The Masque of the Black Death
The Plague laughs behind its mask, because it can wear any.
Category: Poetry & Prose
“Wherefore was I given life?”
Because it’s Södergran time again.
On Larissa Glasser’s F4
Larissa Glasser’s F4 is filthy, bizarre, ultra-violent, and hyper-(trans-)sexual, and I’m sure it’s meant to be all those things.
The Pseudo-Hysterical Female Man
The Female Man wants very badly to be a hysterical novel, but by design, and not spontaneously, it flails about in its confusion, hurting not just itself but the reader as well.
1001 books
Like my own Shahrazad, I’ve told myself 1,001 stories to keep myself distracted from (doing) bad things.
On Borges’ Collected Fictions
The ugly, The bad, The good, The list™
Shadow of the Future
My translation: Edith Södergran - “Framtidens skugga” (1920)
On The Narrow Land
Although I already had a pretty positive opinion of Vance based on ‘Lyonesse’, ‘The Narrow Land’ surprised me with a couple of really good tales.
On The Eye of the Heron
Ursula K. LeGuin’s ‘The Eye of the Heron’ is an engaging novella about oppression and resistance in a new world.
On Dockskåpet
Tove Jansson’s collection ‘Dockskåpet’ (The Doll’s House) has a number of gems. Most of them are character sketches, between ten and twenty pages. Domestic troubles, strange obsessions. A novel or story collection can itself be a kind of textual doll’s house, with little rooms of drama and tiny furniture.