Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Enough Dark Elves to last you a lifetime

The fine folks at Humble Bundle are offering a huge bundle of Forgotten Realms novels, most of which seem to focus on the Underdark and its denizens, the Drow or Dark Elves. As usual part of the proceeds go for a charity.

One buck will net you six titles, and if you go all in and spend 15 bucks, you’ll get 23 books. There’s a whole slew of R.A. Salvatore novels featuring Drow swordmaster Drizzt, plus a few titles from other authors and series.
I admit I am not a fan of R.A. Salvatore, but admittedly I read his books a lifetime ago, and in translation. This is a good opportunity to re-evaluate the bestselling Salvatore. And other books seem promising.

As I mentioned, part of what you pay will go to a charity, in this case Extra Life, that is setting up children hospitals.

And as we are at it, there is also another bundle you might be interested in – up to 26 Warhammer 40.000 ebooks, with the same deal. In this case, the charities supported are two, CLIP and the Every Library Institute.


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Men (and women) of learning and of steel

Back in the day, I fell desperately in love with the writings of Mary Gentle, the British writer whose Rats & Gargoyles is still in my top five of favourite fantasy novels thirty years after I first read it. I have multiple copies of it, and the only time in my life I was mugged, the guy attacked me to steal from my coat pocket the paperback of Rats & Gargoyles.
A bibliophile-thief? A fantasy-loving thug?

In those pre-internet days, the only way to get everything Gentle had published was perusing the catalogs from Andromeda Books, and then mail an order (you know, with envelope and stamps) all the way to the UK, and then wait and pray the postman didn’t so something stupid.

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A memory called Empire

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.

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As if…

As if I had not enough already on my plate, compounded with a general lack of energies and a devastating lack of sleep, I’ve thought it would be good to use internet for something more than squalid self promotion and for mindless entertainment.

Like, there’s people out there that are having a real bad time – much worse than mine – dealing with the lockdown and its consequences.
Kids that used to meet their friends in preschool.
Singles holed up in a one-room apartment somewhere in suburbia.
People that have no one to talk to.

What could I do?
I am basically a writer and a teacher.
What could I provide for the community?
Any ideas?
Write them in the comments.


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Like a ragged samurai – L’Armata Brancaleone

Mario Monicelli (1915-2010) was a genius and a true artist. He started his career in movies at 19, writing an adaptation of Poe’s Telltale Heart, and for over seventy years he was at the cutting edge of Italian cinema, with a total of 112 scriptwriting credits, and 69 movies directed. He was one of the stalwarts of the so-called “commedia all’italiana” (Italian-style comedy), a genre that, at its best, mixed broad farce, subtle satire, and sharp social observation. And Monicelli was the best in the game.

Italian-style comedy came with a bundled problem, and some friends warned Monicelli that by bringing to the screen the flaws of the Italian character in highly comedic manner, his would be perceived by many as a celebration, not as an exposé. It was a fair warning, and indeed, today a lot of Monicelli’s work is remembered for the belly laughs and the ribald double-entendres, not for the often painful underlying themes of human frailty and misplaced ideals.

In 1966, Monicelli and some friends, including actor Vittorio Gassman, decided they could not take anymore the Disney-esque popular perception of medieval times, and decided to do a movie about a “ragged samurai of sorts” in a Medieval Italy that was at the same time historically accurate and sharply modern. So they did L’Armata Brancaleone (known in English as For Love and Gold or as The Incredible Army of Brancaleone).

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Italian Low Fantasy – Kickstarting Brancalonia

The page for the Brancalonia Kickstarter is live, and the project was financed in about one hour. Color me impressed – and grateful to the fans.
There is still twenty days to go, and so the project might become huge.
But what’s this Brancalonia thing?

Brancalonia is a game setting for the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, a psaeudo-historical fantasy that taps the rich catalog of stories, folklore and ideas from the Italian middle ages.
Based on the same concept of the highly successful Italian fantasy anthologies Zappa & Spada (something we could translate as Spade & Sorcery), Brancalonia is a low fantasy setting, in which the players portray members of the Medieval lower classes, trying to eke a living in a world filled with dangers, both mundane and supernatural.

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A very Italian sort of fantasy

Admittedly, 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.

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