I am currently reading a litfic novel from the 1950s, which I read back in the dim and distant, and having read an account of it in a recent biography did not greatly recognise it or any of the characters, so when I saw a copy in Skoob books last week, picked it up.
And it has that curious narrative convention that I have observed in other novels ( Read more... )

Because all these demonstrate recurrence &/or refusal to learn from history, &/or forgetting how things used to be.
Dangerous liaisons: why syphilis and gonorrhoea have returned to haunt Britain.
It is probably little known, except to STI-history nerds like moi, that the VD provision initiated in the UK in 1917 was, in some senses, a precursor of ( Read more... )

Would it not be more useful to think in a somewhat more granular fashion about what we are thinking about when we are bewailing the declining popularity of literary fiction, and the fact that litfic writers are unable to support themselves by writing litfic:
Literary fiction in crisis as sales drop dramatically.
When one considers that within the ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Scandal Takes the Stage, read the next in the trilogy, Temptations of a Wallflower (2016). Implausible but fun.
Genevieve Valentine, Dream Houses (2014) - well done, but very bleak.
Mia Marlowe, How to Vex a Viscount (2012 reissue of 2009 novel) - well, I did finish this (no 3 in the box set) but deeply implausible, and a v ( Read more... )

Have lately read a couple of things which might roughly be described as 'we live in Narnia, we found a portal or some other method of transmission into modern-day USA, and you know what, we prefer it there'.
Just recalled that in similar vein was Emma Newman's Between Two Thorns (The Split Worlds, no 1) (2013), in which someone much prefers C21st ( Read more... )

Men have all the time in the world to have a baby, right? Not according to the latest research.
Though on the 'freezing sperm' thing, is this about ticking biological clocks or about having other health-related things going on?
I find it interesting that there's a misleading narrative of (rich, celebrated) men achieving fatherhood at very advanced ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Obsession in Death, which I do not think one of the stronger entries in this long series, but this may be because it does that thing I really dislike of snapshots of the antagonist's thought-processes interspersed in the main narrative.
'Scorched Supper on New Niger' (1980) by Suzy McKee Charnas, as part of a SnackReads ebook ( Read more... )

My first (of two) panels was this morning, and I think went well if a bit sticky to start off with (also possibly could have done with MOAR panelists - 2 + mod a bit thin?). Somewhat of an irony for cis het monogamous moi to be talking about certain pernicious tropes around sex in sff narratives perchance? Y/N?
General impressions: somewhat but not ( Read more... )

I suspect that you either see this as a lovely romantic story or as dangerously pathological and encouraging a very dodgy mindset: Canadian searches for Irish girl who stole his heart.... dentist from Kelowna, British Columbia, has travelled thousands of miles back to Ireland to find a red haired, freckled girl he saw once in a café in County ( Read more... )

Piece in today's Guardian G2 section on the sudden swathe of dystopian movies: why is the future on film always so grim?
I think it makes some good points: As Imran Siddiquee pointed out last year in the Atlantic, it is a world where white people are the ones doing most of the suffering. It is a world where white people get to masquerade as ( Read more... )