My insomnia keeps raging, and so I am filling my long nights with books and movies – because you can’t go on writing without a pause. A good opportunity to catch up with titles I have overlooked or left behind in the past years.
And right now I am really enjoying Arkady Martine’s A memory called Empire, that is the sort of smart, fun space opera that I have always liked. The reason, really, why I read (and sometimes write) science fiction.
Continue readingAdmittedly, the title of Roy Kinnard and Tony Crnkovich’s Italian Sword and Sandal Films, 1908–1990 is misleading. The book does not cover only sword & sandal movies (aka peplums), but a whole selection of swashbucklers, historical and Biblical flicks. And I am not complaining at all.
The book, published by McFarland & Co in 2017 is really just a long check list of the most important movies in the broad category of sword & sandal as applied by the authors. Like in, say, Silver & Ward’s Noir Encyclopedia, we get details on every cast and crew member but alas not an extensive critical article for every film. This is really a pity.
Continue readingI was mentioning my lack of experience in the field of romance, and as luck would have it, I ended up with a romance novella on my reader.
A classic case of fuzzy serendipity.
Zen Cho, a young fantasy writer from Malaysia, has been on my radar for a while – ever since her Sorcerer to the Crown made quite a splash.
And the other day, as I was browsing Amazon, as one does, I spotted a short work by Cho called The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo.
What can I say?
It was short, it was cheap, I bought it.
And only later I discovered that it is not a fantasy, but rather a romantic comedy set in 1920 London, following the titular Jade Yeo, straight out of East Asia and working as a reviewer for a magazine, as se gets swept in the heady lifestyle of the Bloomsbury Circle.
The author self-published it a while back, and it’s a fast, entertaining read.
And a lot of fun it is, mixing historical elements, sharp satire e biting wit, and yes, a good dose of romance.
But now I am even more interested in reading Zen Cho’s fantasies – because she’s an excellent writer, from what I was able to see, and I am quite happy with this fortuitous and entertaining discovery.
I am pleased to announce that the anthology All That Weird Jazz, published by the fine guys at Pro Se Productions, is available in both paperback and ebook, and it’s a collection of hits, featuring nine stories by Kimberly Richardson, MA Monnin, Ernest Russell, EW Farnsworth, James Hopwood, McCallum J. Morgan, Mark Barnard, and Sharae Allen. And one by me.
As a long time fan of jazz music, it was a pleasure and a privilege being part of this team, and I hope you guys will enjoy this fine selection of weird fiction.
I am sure I wrote in the past about how much I would have liked to write a series about a paranormal detective or an occult investigator. The sub-genre has a long and well-established tradition, and there’s a few excellent books out there, and quite a few series worth checking out.
Of all the collections out there, one of my favorite is probably Mark Valentine’s The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths, that Wordsworth Classics published in their line Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural. The stories in the volume are old – most of them are Victorian or Edwardian – and from lesser-known authors, but that’s part of the fun. A quick check on Amazon reveals that the book is no longer in print, and a copy can be had for 268,99 euro, plus postage. And to think my copy is here on a chair, under a tin of cookies…
But as luck would have it, in the end I did write not one, not two, but three (hopefully) series about supernatural detection.
Continue readingI have talked in the past about how, to Italian kids of my generation, Arsène Lupin, the character created at the turn of the last century by Maurice Leblanc, was a timely and much welcome introduction to tongue-in-cheek adventure and good-natured rule-breaking, jazz, sophistication and beautiful women, thanks to a wonderful TV series featuring the excellent Georges Descrières in the role of the gentleman thief.
Indeed, Descrières as Lupin and Patrick Macnee as John Steed have a lot to answer about how I turned out as a person.
Later came the Lupin books, often in strange translations and abridged editions to make them suitable for young readers, and later still the movies, but everything started with the TV series. Re-watched today, the series is slow-paced and suffers from an almost theatrical construction of certain scenes, and yet the acting, the production values and the locations (episodes were shot all over Europe) are worth alone the price of admission.
Continue readingLovecraft purists often frown at Lovecraft-inspired fiction. The main charge raised by these people is, other writers are either too much like Lovecraft or not at all like him, often at the same time. The second most common accusation is that certain stories are too action-centered and adventure-oriented, filled with guns blazing and chanting cultists. They usually blame Lovecraft’s popularity with the gaming crowd as the main reason for these degenerate pastiches, in which Indiana Jones or Doc Savage seem to exert an influence stronger than Nyarlathotep’s.
But I do like a bit of Lovecraft-flavored pulp adventure – and I do not mind action, gun-play and tongue-in-cheek name dropping.
I guess I am not a true Epicure in the terrible. So sue me.
Karavansara 