffed-shirt subscribers and/or alums of Northwestern to bear, and so the editorial staff  that had worked with Charles Newman, the original architect of the 1964 transition to a magazine of wide appeal, was purged in 1980-81, including Robert Onopa and Elliott Anderson, and while the magazine continued for three more decades as a print magazine before being forced to go web-only, and has published some good fiction, it never again had the vigor nor luster of the first decade and a half of international publishing. (1958-64 a campus magazine; 1964-2010 as a general-interest magazine; 2010-date as a student-edited webzine).






    And, almost of course, since it usually wasn't the best but was usually among the best, and most reliably engaging during founding co-editor George Plimpton's extended run with the magazine and for most of the time since, The Paris Review. I've been unwilling to pay $20 per issue for the magazine of late (a mental block, perhaps), but in its more reasonably-priced years, and as edited by Plimpton, Brigid Hughes (who ably, briefly succeeded Plimpton upon his death, but was dumped in favor of the rather inept Philip Gourevitch, and decamped to her own rather good, a bit more Harper's-like, magazine A Public Space by 2006) and Lorin Stein, it has been a benign and easily-spotted, much-felt contributor to the public culture...never as dull as The New Yorker often was in the 1970s, for example, and frequently publishing impressive new writers as well as old lions.









    For more of today's books and more, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
    ↧

    FFM: VENTURE: THE TRAVELER'S WORLD, February 1965, edited by Curtis Anderson & Cynthia Kellogg (Cowles Magazines): Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, John D. MacDonald et al.

    November 10, 2017, 9:48 am
    $
    0
    0
    Venture, the initially hardcover bimonthly published by Cowles Magazines and Broadcasting (the Look magazine people) knew whom they wanted reading their travel magazine... apparently not sold on newsstands, founded with the February 1964 issue, by the 1965 issue I have in front of me they were charging almost $3 per issue via an annual subscription of $17.50 ...when most slick magazines ran one 50c-$1 an issue on newsstands. The advertisers were mostly airlines and cruise ship lines with some cars thrown in, including inducement to buy a VW Beetle in Europe and have it shipped home when the vacation was over. You needed disposable income to afford this magazine, and at least the aspiration of throwing that income around to visit the destinations they covered, in rather good photography and not the least expensive (and often English emigrant or frequent visitor) writers. Not challenging themselves too much, but nonetheless coasting on practiced charm. So, too, this issue, with essays by Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, John D. MacDonald and Graham Greene (though only Waugh, with the then-recent reissued/filmed bestseller in part about the British exile community in Los Angeles The Loved One, getting cover billing). Alistair Reid, not yet a commodity, is a columnist (MacDonald is given no great attention, either, despite serving as both photographer and essayist about the Everglades). Cowles spared little expense (considering they were charging the equivalent of well over $20 an issue to subscribers in inflation-calculated terms, they might well); lenticular covers were soon offered on the magazine.










































    Muriel Spark writes about how she would Get Away to NYC to do her writing, living in a certain unnamed hotel for months on end to, among other ends, remove herself from the familial nature of the UK community of writers and editors, all apparently enmeshed and without boundaries; in New York, they will leave you be if you say you need to work. She also notes that in 1964, the most common British complaint she'd hear about the city was the poor quality of the restaurants, somewhat comically given the reputation of British cuisine even then (raised under straitened circumstances as a Scot, Spark notes she's usually willing to eat anything put before her without complaint). She also, as a faithful Roman Catholic, passes along a few observations about the churches around the world and particularly those in Gotham...they tend, among other factors, to have more Bleeding Hearts among the sacred art up on the walls. 

    David Holden, by this time a "roving reporter" for the Manchester Guardian,  provides a sort of sub-Mailer essay on the three cities of Saigon, Singapore and Bangkok, characterizing each in gender terms...Saigon corruptly female, Singapore brusquely male, Bangkok a harem eunuch. He isn't quite as self-indulgent in prose or personal anecdote as Mailer, and he does drop some rather sensible observations in with his mild contempt for people trying to make their ways in the tough times each city faces (a tendency that is too common in most of the lesser writers for this elitist magazine). He does remind us that Burma and Indonesia are as wartorn at the time as the eventual reunited Vietnam.

    John D. MacDonald gets no credit in the table of contents for his photo-feature (handsome) about, and back 0f the book essay on how best to tour, the Everglades; among other advice, he suggests not bothering with airboats (Sterling Archer would be disappointed). 



    For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
    ↧
    ↧

    Fridays's "Forgotten" Books: The Links to the Reviews and More

    November 17, 2017, 10:24 am
    $
    0
    0
    This week's links to the reviews and more by the following contributors...Matt wins with least-forgotten book this week, though Sergio, Alice and Marcia Muller have classics or aspiring classics that have managed to hang on in print, and a few new books (and magazines) are in the mix, while Richard Krause gives the most consideration to a typical John Spencer & Co. magazine story any has perhaps ever received so far...if I've missed yours or someone else's, please let me know in comments...Patti is likely to be hosting again next week, perhaps on her new or at least on her old and repaired computer. And please spare a thought for Sandi Tipple, Kevin Tipple's wife, and Kevin and their family. 


    Sergio Angelini: Green for Danger by Christianna Brand

    Yvette Banek: Mystery of the Dead Police by Philip MacDonald

    Mark Baker: The Last Detective by Robert Crais

    Les Baxter: The Dream Detective by Sax Rohmer

    Bernadette: Flipped for Murder by Maddie Day

    Elgin Bleecker: Down There by David Goodis

    John Boston: Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction Stories, November 1962; December 1962, edited by Cele Goldsmith

    Brian Busby: Grandma's Little Darling by Stephen R. George

    Alice Chang: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards

    Bill Crider: A Winter Spy by McDonald Lloyd; A Room to Die In by "Ellery Queen" (Jack/John Holbrook Vance, in this case); Baseball Stars of 1957 by Bruce Jacobs; Touchfeather by Jimmy Sangster

    Martin Edwards: Turn the Light Out as You Go by Edgar Lustgarten; The Announcer aka A Voice Like Velvet by Donald Henderson

    Peter Enfantino, Jack Seabrook and Jose Cruz: EC Comics, April 1954; DC war comics, April/May 1971

    Will Errickson: Unholy Mourning by David Lippincott; The Possession of Joel Delaney by Ramona Stuart

    Curtis Evans: Ruth Sawtell Wallis, No Bones About It and more...

    Paul Fraser: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1978, edited by Edward L. Ferman

    Barry Gardner: Mallory's Oracle by Carol O'Connell

    John Grant: Night Film by Marisha Pessl

    Rich Horton: That Girl from New York by Allene Corliss
    Jerry House: The Magic Mirror: Lost Supernatural and Mystery Stories by Algernon Blackwood (edited by Mike Ashley)

    Jeanne (hosted by Kevin Tipple): Sofie Kelly: Magical Cat mysteries

    Nick Jones: 1950s/60s British SF book jackets by divers hands

    Tracy K: Murder on the Blackboard by Stuart Palmer

    George Kelley: The Big Book of Rogues and Villains edited by Otto Penzler

    Joe Kenney: The Coming of the Terrans by Leigh Brackett

    Margot Kinberg: Blacklands by Belinda Bauer

    Rob Kitchin: Birds in a Cage by Derek Niemann

    Richard Krauss: "Perilous Expedition" by "James Elton" (John F. Watt?)

    B. V. Lawson: The Long Shadow by Celia Fremlin

    Evan Lewis: Death Takes an Option by "Neil McNeil" (W. T. Ballard)

    Steve Lewis: The Flaming Man by M. E. Chaber

    Marcia Muller: Laura by Vera Caspary

    Neeru: "Anthony Gilbert" (Lucy Beatrice Malleson): Murder Comes Home; Death Casts a Long Shadow aka Death Takes a Wife; A Nice Little Killing

    John F. Norris: Murder Under Construction by "Sue MacVeigh" (Elizabeth Custer Nearing)
    Juri Nummelin: Peepland by Christa Faust, Gary Phillips and Andrea Camerini; Triggerman by Walter Hill and "Matz"; The Fiery Cross by "Don Pendleton" (in this case, Mike Newton)

    Matt Paust: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie 
    (Sergio Angelini on this book & film)

    Mildred Perkins: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

    James Reasoner: Lair of the Beast by John Peter Drummond

    L. J. Roberts: The Seagull by Ann Cleeves

    Gerard Saylor: The Out is Death by Peter Rabe; Castle Danger: Dead End Follies by Anthony Neil Smith

    Victoria Silverwolf: Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, November 1982, edited by Cele Goldsmith

    Kerrie Smith: Murder in Little Shendon by A, H. Richardson

    "TomCat": Full Crash Dive by Allan R. Bosworth

    Samuel Wilson: "Black Prince" by Francis Beverly Kelley

    A. J. Wright: William C. Morrow

    Mark Yon: New Worlds Science Fiction, November 1962, edited by E. J. Carnell










    ↧

    Books Received: THE CLINGERMAN FILES by Mildred Clingerman; WIDOW'S MITE and WHO'S AFRAID by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

    November 23, 2017, 3:59 pm
    $
    0
    0
    Greg Shepard's Stark House has added another two-novel volume to their valuable selection of reprints (full stop, but in this case specifically) of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's suspense novels, this one replicating in primary content its Ace Double previous paperback edition. I hadn't realized till now, or had forgotten, that she died relatively young, even for her time, in 1955 at 65 or 66 years of age, and while the paperback boom was certainly well under way, she was a bit early to benefit from, at least, Fawcett Gold Medal at its height. Even her more modest novels (the only one I've reviewed so far on the blog, for example, Too Many Bottles or The Party Was the Payoff , depending on which edition one read) are worth the effort. her better ones drew the extended admiration of such contemporaries as Raymond Chandler and such successors as Ed Gorman and Sarah Weinman. Her author portrait on the back is rather reminiscent of Ayn Rand, a writer she in no other way resembles...Sanxay Holding having wit, grace and character (and characters rather than mouthpieces lecturing each other) in her writing...

































     



    Through the kindness of Scott Cupp, present as I was not at the World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio this year, I now have a copy of The Clingerman Files, edited by Mark Bradley and including apparently all Mildred Clingerman's completed short fiction, previously published or not, in the initial and perhaps only volume to come from Size 5 1/2 B Publishing (we gather from the logo it was probably Clingerman's shoe size), an outfit made up largely of her family. Clingerman was a productive (but not Hugely productive) and highly-regarded fantasy and sf writer of the 1950s and '60s; never wrote a novel, when that was (at least as much as now) the way to a sustained career in the field, and even with sales of two stories collected here, two stories to Collier's  and one to The Ladies Home Companion, didn't get much more than a supplementary income from her writing...her one previous collection, A Cupful of Space, was published by Ballantine in 1961, in the midst of a severe cash-crunch for that company, and as a result her daughter remembers an advance of merely $600...enough to buy a used car then, to be sure, but a far cry from what Ballantine had been able to offer its writers a half-dozen years before (or than either slick magazine would've paid for her short stories individually). Her first story to be published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,"Minister Without Portfolio", was agented, and the editors were amused to have her described as "a beautiful but unpublished writer", leading Anthony Boucher to jokingly wonder what her agent was trying to offer (Boucher and McComas note the phrase, if not their response, in the headnote of the story as published in F&SF for February 1952; the response can be read in The Eureka Years: Boucher and McComas's Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1949-1954, edited by Annette Peltz McComas).  I shall be digging into both of these, and other kindly provided items by Scott, in the coming weeks.

     








































    ↧
    Search

    Underappreciated Music, the links to the sounds and the words about them, October/November 2017

    November 23, 2017, 11:20 pm
    $
    0
    0
    Rest in Glory: Jon Hendricks, 1921-2017
    The (frequently) monthly assembly of undervalued and often nearly "lost" music, or simply music the blogger in question wants to remind you reader/listeners of...



    Patti Abbott: Nightly Music

    Brian Arnold: The Boston Pops: Christmas Festival; Holiday Music and more;Hallowe'en music and more One;Two; Three

    Jayme Lynn Blaschke: Friday Night Videos

    Paul D. Brazill: A Song for Saturday

    Jim Cameron: Booker Ervin: Tex Book Tenor 

    Alice Chang: Hiroyuki Sawano: "Sylvalum (night)"


    Sean Coleman: Pretenders II 

    David Cramner: The Flaming Lips: "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots"

    Bill Crider: Song of the Day; Forgotten Hits; Link Wray and His WrayMen: "Rumble"

    Jeff Gemmill: Top 5s;Joan Jett and the Blackhearts: I Love Rock'n'Roll; Janet Jackson in concert, 1990; Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in concert, 1990;
    Olivia Newton-John: Totally Hot; Juliana Hatfield in concert, 2017; Paul Weller in concert, 2017

    Jerry House: Big Mama Thornton; Hymn Time; Music from the Past
    Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker, et al.: "Hound Dog"/"Down Home Shakedown"


    Jackie Kashian: Ryan Conner on Smashing Pumpkins

    George Kelley: Greatest Hits of the '70s; The Bodyguard: The Musical

    Kate Laity: Song for a Saturday

    Lambert, Hendricks & Ross: "Moanin'"

    Jon Hendricks and Company: "In Walked Bud"

    Lambert, Hendricks & Ross and Joe Willisms: "Everyday I Have the Blues"


    Evan Lewis: Shary Richards & co.: The Sounds of the Silly Surfers/The Sounds of the Weird-Ohs

    Marc Maron: Kim Deal

    J. Eric Mason: Aural Image #42 (a Spotify playlist)

    Todd Mason: spirits; a Whole Lot of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross (and Bavan)

    Joe Megalos notes: Sun Ra on BandCamp

    Becky O'Brien: Moana S/T: "There You Are"; The Walking Dead S/T;Stranger Things season 2 S/T;American Made S/T;Flatliners (2017) S/T 

    Andrew Orley: Nobody's Listening

    Dizzy Gillespie's centenary year: 2017: To Bop or Not To Be: A Jazz Life (1990)


    Lawrence Person: Shoegazer Sunday

    Charlie Ricci: The Gospel Whiskey Runners: Hold On;Dan Auerbach: Waiting on a Song

    W. Royal Stokes: Best Jazz CDs of 2016 

    Produced by George Avakian, 1919-2017
    ↧

    FFB: Terry Carr, ed: SCIENCE FICTION FOR PEOPLE WHO HATE SCIENCE FICTION (Doubleday 1966); Harry Harrison, ed: THE LIGHT FANTASTIC (Scribner's 1971)

    November 24, 2017, 2:04 am
    $
    0
    0
    --Redux post from 2012:
    Missionary Work

    Science Fiction for People Who Hate Science Fiction was Terry Carr's first solo anthology to be published, after a volume or two of his work with Donald Wollheim on their Best of the Year sf volume for Ace Books; The Light Fantastic: Science Fiction Classics from the Mainstream (sic: there is not now, nor has there ever been, a true mainstream of literature) was not Harry Harrison's first antho, but his first, as well, was an sf BOTY, in his case for Putnam/Berkley, with Brian Aldiss as increasingly co-editing junior partner in the first volume or so. Perhaps the same impulse that drives one to work on annual showcases makes putting together this kind of "instructional" anthology particularly attractive, even beyond the usual "this is important, or at very least interesting" thrust of nearly any anthology assembled with care,...in the cases of these two fine anthologies, the instructional thrust can be executively summarized as "Open your eyes." (The appended "fool!" is only occasionally barely audible, though almost impossible to completely suppress, as well.)

    The Carr anthology brings together accessible, intelligent, (at the time) not terribly overexposed mostly sf stories (H.L. Gold's synesthesia tale "The Man with English" certainly is arguably fantasy, and Arthur Clarke's "The Star" introduces supernatural elements of the most widely accepted sort in Christendom)...Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" hadn't quite become common coin by the mid '60s, and the Damon Knight story, despite "To Serve Man" having become a much-loved Twilight Zone episode, was nearly as famous as Knight's other early joke story, and even more sapiently pointed). While "What's It Like Out There?" remains The cited example of What Else Edmond Hamilton could do aside from planet explosion, and the Wilmar Shiras a slightly odd choice in this set of encouraging the outlanders to try some of the pure quill. Algis Budrys, in reviewing this one at the time, noted that people who hate sf hate reading, and the only way to get them to take up this book would be for it to be socially necessary to have on their coffee-table or equivalent (as Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five and Stranger in a Strange Land and to a lesser extent at that time Dune and No Blade of Grass and The Child Buyer would be)...but the thoughtful reader who thought they hated sf somehow (probably more common in '66 than today, if not much moreso) could find some diversion here, at very least. Or, by the end of the decade, could enjoy making a joke about reading up on the topic in their Funk & Wagnalls paperback edition.

    Harry Harrison attempts a slightly more double-edged trick, in getting the (presumably well-meaning ignorant) snobs against sf to consider reading the form, and to get similar snobs within the sf-reading community to look beyond the commercial labels for the pure quill wherever it's actually found. Harrison, too, gets in some work in this "sf" context that is arguably (the Cheever, the Greene) or almost inarguably (the Lewis, the Twain) fantasy rather than sf, though the sort of fantasy that sf people usually find agreeable, even leaving aside the time-travel paradox introduced in Anthony Burgess's "The Muse" (Burgess, of course, couldn't leave sf alone any more than C. S. Lewis could, and saw no more reason to do so than Lewis, I'm sure). And, of course, Gerald Kersh and Jorge Luis Borges had no qualms about being considered writers of fantasticated fiction, as long as no one insisted that was all they did or could do, and, happily, no one has...if anything, Kingsley Amis, that passionate advocate for sf so labeled, has seen his advocacy and contributions to the literature all but forgotten in favor of his Angry Young Man (and Older Man) satire, even when careful to have Lucky Jim a reader of Astounding Science Fiction magazine back when Analog was still called that.

    It's a funny old world, and there's no shortage of ignorance of all sorts, but that's what this FFB exercise is here to combat, in its small and often nostalgic way. I liked both these anthologies a lot as a kid, and would still like them if I was first to open them today. What more could we ask?

    Science Fiction for People Who Hate Science Fiction ed. Terry Carr (Doubleday LCC# 66-24334, 1966, $3.95, 190pp, hc); Also in pb (Funk & Wagnalls 1968).

    7 · Introduction · Terry Carr · in
    11 · The Star [Star of Bethlehem] · Arthur C. Clarke · ss Infinity Science Fiction Nov ’55
    21 · A Sound of Thunder · Ray Bradbury · ss Colliers Jun 28 ’52
    37 · The Year of the Jackpot · Robert A. Heinlein · nv Galaxy Mar ’52
    79 · The Man with English · H. L. Gold · ss Star Science Fiction Stories #1, ed. Frederik Pohl, Ballantine, 1953
    91 · In Hiding [Timothy Paul] · Wilmar H. Shiras · nv Astounding Nov ’48
    135 · Not with a Bang · Damon Knight · ss F&SF Win/Spr ’50
    143 · Love Called This Thing · Avram Davidson & Laura Goforth · ss Galaxy Apr ’59
    157 · The Weapon · Fredric Brown · ss Astounding Apr ’51
    163 · What’s It Like Out There? · Edmond Hamilton · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec ’52

    The Light Fantastic ed. Harry Harrison (Scribner’s, 1971, hc)
    · Introduction—The Function of Science Fiction · James Blish · in
    · The Muse · Anthony Burgess · ss The Hudson Review Spr ’68
    · The Unsafe Deposit Box · Gerald Kersh · ss The Saturday Evening Post Apr 14 ’62
    · Something Strange · Kingsley Amis · ss The Spectator, 1960; F&SF Jul ’61
    · Sold to Satan [written Jan 1904] · Mark Twain · ss Europe and Elsewhere, Harper Bros., 1923
    · The End of the Party · Graham Greene · ss The London Mercury Jan ’32
    · The Circular Ruins [1941] · Jorge Luís Borges; trans. by James E. Irby · ss Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962
    · The Shout · Robert Graves · ss The Woburn Books #16 ’29; F&SF Apr ’52
    · The Door · E. B. White · ss The New Yorker, 1939
    · The Machine Stops · E. M. Forster · nv Oxford and Cambridge Review Nov ’09
    · The Mark Gable Foundation · Leo Szilard · ss The Voice of the Dolphins, and Other Stories, Simon & Schuster, 1961
    · The Enormous Radio · John Cheever · ss The New Yorker May 17 ’47
    · The Finest Story in the World · Rudyard Kipling · nv Contemporary Review Jul, 1891
    · The Shoddy Lands · C. S. Lewis · ss F&SF Feb ’56
    · Afterword · Harry Harrison · aw

    For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
    ↧
    ↧

    FFB: THE OVERLOOK FILM ENCYCLOPEDIA: HORROR, edited by Phil Hardy (Overlook 1993); ROMANCING THE VAMPIRE by David J. Skal (Whitman 2008)

    December 1, 2017, 6:19 am
    $
    0
    0
    Here's the second and so far final edition (1993, after 1985) of one of the more impressive, if deeply flawed, reference/critical works in horror film; among the flaws is that the entries are unsigned, so that one can have the fun of trying to suss out if it was Kim Newman, Tom Milne, Paul Willeman, Julian Petley, Tim Pulleine or editor Hardy, or some combination, who are responsible for one opinionated entry or another. Another rests squarely with Hardy and his publishers and their editors: to make room for new content, two relatively minor films were dropped from this edition (albeit everyone who loves horror in my generation of USians has at least heard of Don't Look in the Basement), while all kinds of questionable inclusions (Sorority House Massacre, Three O'Clock High as examples from either end of the suspense film quality range featuring psychopaths) continue...and similarly quasi-relevant work (say, El Topo) is missing, or, like Kongo, only mentioned in the entry for a film it's closely related to, as in this case as a non-silent remake of West of Zanzibar. Less of a judgement call, the index is all but useless unless you know the title or the common alternate titles of a film they offer a primary entry for; it a title is only mentioned in the text of a primary entry, good luck finding it, as with Kongo. (They have cogent things to say about the most obvious horror and horror-related films of Ingmar Bergman, but no entry in the index for The Devil's Eye, or Wild Strawberries, with its notable nightmare-sequence beginning...which would be more forgivable without full entries for the likes of Fatal Attraction.) And, as almost everyone complains about this book, it's no dry simple compendium of facts, but an often self-contradictory repository of strong opinions; someone on staff really hates Robert Bloch's scripts (without noting how much they were meddled with by the likes of producer/directors William Castle and Milton Subotsky, which one would think might be the purview of a book such as this), while someone else makes a point of praising (justly, I'd agree) the likes of the mistitled (not by Bloch!) Torture Garden (someone presumably had a copy of Octave Mirbeau's novel kicking around the office).

    But in this enumeration of some of the faults of the book, I think you might be gathering some of the virtues: it's by no means a comprehensive account of all horror films made (it misses a whole lot of video-only items, including such cult gems as Trancers and Subspecies 2, while noting others as it occurs to them to do so; Japanese and some other east Asian horror filmographies are given a reasonably good representation, but hardly a thorough one, and Korean films--admittedly a booming business in the years since--hardly represented at all), it is in its nearly 500 oversized pages full of informed consideration of a wide range of horror film, including any number of obscurities that might be new to all but the most knowledgeable fan/scholar. It's the kind of book that lends itself to an online or at least hypertextual sequel, and is worth your attention if you come across it. I can see why it's fetching such large prices on the secondhand market. Thanks to Kate Laity for the gift.

    Meanwhile, David J. Skal's book is a charming example of what might even hold together better online, but would lose precisely its tactile gimmicks. Skal, who could write the text of this survey of vampires in popular culture in his sleep, has that rather deft (and non-automatic!) text augmented by even more illustration, all in full color when the original is, and with the kind of tipped-in paper ephemera that did so well for Griffin and Sabine and its sequels a decade or so back; as such, this must be, if not the most expensive book Whitman Publishing has ever attempted, then certainly the most elaborate I've seen. (It comes, in its conceit of being a true scrapbook, with an unattached male vampire face mask, as well as with postcards, film-strip-like photo arrays and more in pouches or taped onto the pages.) At 144 augmented pages, all but necessarily slipcased, it sure isn't a Big Little Book while certainly also being a rather fat big book, and given the number of copies available at the picked-over Borders stores I've been visiting, it probably didn't do well...like the Overlook/Horror originally priced at $50 (well, minus 5c and in 2008 rather than 1993 dollars), you can currently get one at a Borders so endowed for $3.75 (less if you have the discount card, which will no longer be honored after Sunday). Eminently worth the effort to take the look.

    A redux post from 2011.

    For more of Friday's Books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
    ↧

    FFB: MIND FIELDS by Harlan Ellison and Jacek Yerka (Morpheus International 1994)

    December 8, 2017, 5:14 am
    $
    0
    0
    Jacek Yerka is a Polish painter who was influenced first and foremost, we're told, by the Flemish school of representational art, and one can see that; the degree to which he was also influenced by Rene Magritte among the other Surrealists is also hard to miss, though there's a softness to the lines of some of his paintings not much like Magritte at all, and a sharp clarity in some that outdoes the playful elder master.  Harlan Ellison, a writer mostly but by no means exclusively of fantasy fiction and popular-culture criticism, was unsurprisingly drawn to Yerka's paintings, and with this project took to writing vignettes in response to individual paintings, sometimes little anecdotes or jokes or musings, sometime fully-fleshed if brief short stories. Not the first time Ellison would write stories around paintings, a common commissioning practice in the fiction magazines of the 1940s, when Ellison began reading them, and the 1950s, when he began his career writing for them; and not an uncommon means of creation of fiction in any era; I've done it...there's no little chance that you've done it. Further, collections of vignettes is an approach Ellison had used fruitfully before, in such literary portfolios as "From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet" and, perhaps less obviously, in working around a common theme in some of his best work, such as "The Deathbird". This book is, so far, the last collection of predominantly new work Ellison has published, aside from the comics adaptations, mostly of older stories, for the magazine project (and collected reprints in book form) Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor.

    The stories in this volume have only infrequently been seen elsewhere, and are for the most part not Ellison's best work, but are still engaging examples of his approach, each taking its title as well as inspiration at least in part from the painting it's paired with. As a nice package deal, illustration and story together, three were published in magazines before or alongside the book's appearance in 1994:

    from the Locus Index: 
    Mind Fields: The Art of Jacek Yerka; The Fiction of Harlan EllisonJacek Yerka & Harlan Ellison (Morpheus International 0-9623447-9-6, Mar ’94, $24.95, 71pp, tp, cover by Jacek Yerka) Art book, a collection of 33 full-color paintings, each paired with an accompanying original short-short or prose poem by Harlan Ellison based on the painting. With notes by Ellison. A 1,000-copy hardcover edition (-03-7, $45.00 — already sold out) and a signed, slipcased, leatherbound 475-copy limited edition (-00-2, $95.00) were announced but not seen. Available from Morpheus International, 200 North Robertson Blvd., Suite 326, Beverly Hills CA 90211.
    Yerka's painting trimmed for the cover format
    Two of the stories, "Susan" and "Fever", were reprinted in Datlow and Windling's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volumes for 1994 and '95, respectively; otherwise, the prose items have in some cases been included in Ellison's retrospective collections published since, but only a few of them...they do work best, for the most part, not divorced from the paintings, even if the better ones can stand on their own. Ellison is usually better at longer forms of short fiction, giving himself room to dig in and explore the psyches of his characters in greater detail, but the charm of much of his mature work is in evidence here...the notes help make clear, as do the dedications from both Yerka and Ellison, that this book was assembled in stressful times for nearly everyone involved: Ellison had several heart attacks in the period, his wife Susan, for whom he describes "Susan" as a valentine of a story, had spinal disc problems, Jacek Yerka's young son died, not living to see the advice he gave to his father on the last painting in the book come to fruition, and even the publisher at Morpheus, James Cowan, was afflicted with motility problems that looked at first as if they would require extensive surgery (Yerka dedicates the book to the memory of his son; Ellison to the memories of the then recently-dead friends Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber and Avram Davidson). Added to this, Ellison is particularly disturbed  by the early '90s resurgence of Nazism and similar fascist tendencies, including Pat Buchann's new prominence as both presidential candidate (I suspected then and continue to suspect, in part to deflect David Duke from having as much influence on the GOP's contest as he might, as the less-well-known Trump wildcard of 1992) and Holocaust skeptic, however partially. Certain things never go out of style. Ellison deals with this most explicitly in "Twilight in the Cupboard".

    It's a lovely book, though the semi-gloss pages in large format make it easier to look at than to read (the reproduction of the paintings looks to be excellent)...not the book to start with for Ellison, which would probably be one of the versions of Deathbird Stories, but worthy of one's time and effort to obtain it...very reasonably priced copies of the paperback edition are available from the Usual Sources.





    And one of the best stories, and the painting that, to a degree Ellison found annoying, seemed to catch everyone's eye as the epitome of Yerka's brilliance, the book's cover painting as a result, "Attack at Dawn", was the sample Algis Budrys, a lover of automobiles among other relevant things, took for his magazine Tomorrow, in the same issue that published my first story. As a result, this book has a certain sentimental resonance for me. The 1995 Year's Best Fantasy and Horror which includes Ellison's "Fever" also includes my story "Bedtime" in the "Recommended Reading" longlist.

    For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

    Mike Doran points us, in comments below, to this interview, from Tom Snyder's CNBC series, in 1994...the tape source it was uploaded from was in pretty rough shape in parts (though the audio is never seriously disrupted), and dates from the days when YT limited uploads to about 7-8 minutes each:





    ↧

    Richard Moore on Bill Crider and his Truman Smith novels and crime-fiction fandom

    December 14, 2017, 9:10 pm
    $
    0
    0
    On Bill Crider:
    Richard Moore, James Reasoner, Bill Crider
    I first got to know Bill Crider in an Amateur Press Association (APA) for mystery fans called Elementary My Dear APA or DAPA-EM. Long before the internet and blogs, groups of fans would do individual “zines” and mail their pages to the Official Editor who would bind them together and send them back out to the members. We were limited to 35 members and the mailings were every other month. As every member would usually comment on each zine, it became 35 individual conversations with weeks of lagtime. We were in DAPA-EM for more than three decades and Bill and I are still in a western APA, Owlhoot.

    Decades of mailings become incredibly bulky. Bill has sent all of his to Texas A&M and as a running record of mystery fandom, they certainly have value. Bill began as a fan—when we met, he had one Nick Carter novel credit before finding his voice in mystery, western, horror and other fiction. And Bill does have a distinctive voice—all the great writers do.

    It was at conventions that we met in person and over three and a half decades at Bouchercons and regional mystery conventions as well as a few science fiction cons such as ArmadilloCon in Austin. we’d attend panels, roam the dealer’s rooms, stand in line to get favorites to sign books, explore the cities and meet at night to share stories. Bill has one of the great book and paperback collections. I remember standing with him in line at a Bourchercon to get Evan Hunter to sign a few books. He groaned when he saw I had Hunter’s elusive first novel The Evil Sleep (Falcon Books 1952). It was one of the few he didn’t have (he later found a copy).

    Bill loved the old paperback original writers such as Harry Whittington, Marv Albert, Peter Rabe. Bill and I always attended the occasional convention appearances of old pulp writers and editors such as Stephen Marlowe (Milton Lesser), Howard Browne, William Campbell Gault and Dwight V. Swain. If I have favorite memories from the dozens of conventions where we gathered they would be the trips to Austin, Texas where Bill and Judy would lead us to some great Tex-Mex food, and then going booking with Crider and Joe Lansdale.

    I don’t know about this heaven thing but if I could draw one up it would include a convention with a stocked dealer’s room and a roomy suite with all the old departed gang present: including Barry Gardner, Graeme Flanagan, Bob Briney, Noreen Shaw, Hal Rice, Stan Burns, and with dear Ellen Nehr bellowing at me in a tone worthy of a Wodehouse aunt.

    On his Truman Smith novels:

    Bill Crider in an afterword to one of his Truman Smith novels wrote: “When I was a child, I thought Galveston was one of the most romantic places in Texas. Many years later, I still do.” That nostalgic atmosphere and love of place runs throughout the series, which was launched in 1991 with Dead on the Island. In that time the glory that was Galveston had faded from the days when it was a wide-open town with gambling, brothels, and nightclubs attracting major acts.
    A crusading DA in the late 1950s led a crackdown that closed the dens of iniquity and dumped all the slot machines into the bay. After long decay, some renovations are underway in the historic district during the time in which these novels are set. Today the old Hotel Galvez, built in 1911, has been modernized into a showplace and they still have the Dickens festival in December with various Tiny Tims and Scrooges parading along the Strand.
    Truman Smith was a star running back for his Galveston high school and his friend Dino was a linebacker on the same team. Truman ended up at the University of Texas and in his sophomore year blossomed into a major threat. Dino went to Texas Tech was a defensive star.  When the two teams met, a blindside tackle by Dino ended Truman’s football career.
    Truman ends up as a private investigator in Dallas but is drawn back to the island to search for his sister who has disappeared.  Despite all his exhaustive work trying to locate her or learn her fate, he fails.   His old friend Dino provides an old house to live in and he scratches out a living taking house painting jobs.  In the opening novel, Dino asks him to locate a different missing girl.  Very reluctantly, Truman takes the case.  
    Through the course of this novel (and others in the series), he has to dig through a lot of family histories and Galveston’s past.  In rereading the series, I was reminded of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels where so many stories involve hidden family secrets.  
    Perhaps influenced by Bill's life-long love of private eye novels, Truman Smith is a more robust figure than Sheriff Rhodes, Carl Burns or other Crider mystery heroes. Although still hampered by his balky knee, Truman can hold his own in a barroom brawl and he has a pistol and will shoot someone if he has to. I like the cast of secondary characters such as Miss Sally, the ancient old lady who sips Mogen David wine and knows all the gossip past and present in Galveston. I just plain love this series and all five novels are available in Kindle editions.
















    Text copyright 2017 by Richard Moore. For more considerations of Bill and his work, please see Patti Abbott's blog...
    ↧
    Viewing all 1181 articles
    Browse latest View live
    Search