That’s a sample page from a book I’m really enjoying reading at the moment: The Explainers by Jules Feiffer. (You can see some other sample pages at The Comics Reporter, or even cooler check out the slideshow on Flickr.) Here’s how the publisher describes the book: In 1956, a relatively unknown cartoonist by the name of Jules Feiffer started contributing… Read more →
Tag: Books
Their great chicken-bone and moonshine empire will rise again
I know you’re already seen this, but it’s just too good to let go by. My favourite bit references the hobo signs stuff we were looking at earlier this month: And they devised a secret language of signs and scrawls used to alert their passing brethren to danger or opportunity. A crucifix chalked on the side of a house meant… Read more →
In which I embody the Internet as infinite recursor
So, Jeff VanderMeer, author of many things (including frightfully good stories about mushroom people) linked to my post below about pseudonyms. He’s gone with the “rather laugh than cry” route and has introduced a new Internet meme for book nerds: So, what’s your literary pen name? THIS IS THE OFFICIAL FORMULA (as created by, um, me): (1) Use the first… Read more →
Bookish Bits: A Miscellany
Check out PodCastle, a new podcast of readings from in the F/SF genre. They got my attention with their first reading, of Peter Beagle‘s Come Lady Death. There are several more stories there now, as well. More details on Anathem, the new Neal Stephenson. Looks to be another monster of a book. And, I’m thinking, we’re going to be seeing… Read more →
Bookish Bits: Pseudonyms
OK, I’m comfortable with the idea of pseudonyms for authors. Sure, when I was a kid and first ran into the concept (I think it was when someone told me that the Eric G. Iverson guy whose stories I liked in the digests had novels under another name) I was a little shocked, but I’m used to it now. Some… Read more →
Bookish Bits: Small Press Publishers
I give a disturbing amount of money to Subterranean Press and Night Shade Books for some of their fine editions. They seem to print a lot of stuff that I want to have–hitting both my tastes in literature, in that they print books I want to read and own, and my tastes as a frankly insane collector type in that… Read more →
Bookish Bits: Vance Integral
That’s Jack Vance over there. I’m a fan. I’m enough of a fan that I wanted to sign up for the Vance Integral Edition when they were taking subscriptions. It played into my two compulsions: collecting all the good writing, and collecting fine or rare editions of the good writing. At that time I didn’t have the money sitting around.… Read more →
A Humument
I was recently in a discussion of books as art object. Usually when I’m in a conversation like that it’s about fine limited editions, but this time it was about books that are works of art in a more conventional sense. I cited the Codex Seraphinianus, and the person I was talking to cited A Humument. I admit I was… Read more →
It Can’t Be Done
Why? Why would you try to take not just one, but two “highly complex” novels and try to make a film out of them? Hyperion deals with a space war, with most of the action taking place on a planet named Hyperion, known not only for its electricity-spewing trees but also for the Time Tombs, large artifacts that can move… Read more →
Today’s Only Content
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present for your edification, a highly-trained Canadian actor who has spent 30 years working in Britain (on stage and screen, and in over 200 BBC radio plays, among other things) playing the part of a stage actor from Tennessee in the 1960s, who is in turn playing the part of a British narrator in Victorian times,… Read more →
Dismissed with a touch of ceremony
Maybe I will go to Paris. Who knows? But I’ll sure as hell never go back to Texas again. Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry. I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented… Read more →
You can put data in…
I’ve read all of Christopher Buckley’s satires, and have almost uniformly enjoyed them. I only recently got caught up, reading the latest one, Boomsday, just before the holidays late last year. I enjoyed it, too. However, there was one thing in there that really caused me to lose my suspension of disbelief. It wasn’t the idea of a platform based… Read more →
Portraiture and Literature
Got a little time to spend crawling around on the web? Allow me to recommend that you use some of it to check out the archives at Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s clobberin’ time!!! You might ask “what the hell is that”? Well, in the site’s own words: This website, now in its ninth incarnation since being launched in 06.1998, is… Read more →
It’s been a while since this happened…
I am completely ensorcelled by A Wild Sheep Chase. I’m not sure to what extent that’s down to Murakami, and to what extent to Birnbaum, though. I suspect that I am on the brink of disappearing into at least eight Murakami novels and not coming up for air until I’ve devoured them all. I can not yet explain why I… Read more →
Once more unto the breach
…to close a bunch of tabs before Firefox memory issues eat my computer. Let us begin with my praise of BibliOdyssey. They pulled me in earlier this month with the scans from an antique geomancy almanac, and I’ve been exploring their archives since then. Wow, is there a lot of stuff in there for a bibliophile to gawk at. Cosmological… Read more →
