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.
Category: Poetry & Prose
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.
Type Travels: Leigh Alexander’s Mona
Mona is a short story by Leigh Alexander with gorgeous illustrations by Emily Carroll. The story is part sensual urban horror, part homage to the game Silent Hill 2. The story recently went on sale, and I provided the design for the e-book versions. Have a look at the design below, and don’t forget to buy a copy of the story!
Memory Insufficient: Language and Games
Recently, I had the honour of being guest editor on Memory Insufficient, the games history ezine. I edited the special issue on Language and Games. You can read the editorial from the issue below, but really you should just go and download the whole issue here [pdf], because it’s free.
Type Travels: The Sword of Welleran
Recently, I’ve become more and more interested in book design and typesetting, and I decided that I wanted to become better at it, and offer it as a service to other people. In the growing world of e-books and digital reading, there is something of a dearth of good design, and the aesthetics that I admire in printed books have for the most part not found their way into the digital realm. As an exercise, I’ve started playing around with some public domain fantasy literature that I wanted to read anyway, such as the (early) works of Lord Dunsany. In that spirit, I’ve recently completed a PDF setting of The Sword of Welleran And Other Stories, originally published in 1908.