Category: science fiction

current reading : late march / early april

 

BOOKBINDING & POLITICS
On the afternoon of Thursday 9 April I will be giving a talk at Oberlin College in connection with a program and workshop on bookbinding and politics at the library, We hold these Truths . . . to be Binding! Austin binder Jace Graf will be leading the workshop.  Information on the event can be found here :  https://oberlin.libcal.com/event/16363787
My talk is open to the public and is entitled Reading the Structure of the World : Bookbinding, Artificial Intelligence, and Life
I am looking forward to this, and to the idea of a bookbinding project that is not an all-consuming thrust to meet the deadline for an edition binding.
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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.

Metaphrasis

 

— William S. Wilson. Why I Don’t Write Like Franz Kafka. New York : The Ecco Press, [1977].

— —. Γιατι Δεν Γραφω Σαν Τον Φραντς Καφκα. Athens : Ekdoseis Apopeira, 1994. Translated by Sonia Salimpha, Stratos Kakadellēs. OCLC: 610587751 (Johns Hopkins).

William S. Wilson (1932–2016) was a friend for more than twenty-five years. I esteem his collection of stories and included it in my Grolier Club show for the beauty and clarity of his prose : and because several of the stories push at the boundaries of what we understand as science fiction in the same way that some of the work of Borges does.  “Desire” is a (quietly) spectacular example of what the short story can accomplish.

Bill was not a prolific writer. He published one novel, Birthplace, and a long stream of essays on art, literature, and philosophical topics. He was an exacting writer whose work demands of the reader the same rigor and sheer energy of attention with which he wrote and thought. And because of where and he lived in Chelsea, he knew everyone in the New York art scene of the Sixties and Seventies, not as a celebrity hanger-on but as an intelligent observer. There is a fascinating transcript of Jonathan D. Katz’s 2012 interviews with Bill at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

One sparkling memory from 1994 stands out among all our exchanges. I dropped in to visit him on 25th street and he said, I too have been published in Athens. He showed me a copy of his story collection, and all the history of philosophy was contained in his smile.

I remembered this some months ago, and now I have a copy of the book, thanks to a friend who set a family member on a quest through all the bookshops of Athens. It is locally scarce in the U.S., too. I don’t read Greek (ancient or modern) beyond the alphabet, but I am gratified to have this additional reminder of my friend Bill Wilson.

And this just on my desk : the 1528 Vier Bücher, Dürer’s four books on proportions of the human form.

30 years of the Avram Davidson website, and other news

Some thirty years ago this month, in September 1995, the Avram Davidson website went live on a subfolder of a borrowed server, courtesy of my former colleague Jim Nicholson. He responded to my asking for help turning a mess of information into a database by saying, Let’s turn it into a website. And so using a primitive DOS text editor, I coded a preliminary title index to the writings of Avram Davidson (1923-1993), and the website was launched. I never met Davidson but when I first started reading his work it compelled my interest and curiosity. Science fiction is a warm room on a cold night, as Paul WIlliams once wrote, and the field is pretty welcoming to newcomers. As electronic penpals and in real life, I met dozens of readers who shared an interest in Davidson’s work, or who had known him, or edited him, etc. The list is long: Michael Swanwick, Eileen Gunn, Gregory Feeley, Gordon Van Gelder, Phillip Rose, and others; and also friends now dead, among them Reno W. Odlin, David G. Hartwell, and George Scithers.
The first few years were rich in correspondence, especially once The Nutmeg Point District Mail electronic newsletter took shape, and the Avram Davidson Society (still largely a notional organization). The late Grania Davis, executor of the Estate, worked diligently to bring new books into being over a period of a decade, and I helped with many of them. The website grew organically and sent out digressions and personal flourishes, and even produced a monograph series of the publications of the Avram Davidson Society (the most substantial evidence of its existence). In 1999, the website came into its own with the avramdavidson.org domain. Always coming back to the work of Avram Davidson, with delight and wonder.  For me it was always an irregular shoestring midnight sort of operation, with periods of high yield followed by fallow periods. That title index remains at the core of the website : a bibliographical resource for the ages.
And if some of those digressions of mine (such as the Endless Bookshelf) are now more active than the Avram Davidson website, that is partly because other writing projects compel my energies and attention (there might be one of two publications still to come from The Nutmeg Point District Mail). But most importantly, once Grania’s son Seth Davis started his own process of discovering the writings of Avram Davidson, he began building the Avram Davidson Universe —  https://avramdavidson.com — and recruited a wide pool of new contributors and participants for interview podcasts and simultaneously embarked on a systematic project to publish the works of Avram Davidson. Always coming back to the work of Avram Davidson, with delight and wonder.
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2025 has been a bonzer* year for me in books, with publication of the following works :
A Melville Census, John Marr & Timoleon (January)
A Book of Ryhmes by Charlotte Bronte (Brontë Parsonage Museum / Tartarus Press, April), which includes my essay, Travelling with Charlotte
Another Green World (Zagava, June 2025)
The Critical Mess by Michael Zinman (Distributed by Temporary Culture, August 2025)
and the hardcover issue of Another Green World is in production at Zagava’s binders.
If you haven’t already done so, buy a book or two from Temporary Culture. The Private Life of Books is always a nice gift for a friend.
* (that’s an Avram Davidson word, which he traces to bonanza and the Sydney Ducks, a California Gold Rush era gang in a neighborhood of San Francisco)
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I have been reading my way through a box of Penguin paperback editions of works by Michael Innes, whose books were recommended to me (independently) by John Clute and Mark Valentine. I share their high esteem for Appleby’s End (1945), also praised by H. R. F. Keating in Crime and Mystery The 100 Best Books. I am having a fine time and will write something about the Innes books. Kelly Link sent me the beautiful Small Beer edition of The Book of Love (2024) in four volumes, and that is next on my reading list.
I will be in Boston for the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair 7-9 November 2025, if you are there, come say hello (at the Cummins booth 213)
Peace,
Henry Wessells, 29 September 2025

recent reading : early august 2025

recent reading :

— Raymond Sokolov. Wayward Reporter. The life of A. J. Liebling. Harper & Row, [1980].

— R. B. Russell. T. Lobsang Rampa and Other Characters of Questionable Faith. Tartarus Press, [2025].

— E. F. Benson. Visible and Invisible. Hutchinson, [1923]. Collection of a dozen uncanny stories. The publisher’s catalogue (dated Autumn 2023) at the back lists this under new fiction : “Between our own and the other world lies a borderland of shadows, which eyes that can pierce the material plane may sometimes see.” Benson’s father (died 1896) was the late Victorian Archbishop of Canterbury ; his siblings were all very talented and eccentric. “Mrs. Amworth” is a nasty village vampire tale, deftly told.
In a centenary essay at Wormwoodiana, Mark Valentine notes Benson’s “sardonic glee in the macabre.” http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2023/10/borderland-shadows-centenary-of-visible.html

— John Kessel. The Presidential Papers plus Imagining the Human Future : Up, Down, or Sideways plus The Last American and much more. PM Press, 2019. Outspoken Authors 31.
Includes “The Franchise” and Terry Bisson’s interview, and other satirical pieces. I saw John briefly at Readercon and he inscribed this “Critical of every president . . .”

— Paul Park. A City Made of Words plus Climate Change plus A Resistance to Theory and much more. PM Press, 2019. Outspoken Authors 23.
“A Conversation with the Author” and “A Resistance to Theory” are profoundly disquieting stories.

— A Soliloquy for Pan. Edited by Mark Beech. 372, [2] pp. Egaeus Press, 2025. Second edition (originally published 2015), with additional illustrations, adding one story, “The Game of the Great God Pan” by Benjamin Tweddell.

— Mark Samuels. Black Altars [2003]. Illustrations by Joseph Dawson. Zagava, 2025. Pictorial cloth. Elegant large format edition (12 x 7-1/2 inches) of this collection of six stories, a delight to hold in the hand and read.

— M. P. Dare. Unholy Relics. Edward Arnold, [1947] .
Collection of ghost stories in the tradition, though the plots are a bit coarser than anything from the pen of M. R. James ; and an exemplary work of literary misogyny couched in chivalrous postures. In that respect, Benson (see above) ain’t bad, neither.

 

dust jackets and scientific romance

At Readercon in mid-July, the great delight was the panel / conversation with John Clute about dust jackets and the information they encode (in and out of science fiction), with examples from The Book Blinders (2024), my own collection, and the Clute Library at the Telluride Institute [click on things to see bigger pictures].

Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud (dust jacket from the Clute collection, Telluride)
Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud (dust jacket from the Clute collection, Telluride)
Raid over England by Norman Leslie (dust jacket from the Clute collection, Telluride)
Raid over England by Norman Leslie (dust jacket from the Clute collection, Telluride)
Old Junk by H. M. Tomlinson (dust jacket from the Clute collection, Telluride)
Old Junk by H. M. Tomlinson (dust jacket from the Clute collection, Telluride)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clute also talked about the Scientific Romance in interwar British publishing, with Michael Dirda, a good chat. His thesis in progress is outlined at the SFE, lots of interesting titles (most of them in the Telluride hoard), details here :
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/scientific_romance

The World Ends by William Lamb [Storm Jameson] (dust jacket from the Clute collection, Telluride)
The World Ends by William Lamb [Storm Jameson] (dust jacket from the Clute collection, Telluride)

The Secret Voyage by A. Harcourt Burrage (dust jacket from the Clute collection, Telluride)
The Secret Voyage by A. Harcourt Burrage (dust jacket from the Clute collection, Telluride)
The Collapse of Homo Sapiens by P. Anderson Graham (dust jacket from the Clute collection, Telluride)
The Collapse of Homo Sapiens by P. Anderson Graham (dust jacket from the Clute collection, Telluride)

 

recent reading : late june 2025

recent reading : late june

— Paul McAuley. A Very British History. The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985-2011 [and:] . . . (Additional Stories). 2 vols. PS, 2013. Cover art by Jim Burns. Edition of 200 copies, signed by the author.
What a range of tone and subject, from far future urban sass and space drama to life in the ruins ; and McAuley’s hard science fiction as often engages political as scientific speculation. “Second Skin” (1997) and “Rocket Boy” (2007) are excellent hard tales; and “Cross Road Blues” (1991) and “The Two Dicks” (2001) are choice entries in the line of  subversive British literary pastiches of American popular culture — I am thinking of “The Big Fish” or Back in the USSR by Byrne and Newman, and similar delights — indisputably, Howard Waldrop was read over there east of the Atlantic ocean.
“How We Lost the Moon, A True Story by Frank W. Allen” (1999) is great, Nevil Shute in space, with a fine ending. [This is high praise, not a dig : Jack Vance made a whole late career cycle of Wodehouse in space.] “A Very British History”, published in Interzone in 2000, is a review of an imaginary book worthy of Lem, but only a tricky Brit could have rung this particularly bell so clearly.
The world-building in the stories is sly and integral. As in the novels, the dance of ideas includes gestures or flourishes that would be infodumps in other hands : McAuley knows when to let an idea go as a flash or hint. I had read Fairyland and a few other novels ; reading War of the Maps earlier in the month prompted me to look at the short stories.

— Michael Swanwick. [Singular Interviews] S1ngular 1nterv1ews. Dragonstairs Press, 2025. Edition of 60 copies signed by the author. Stitched in Indian paper wrappers of various hues, with title label.
Michael Swanwick is the originator of the Singular Interview (many were published in the New York Review of Science Fiction). When he asks a single question, people answer: John Crowley, Tom Purdom (a witty joke), Eileen Gunn, Gregory Frost, Paul Park, Mike Resnick, Samuel R. Delany, Karl Schoeder, David Hartwell, Henry Wessells, Greer Gilman, Spider Robinson, Fran Wilde, Tom Purdom (a serious answer this time), and Michael Moorcock.
[It is a useful conceit, and I have borrowed it on several occasions). The edition sold out almost immediately, as usual with this press (see me after class if you need a copy)].

Readercon 34 (July 2025)

Readercon 34 Schedule
at the Boston Marriott Burlington in Burlington, Mass.
https://readercon.org

Saturday 19 July
10:00 a.m., at the autographer’s table
Autograph Session : Henry Wessells

Sunday 20 July
10:00 to 11:00 a.m., in : Create / Collaborate
The Art of the SF Book Cover
John Clute & Henry Wessells
Panel description : Since its inception, the British Library, the national library of the UK, has stripped dust jackets off books in its holding and discarded the unwanted wrappers, losing an essential piece of their cultural and artistic significance. In The Book Blinders, science fiction historian and theorist John Clute details the “annals of vandalism” at the British Library, with a focus on works lost (and found). John Clute and antiquarian bookseller Henry Wessells give a joint presentation on this subject, with numerous illustrations, and with extra time for Q&A.

11:00 to 11:30 a.m., in : Empower / Embrace
Reading : Henry Wessells
Henry Wessells reads from The Elfland Prepositions and from Another Green World (both newly published in 2025).

12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m., in : Create / Collaborate
The Art of the SF Book Cover
John Clute & Michael Dirda
Panel description : The early divergence of American and British science fiction may best be witnessed in the works of UK authors in the 1930s and ’40s that have been called “scientific romances.” Unlike their pulp cousins in the US, these works lack the optimistic outlook of young square-jawed heroes out to conquer the galaxy. Instead, they offer anxiety about rogue scientists armed with Ultimate Weapons out to blackmail the world to either peace or servitude. In this presentation, famed fantastika theorist John Clute and Michael Dirda will discuss this less-recognized strand of SF.
[N.B. I will be running a slide show not dissimilar to the one for dust jackets.]

I should arrive at Readercon by midday on Friday. Temporary Culture will have a table in the book room on Friday and Saturday, and copies of A Conversation larger than the Universe, The Private Life of Books, The Elfland Prepositions, and Another Green World (advance copies of the Zagava paperback), the publications of the Avram Davidson Society, Sexual Stealing by Wendy Walker, and a variety of other books will be available for sale (cash, cheque, or paypal). If you see me, come say hello. There is always plenty of time for conversation.

Another green world by Henry Wessells, 2025

Another green world by Henry Wessells
a first glimpse in the wild : Another green world (2025)

— Henry Wessells. Another green world. Zagava, 2025. Paperback issue. Pp. 180, [2, blank], [2, imprint]. Sage green wrappers printed in black, lower wrapper with blurbs by Guy Davenport, William Gibson, and Joanne McNeil.
On a very hot evening in late June, your correspondent went to Newark airport to expedite customs clearance and collect the first author copies of Another green world, newly re-issued by Zagava Books with two additional stories. It is a stylish book in a tall narrow format, set by Jan-Marco Schmitz in Minion pro with titles in Roadway.
The paperback is a pleasure to hold and read. The hardcover issue is in production, and a formal  announcement of publication is expected. Zagava make nice books. Perhaps you will agree.

The table of contents is as follows (with note of the story‘s first publication) :

  1. From This Swamp. (The Starry Wisdom. A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft. Ed. D. M. Mitchell. Creation Books, 1994)
  2. Book Becoming Power. (NYRSF, March 2000)
  3. Another Green World. (Nature, 15 June 2000)
  4. The Polynesian History of the Kerguélen Islands. (Exquisite Corpse 45 & 47, 1994)
  5. The Institute of Antarctic Archaeology & Protolinguistics. (Another green world, 2003)
  6. Appraisal at Edgewood (A Critical Fiction). (NYRSF, March 2001)
  7. Hugh O’Neill’s Goose. (Interzone, October 2001)
  8. Virtual Wisdom. (Exquisite Corpse 36, 1992)
  9. Wulkderk; or, Not in Skeat. (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 32, 2015, as “The Beast Unknown to Heraldry”)
  10. Extended Range; or, The Accession Label. (2015, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 35, 2016)
  11. Ten Bears; or, A Journey to the Weterings (A Critical Fiction). (NYRSF, October 2003)

Of the first edition, Guy Davenport wrote,
“If you don’t believe in magic, read Henry Wessells and find out how wrong you are.”

Joanne McNeil (author of Lurking and Wrong Way), writes, “Henry Wessells writes from beyond an ‘unfamiliar void’, where the natural world, dreams, language, myths, research, and rituals converge. The stories collected in Another Green World offer uncanny vitality out of the dark like dandelions sprouting from cracked New Jersey pavement. A delightful and enduring work of literary inquiry.”

commonplace book : february 2025

The Elfland Prepositions, published 27 February

advance copies of The Elfland Prepositions, at the Post Office

advance presentation copies, at the post office ready for mailing [26 February]

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in production

The Elfland Prepositions. Cover image
— Henry Wessells. The Elfland Prepositions. Temporary Culture, 2025.
Printed on Mohawk superfine white eggshell. Pictorial wrappers. 26 copies, lettered A to Z, were reserved for presentation ; there were also 100 copies numbered 1 to 100.

Proof copy above (received 12 February 2025) ; proofs corrected & in production (14 February 2025), published 27 February 2025.

Copies now offered for sale, click on link or photo to order.
ISBN13 978-0-9764660-0-0 ISBN 0-9764660-0-1

Collection of four previously unpublished short stories.

Elfland is not a nice place, but it’s important to know how it works.

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seen in the imagination, and at the Grolier Club :

two entries from the recent Grolier Club exhibition, Imaginary Books. Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books, from the collection of Reid Byers.

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current reading

— Charles Robert Maturin. Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale [1820]. With introduction and notes by Victor Sage. Penguin Books, [2000].
/ into the labyrinth, again

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recent reading

— Len Deighton. Hope. HarperCollins, [1995].
— — Charity. HarperCollins, [1996].
— — Winter. A Novel of a Berlin Family. Knopf, 1987.
Germany in the world, 1899-1945 ; back story or bedrock for the Bernard Samson novels.

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‘away from the clank of the world’

— Walt Whitman. In Paths Untrodden. Printed in brown ink, blockprint illustrations in green and blue. [16] pp. [The Letterpress at Oberlin, January 2025]. Edition of 217.
Calamus 1, from the 1860 Leaves of Grass, with blue herons and green marsh plants. [Gift of VH].

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Hard Rain by Janwillem van de Wetering

A short note now up (in English) on the excellent and informative Dutch site

https://janwillemvandewetering.nl/favoriete-boek/

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“not relics of the past, but pockets of the future arriving ahead of schedule”

— Christopher Brown, over at The Clearing (the blog of Little Toller Books)

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“When I look at that obscure but gorgeous prose-composition, the Urn-burial, I seem to myself to look into a deep abyss, at the bottom of which are hid pearls and rich treasure ; or it is like a stately labyrinth of doubt and withering speculation, and I would invoke the spirit of the author to lead me through it.”

— Charles Lamb on Sir Thomas Browne, quoted by Hazlitt, in “Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen” (1826)

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Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford : the Endless Bookshelf book of the year – 2024

— Francis Spufford. Cahokia Jazz [2023]. Scribners, [February 2024].
Cahokia Jazz is a Prohibition novel, a jazz novel, a detective novel, and an excellent science fiction novel set in an alternate America, and the best new book I read in 2024 (it was published in England last autumn but I did not see a copy).
The novel opens with the investigation of a gruesome crime by two Cahokia police detectives. Joe Barrow is a deracinated veteran of the an Indian orphanage school and the first world war. It’s a toss-up which was the harder school. Phin Drummond, is also a veteran of the trenches, a poor white opportunist and a joker in the face of death. Barrow plays piano in speakeasies and hotel nightclubs,  and Cahokia Jazz rolls out to the plink and rumble of piano music from ragtime to Satie to Jelly Roll Morton.
How many ways can the dominant Anglo-Norman colonial history of North America be subverted ?  It’s one thing to invoke a distinguished name, as Spufford does with the novel’s sly dedication ; it’s another to deliver the goods. The narrative of Cahokia Jazz is not rote or formulaic but organically rooted in language and anthropology and invented historical documents. To get technical for a moment, the Jonbar Point is a milder Columbian exchange and the introduction of a less virulent strain of smallpox to the Americas, so that indigenous populations survive in larger numbers and the political and cultural shape of the continental United States is altered. St. Louis remains a small rural trading post ; on the east bank of the Mississippi, Cahokia is the industrial powerhouse and nexus of commerce and transportation. This is another America, but certain characteristics persist and Spufford plays the tensions well : the polity of Cahokia is a syncretic multi-ethnic Catholic commonwealth with an indigenous American aristocracy whose matriarchal line of succession contrasts with the Protestant merchant-industrialist capitalists slavering at the opportunities they seek to create by fomenting unrest and playing the Red Menace card. An investor says, “One hopes that when the, ah, obstacles of the present arrangements have been cleared away, the place will still preserve its character. As much as possible, anyhow.”
One arc of the novel is Joe’s recovery of his takouma (indigenous) heritage through his connections with the Sun and Moon. The Sun is the de facto ruler of Cahokia — Harvard-educated, cosmopolitan descendant of the long line of princes, with a Boston Brahmin drawl, “long hair and earrings and a face the color of old, oiled wood”, and someone deeply attentive to the power of symbols. “The Man” gives Joe his card (like the Provót “ASSIST” in Avram Davidson’s Eszterhazy tale “The Crown Jewels of Jerusalem”) to ensure the cooperation of the takouma population, and brings Joe along to witness the Green Corn Planting ceremony in a rural suburb. Joe meets the Moon — the niece of the Sun, stylish couturière and cultural benefactor of Cahokia. She tells him the tale of Thrown-Away Boy and his brother Lodge Boy, and he accompanies her to a dinner at the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Algonkian Hotel.
At any moment the relationship between the two detectives could edge into Laurel and Hardy — or Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, or the Keystone Kops — but it doesn’t. Cahokia is a gritty, stinking, beautiful city, seething in the build-up to a KKK riot, and as the detectives criss-cross the map in search of the murderer, they meet and interview  individuals  so distinctive — German gangsters, a tough-talking red-headed newspaper reporter, hicks, takouma crazies and political activists and poets and office workers — that the moments of wit and levity never tumble into slapstick. There are many pleasures throughout the novel, some involving a sense of alternate possibilities. Spufford integrates ritual and mystery into a twentieth-century America : the appearance of the Four Winds Society when Joe joins the detective bureau is a rite of welcome by his colleagues in masks, but the power of that society is revealed when the police are suddenly ushered out of a takouma neighborhood by citizens whose masks no longer seem so benign. Another delight is the long scene in the Algonkian’s Catawba Room, where Joe meets the takouma cultural elite and a visiting professor of Anthropology, sits in at the piano with the band, and dances with the Moon. The week of the novel is packed with incident.
“To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth”, as Conrad wrote : the effect upon the reader, that’s what it all comes down to. Cahokia Jazz makes it happen.
The Endless Bookshelf book of the year 2024.