And then something happens that disrupts all your plans and your timetables, and it0s OK like that.
In this case, the something was a quick message from my friend Marina, that suggested I check out a book called Passing Strange, by author Ellen Klages.
The book, Marina said, came with the recommendation of Caitlin R. Kiernan.
If the recommendation and the gorgeous cover weren’t enough, I then checked the blurb on Amazon…
San Francisco in 1940 is a haven for the unconventional. Tourists flock to the cities within the city: the Magic City of the World’s Fair on an island created of artifice and illusion; the forbidden city of Chinatown, a separate, alien world of exotic food and nightclubs that offer “authentic” experiences, straight from the pages of the pulps; and the twilight world of forbidden love, where outcasts from conventional society can meet.
Six women find their lives as tangled with each other’s as they are with the city they call home. They discover love and danger on the borders where magic, science, and art intersect.
Inspired by the pulps, film noir, and screwball comedy, Passing Strange is a story as unusual and complex as San Francisco itself from World Fantasy Award winning author Ellen Klages.
Yes, inspired by the pulps, film noir, and screwball comedy.
Could I not invest two bucks and a half in this book?
And a great investment it was, just as it was a good idea spending a few hours in these two nights to read the book and enjoy its mix of class, elegance and ideas.
Part of the (excellent) series of Tor.com novellas, Klages’ book is a historical fantasy1 set in 1940, and touches on a number of subjects, from topology to weird menace pulps, while tracing the lives of six characters in the shadow of the incoming war and in a society i n which they have a hard time fitting.
Elegantly written, with great dialogue and great characterization, Passing Strange reads like a breeze, and is hopefully a sign that 2017 will be an excellent year for fiction, if nothing else.
Highly recommended.
- remind me to do a post about why lots of current fantasy fans wouldn’t recognize Klages’ story as a fantasy, and why this is an absolute tragedy. ↩
I am currently reading a great book by William Dalrymple, called White Mughals. The tag-line Love and betrayal in eighteenth century India might sound like this is some kind of bodice-ripper, but Dalrymple is a solid writer about Asia, and his is a very interesting study of British-Indian relationships in the 218th and early 19th century.
Yesterday I gave myself a little gift – my new Italian indie ebook is doing decently, so why not? – and so I bought me a copy of the classic 1974 double biography by Warren G. Harris Gable & Lombard.
Apparently, the Furie movie had nothing to do with Harris’ book – not only in the sense that it had very little to do with Gable and Lombard in the first place but really, apart from the title, Furie and his team never even touched the biography. The movie is notoriously full of factual errors and gives a very poor image of the two stars, and it was savaged by, among others, Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael.
On the 29th of December the Catholic Church remembers Saint David, alias King David, alias The Slingshot Kid.
One last purchase before the festivities, The Pulps by Jess Nevins has been an impulse buy – I was looking for something completely different, and Amazon’s evilothers also bought function revealed to me the existence of a Nevins book I knew nothing about.
Karavansara 