Note: I received an advance e-book edition of Wylding Hall from the publisher, Open Road Media, for review consideration. At last, an Elizabeth Hand book suited to my needs! In the past when I have tried books by Elizabeth Hand, most of those attempts undocumented in this space because writing “meh” reviews is boring, I have found her books either dull or unsatisfying. But her new book, Wylding Hall, makes the most of its ellipses, letting the reader’s mind fill them with the very spookiest of explanations. Wylding Hall is set up as an oral history of the famed (fictional)…
15 CommentsReading the End Posts
Sometimes, people in Russia hold these things called monstrations (like demonstrations without the de), which are like protests, but instead of protests they are performance art. And instead of protesting real things, they march all around with billboards that say things like No to colonization of Mars! and You are too boring to talk to! and WET PRIESTS. Ahahaha, Russia, you’re so weird! What a weird thing to do! Protests get stifled in Russia, so Russia has performance art protests instead. Ugh, that wasn’t fair. Sometimes Russia has real protests too. But they also have these fake performance art protests, and I think this should…
9 CommentsHappy Wednesday! This week, we’re sharing some thrilling podcast news, talking about time and place settings we’d like to see in more books, and reviewing Attica Locke’s new mystery Pleasantville. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 43 Links of interest Vulture reports on JK Rowling’s non-prequel play. The Vox article about leading slavery tours at a plantation. Books mentioned (those that have been reviewed in this space are linked to the review): Ada or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov (podcast readalong!) The Cutting Season, Attica…
7 CommentsAn English woman moves with her two children into a blue house in Croatia in the first chapter of The Hired Man. She hires a neighbor called Duro to do handyman work, helping fix up the house, to make it into a nice vacation home. Duro has two dogs and a bunch of guns, and there is something not right in the town of Gost. So here is where a background understanding of the ethnic/religious conflict in the former Yugoslavia would have been beneficial to me. The jokesters in the audience will say “What? But Jenny! You love genocide!” and that’s…
15 CommentsSome links that have caught my eye over the past two weeks! Enjoy! Are you familiar with the Kennewick Man? Spend some time on his Wikipedia page — it’s a fascinating story — and then read about why the scientists should feel like dicks now. Awesome zookeepers awesomely doing Chris Pratt’s raptor-taming move. Poetry coopted for Supernatural fanfic: An interview with poet Richard Siken that just fills me with joy for the utter weirdness of the world we live in. A linguist explains how we convey sarcasm typographically. LANGUAGE FINDS A WAY. Alyssa Rosenberg on how white supremacists in pop…
18 CommentsLet’s begin by double-checking that everybody knows about the MOVE bombing in the 1980s. Because I didn’t know about it until Code Switch mentioned it a while ago, and then right after that, in yet-further proof of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, I encountered it in Asali Solomon’s debut novel Disgruntled. Basically there was this militant group called MOVE that lived in a Philadelphia apartment and their kids ran around naked and they composted their own stuff, which drew roaches. Also various members were under indictment for various things. So the Philly cops came to their house, and the members of MOVE…
25 Comments…was this: Clint Barton sees Kate Bishop for the first time (click to embiggen). Basically Clint sees Kate and is like this: Plus, Matt Fraction — who wrote for the Civil War event, though not that particular issue up there — calls it back in the second issue of Hawkeye, the one where we meet Kate. Overall, however, Civil War was…kind of a downer. Perhaps if Kate and Clint had hung out more?
16 CommentsHappy (belated) Father’s Day to the fathers among you! This week, we welcome special guest star Ashley (we are so sorry about the crackly mic) to talk about fictional fathers, The Fair Fight (about lady boxers in the 1800s), play a game, and answer some listener mail. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 42 Here’s Ashley’s movie column on Fiction Advocate, if you’re interested (and you should be)! Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and…
3 CommentsI’ll have the podcast up later today, but I wanted to first mention that the wonderful site Lady Business is running a Women in Authority week (or as I described it to myself in order to make my choice of topic plausible, Ladies in Business), and they asked me for a guest post! Behold a quick post about one of my favorite books ever, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.
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