recent reading :
— Larry McMurtry. Lonesome Dove. A Novel [1985]. Foreword by Taylor Sheridan. [2], 858 pp. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, [2025].
A spectacular book, every sentence and every chapter, from the Rio Grande up to the northern reaches of Montana. Engaging, devastating, even horrifying, and compelling at every level. This is a work of fiction so richly imagined that the reader walks, rides, listens, all the way. I cite a very few passages of interest :
“I ain’t a natural bachelor,” Augustus said. “There’s days when a little bit of talk with a female is worth any price. I figure the reason you don’t have much to say is that you probably never met a man who liked to hear a woman talk. Listening to women ain’t the fashion in this part of the country. But I expect you got a life story like everybody else. If you’d like to tell it, I’m the one that’d like to hear it.”
“The Earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight,” he added.
“Jake just mostly drifts. Any wind can blow him.”
“Ride with an outlaw, die with him.”
I though that slavery was the Matter of America, but McMurtry makes a pretty good case for the cattle drive and shoot-out and massacre as the vernacular Odyssey at the heart of the heart of the country.
(I read Lonesome Dove because David Streitfeld’s book Western Star sparked my curiosity.)
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— John Masefield. ODTAA. A novel. William Heinemann, 1926. One of 275 copies signed by the author.
Picaresque account of a revolution in a tinpot Latin American dictatorship. Prequel, of sorts, to Sard Harker (1924).
For an essay that will appear on Wormwoodiana.
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Michael Swanwick has published a brief, funny, and opinionated account of the New Wave in science fiction, The New Wave Explained
He followed with A Box Full of Controversy, a look at the origins of his 1986 essay A User’s Guide to the Postmoderns, Including the Battle for the Future, Unbridled Ambition, the Fate of the Children in the Starship, the Cyberpunk-Humanist Wars, Blood under the Banquet Tables, Metaphors Run Amok, and the Destruction of Atlantis !
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the Story Prize 2026
the winner of the 22nd annual Story Prize award is André Alexis, author of Other Worlds. Stories (FSG Originals. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2025).
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current reading :
— Marcel Proust. A la recherche du temps perdu. I. [Du côté de chez Swann. À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs]. NRF Gallimard, [2019]. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
/ I am back into it.
— The Supernatural Omnibus. Being a collection of Stories of Appraitions, Witchcraft, Werewolves, Diabolism, Necromancy, Satanism, Divination, Sorcery, Poetry. Voodoo, Possession, Occult Doom and Destiny. Edited, with an Introduction, by Montague Summers. Gollancz, 1931.