news & notes
the view from the hammock
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— Michael Swanwick. Basil, Pepper, Salt, and Garlic Greens : A Year in a Witch’s Kitchen. Dragonstairs Press, 2026. Edition of 80.
A cheery mediaeval fantasy of “Auld Agnes” (twice a widow and not yet thirty) and celebration of the seasonal bounty of the land, a novel in miniature that swiftly turns very dark.
——. Twenty-Three Reasons to Attend ICFA. Dragonstairs Press, 2026. Edition of 40.
A brief history of the convivial gathering that is the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, issued to mark the 47th iteration.
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IX XI. A documentary by Sean Wilsey.
I caught one of the screenings of IX XI in its premiere at the Tribeca film festival. I was impressed by the collage of small moments to tell a big story ; the events of 11 September 2001 in New York City are one of the defining events in my lifetime. The film is built upon interviews with a dozen people “from all walks of life”, including some fabulous cameos, and good archival moments. I especially dug the footage of skateboarding the plaza, and the art on the beach segments from earliest days of the World Trade Center. Director Sean Wilsey is a good listener. Roz Chast is every bit as compelling in her tales of parental anxiety as in her cartoons. The TV cameraman communicated his impulse to get right down there and interview people on the spot : the dread and the excitement are equally palpable. And his memory of waking the next day with concrete tears in the corners of his eyes was moving. There were even some laughs. In the Q&A after the film, Wilsey noted that his own account of his experiences on the day was the first to be cut. The interviews are recorded (without any prompts or questions) in a set that alludes to Yamazaki’s soaring façades and to rippling waters of memory and memorial pools. The film is limited to the days before and the day itself, no politics or exploration of aftermaths, an intention, and a choice, I can respect.
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current reading :
— M. John Harrison. Climbers [1989]. W&N Essentials, [2022, 7th printing].
Somehow I had never read this wonderful book. If one of the characters appears to suffer from “a kind of nostalgia, but for a place you’ve never been”, Harrison’s tricky prose reads like a memoir of events that never happened and it is no less true for that.
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— R. B. Russell. The Sanctuary and Other Strange Stories. Tartarus Press, [2026]. Pictorial boards, dust jacket, from a painting by the author.
Collection of 28 stories, written over a period of some two decades.
Am really looking forward to reading this.
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recent reading :
‘an inventory of silent nothings’
— (LAWRENCE, T. E.) Colin Sackett. The . A Concordance. Uniformbooks, 2026. [Gift of MV].
Bibliographical concordance to the expurgations in the published edition of The Mint, A day-book of the R.A.F. Depot between August and December 1922 with later notes by 352087 A/c Ross (1955). T. E. Lawrence wrote an account of his time in the R.AF. and in March 1928 “he sent a clean copy of the revised text to Edward Garnett [who] had copies typed which were circulated to a small circle, among them Air Marshal Trenchard. Trenchard’s concerned response led Lawrenceto guarantee that it would not be published at least until 1950.” When Lawrence died following a motorcycle crash, his brother made arrangements with Doubleday, Doran, American publishers of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, to produce 50 copies of a copyright edition of The Mint in 1936 (O’Brien A166), ten copies of which were nominally for sale at the prohibitive price of $500,000 per copy. When The Mint was published in 1955, the censored content (“all objectionable words”) was not “conventionally redacted — by substituting asterisks, or emphatic black overprinting — but rather, made absent” : as blank spaces. The vocabulary is rather limited and predictable : in his editorial note, Sackett helpfully provides an inventory. (In 1973 a definitive edition, edited with a preface by J. M. Wilson, and including the objectionable words and names as they appeared in the manuscript, was published by Cape).
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— Richard K. Morgan. No Man’s Land. Del Rey, [2026].
Violent collision of notions of Faerie with the dislocations in the aftermath of the first world war : memories of trench warfare, sexy witchcraft, and the Forest resurgent and threatening, in a hard-boiled detective mode, with mockery of the political and intelligence establishment (and the Order of the Golden Dawn). Relations between humans and “the Huldu” are largely gladiatorial in nature and the encounters are deftly choreographed. While Dunsany is named from the first page, and one of the book’s sectional epigrams cites Raymond Chandler (“It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in.”), the narrative tone is much more Mike Hammer or Carroll John Daly than Hammett or Chandler. An intense book.
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— Charles E. Gould, J, Jnr. The Toad at Harrow. P. G. Wodehouse in Perspective. London: [Printed by the John Roberts Press for James H. Heineman], 1982.
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— An Englishman in New York. A Selection from the Library of Stephen C. Massey. Illustrated. 112 pp. (220 items). Peter Harrington, 2026.
An interesting and wide-ranging catalogue with numerous dedication copies and interesting rarities, such as Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) in rose muslin over boards (right at the dawn of modern cloth bookbinding), and a beautiful pair of Norwich textile sample books from the same period. As an auctioneer with Christie’s Mr. Massey sold a Gutenberg Bible in 1978 and the Codex Hammer of Leonardo da Vinci in 1994 (now known as the Codex Leicester).
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— Madly Singing in the Mountains. An Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley. Edited with a preface by Ivan Morris. George Allen & Unwin, [1970]. Recollections of the great translator and poet Arthur Waley, whose A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918) is one of the great texts of English modernist poetry ; he also translated Japanese poetry, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, The Tale of Genji, The Poetry and Career of Li Po, and Monkey. With a miscellany of extracts from his other works.
If there is but a seed
On the face of the rock
A pine will grow ;
And shall not love worth calling love
Find always a way to meet ?
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— John Blackburn. The Blue Octavo. Jonathan Cape, [1963].
— Colin Dexter. The Way through the Woods. Crown Publishers, [1992].
— Bernard J. Farmer. Death of a Bookseller [1956]. Poisoned Pen [in association with the British Library, 2023].
— Henry Wade. The Hanging Captain. Constable, [1932].
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