Pieces of eight

And by eight, I mean news:

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Ah–! Art Student Hand-Illuminates, Binds a Copy of the Silmarillion; Tolkien fans across the world experience heart palpitations.

Check here for an interview with the artist, and larger images of his gloriously detailed work.

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And some incredible (belatedly posted, here) news for fans of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Since the release of the 1982 animated adaptation, Beagle had been denied payment of contractually due royalties for the film. At the beginning of August, Connor Cochran, Beagle’s business manager, sent this announcement:

“THE EIGHT-YEAR STRUGGLE FOR PETER’S LAST UNICORN RIGHTS IS OVER!

Really. No joke, no fooling. It’s over. And everybody won. […] For now suffice to say that Peter has signed an agreement with ITV that (a) ends the whole mishagosh in a way that is great for him, and (b) great for ITV, and (c) great for LAST UNICORN fans everywhere, since now all kinds of things are going to be possible that could never be done before.”

This is news that I’ve been waiting to hear for years.

I’d been exploratorily rereading bits from The Last Unicorn, lately – exploratorily because I know I’ve been growing out of a lot of things that used to fill my head and make me cry. We’re safe; TLU still makes me cry. (It probably helps that I still feel completely unironically about unicorns.) I sound a little flippant, but it’s a deeply beautiful, wise, and timeless book. I don’t like recommending it willy-nilly because I know unironic books about unicorns and mortality and love aren’t everyone’s thing (even though it is sometimes ironic, too! and meta!), but consider this my sideways plea for more people to read it.

Hey, “unironic” and “unicorn” are almost anagrams. Coincidence? I think not.

Go to:
Peter S. Beagle: bio and works reviewed
The Last Unicorn comic #1 (2010): review by Emera
The Last Unicorn comic #2 (2010): review by Emera

The Man With the Golden Torc, by Simon R. Green (2008) E

Date read: 9.2.11
Book from: Borrowed from my cousin
Reviewer: Emera

“The name’s Bond. Shaman Bond. Actually, that’s just my cover. I’m Eddie Drood. But when your job includes a license to kick supernatural arse on a regular basis, you find your laughs where you can. For centuries, my family has been the secret guardian of humanity, all that stands between all of you and all of the really nasty things that go bump in the night. As a Drood field agent I wore the golden torc, I killed monsters, and I protected the world. I loved my job. Right up to the point when my own family declared me rogue for no reason, and I was forced to go on the run. Now the only people who can help me prove my innocence are the people I used to consider my enemies.

I’m Shaman Bond, very secret agent. And I’m going to prove to everyone that no one does it better than me.”

More junk food, sorry. Harry Dresden in London, basically, only not half as zippy or funny (and I’m pretty easily amused when it comes to dork humor). Most of Green’s one-liners sink without a trace, and the book feels brutally repetitive only a few chapters in. The main character solves most conflicts by punching buildings or people (while wearing his magical golden armor of invulnerability and superstrength) or activating one of an array of ridiculously overpowered gadgets. (Look, we get that James Bond had absurd gadgetry, but his gadgetry stayed fun and quirky because it was generally small in size and effect, and single-use-only. Exploding pen =/= watch that can be repeatedly used to turn back time.)

Green thrusts settings and concepts and characters under our noses and then yanks them back again so fast that we hardly have the time to get a sense of  their flavor. I enjoy the Dresden Files in large part because I love and want to explore the Dresdenverse; there’s no Droodverse, just a series of sets being frantically swapped out. And to add to the list of things that get old, fast: Drood’s backup/love interest, the wild witch Molly Metcalf, seems to be capable of expressing disappointment only by pouting, and delight by clapping her hands and squealing. Really?

Still, I enjoyed the introductions to a few lesser-known bits of British-Isles folklore – a throwaway reference had me looking up Joan the Wad, Cornish pixie queen, for example – and a few of Green’s own creations, like Girl Flower, a Welsh elemental made of “rose petals and owls’ claws,” and the Blue Fairy, a dissolute half-elf with the ability to go fishing in other dimensions. And a few moments of the climax felt actually impressive, rather than just loud and boom-y, so I closed the book feeling halfway entertained.

Go to:
Simon R. Green: bio and works reviewed

The faces of Endicott

Endicott Studio is an association of writers, artists, and performers dedicated to arts based in mythological and folkloric traditions. (Wikipedia tells me that it began as a warehouse-turned-salon-space in Boston; wish I had been around for it then.) I was aware of their work on the Journal of Mythic Arts, but wasn’t quite clear on who all comprised the studio. While I was looking for something else (that I’ve now forgotten, in the way of the Internet), I stumbled upon this nifty compilation celebrating 20 years of Endicott, featuring photos from 1987 and 2007 of many of the creatives behind Endicott: founder Terri Windling, Charles Vess, Neil Gaiman, Ellen Kushner,  Delia Sherman, the Frouds, Holly Black, Catherynne Valente, Theodora Goss, and a host of other Black Letters favorites.

A lot of the 1987 photos are downright adorable, it goes without saying. (prom! ’80’s hair! scrunchies and onesies!) Check them out here:

Twenty Years of Mythic Arts

P.S. Terri Windling keeps an Endicott Studio blog here, filled with art, music, history, and links galore, for those of a mythical inclination.

– E

Bookstores of Cambridge: Lame Duck Books

Lame Duck Books
12 Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA

“We are internationally known specialists buying and selling important modern books and manuscripts with an emphasis on rare literature and primary works in the history of ideas in English, German, French, Spanish, Russian and other languages. Our shop features the most significant selection of 19th and 20th century Spanish language literature in the world, as well as important holdings of 17th and 18th century English poetry.”

Significantly fancy-pantsier than the bookstores that Kakaner and I usually feel comfortable rummaging through, clearly, but a fun taste of the high life. You enter this basement bookstore through a hushed, minimalistic art gallery (unaffiliated); the bookshop itself is similarly hushed and artsy.

Kakaner thought their prices ran a little high, for the books with which we were more familiar, but we had a good time regardless ogling such volumes as a first edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, another Atwood volume (forget which – K, do you remember?) that contained a handwritten letter of hers, and this J. Sheridan Le Fanu novel…

…with a seriously charming dedicatory doodle for someone named Phoebe:

Continue below the cut for a couple more photos:

Continue reading Bookstores of Cambridge: Lame Duck Books

The Way of Shadows, by Brent Weeks (2008) E

Date read: 8.20.11
Book from: Borrowed from my cousin
Reviewer: Emera

For Durzo Blint, assassination is an art – and he is the city’s most accomplished artist.

For Azoth, survival is precarious. Something you never take for granted. As a guild rat, he’s grown up in the slums, and learned to judge people quickly – and to take risks. Risks like apprenticing himself to Durzo Blint.

But to be accepted, Azoth must turn his back on his old life and embrace a new identity and name. As Kylar Stern, he must learn to navigate the assassins’ world of dangerous politics and strange magics – and cultivate a flair for death.

Wall-to-wall epic darque fantasy cheesefest, aww yeah. This came to me in a booky care package from my cousin, along with its sequels in the Night Angel trilogy. I would probably have enjoyed the whole thing when I was about twelve (I say that without – okay, with only a little bit of judgment; I welcome strategic doses of darque cheese in my life), but being shorter on reading time these days, I just skimmed the first volume for flavor.

Moody antihero with traumatic past and an even more traumatized yet brave love interest, check. Nomenclature liberally peppered with apostrophes and accent marks, check. Hard-bitten mentor, training montages, sadistic antagonists, and sundry scenes of carnage interleaved with swells of sentimental glurge, check. (I couldn’t get this particular glurge-bit out of my head after stumbling upon a bedroom scene: “Curve yielded to curve with the sweetness that inspired art.”)

The clumsy sentimentality and generally cliché-packed prose are what set me skimming after only a page or three, but on the plus side, the earnestness wasn’t entirely unappealing, there’s at least one non-white protagonist, and what I saw of the female characters (when it wasn’t their yielding curves) seemed moderately sensibly written. I’d still stick to Robin Hobb for my epic-assassin-y needs, though.

Go to:
Brent Weeks: bio and works reviewed
Assassin’s Apprentice, by Robin Hobb (1995): review by Emera

Madame Two Swords, by Tanith Lee (1988) E

Date read: 8.1.11
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

This is one of my most treasured finds from Readercon, picked up from the fantastic Somewhere in Time Books: Tanith Lee‘s 1988 limited-edition novella, with illustrations by Tom Canty. From the title and pastel cover I expected a tale of genteel swashbuckling, possibly YA; should have remembered that Lee never goes in for gentility. Elegance, yes – Lee is manically elegant – but never gentility.

Madame Two Swords starts in a familiar place for Lee: a sensitive, fearful, recently orphaned young woman in an early 20th-century alternate France is treated cruelly by both circumstances and humanity; her only spiritual sustainment comes from a book of poetry discovered in a secondhand shop:

“The blue cloth binding was quite pristine under its dust. It was a slender book, without lettering. I opened it out of curiosity.”

“The book was my talisman. Other girls wore crosses or medallions.”

The narrator is unemployed and evicted, and finds herself in dire straits, chased from one end of the socioeconomic spectrum to the other: too middle-class for hard labor, too unskilled to be a seamstress, too unwilling to accede to customers’ advances to be a waitress in the seedier cafés. At the extremity of her despair – enter Madame Two Swords, a black-eyed old woman of terrifying intensity, in whose museum-like house the narrator comes to some strange realizations.

In this France, the Revolution was sparked by the poet-demagogue Lucien de Ceppays in the city of Troies. This Revolution culminated in the execution of the original revolutionaries, including de Ceppays, by the fickle mob, and the occupation of France by a fearful British monarchy. Inhabitants now speak “Frenish” as often as French, and labor in a depressed economy overseen by a puppet government. The narrator’s talisman-book is, of course, a volume of de Ceppays’ work, and contains besides a haunting watercolor portrait of him. The story quickly sees her devotion to his image and memory moving beyond girlish fantasy.

The final supernatural twist, when it comes, is powerful in effect, in large part because of the supreme delicacy with which Lee constructs the fleeting image central to the revelation. There’s an also-delicate but definite touch of gender-bending, which I wish I could discuss in more detail without being spoilery, but suffice it to say that I liked how Lee addressed its implications, a lot. This is a story that makes use of deeply Gothic-Romantic tropes (duh, Tanith Lee) yet resists being just romantic; it’s fierce and intelligent and ultimately insists on the dignity of all of its characters.

And so my love affair with Tanith Lee continues! If you like Revolutionary France and cross-lingual puns and intelligent Gothic fantasy, if you love Tanith Lee and beautiful books, you might consider treating yourself to a copy of Madame Two Swords.

Two more photos (can’t help showing it off!) under the cut:
Continue reading Madame Two Swords, by Tanith Lee (1988) E

Mouse Guard: Winter 1152, by David Petersen (2009) E

Date read: 7.18.11
Book from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera

Mouse Guard: Winter 1152

“After Midnight’s Rebellion in the Fall of 1152, the following Winter proves to be a cold and icy season. The Guard face a food shortage threatening the lives of many a mouse in the Territories. Some of the Guard’s finest – Saxon, Kenzie, Lieam, and Sadie, with the old grayfur Celanawe by their side – traverse the snow-blanketed Territories, acting as diplomats to improve relations between the mouse cities and the Guard, and seeking vital supplies for their headquarters at Lockhaven. But hungry predators, the dangers of ice and snow, and a wrong turn into the haunted depths of the abandoned weasel tunnels of Darkheather place even so intrepid a band of Guardsmice in mortal peril…”

As Kakaner assured me, Mouse Guard vol. 2 has much more emotional meat on its bones than did the first arc. Reading this volume, it’s clear that Fall 1152 was just a taster; here our sense of the Guard’s mythology and traditions is deepened, and the worldbuilding continues apace, both within the comic and in the (again) adorable and obsessively detailed appendices.

Midnight’s obligatory power-hungry rebellion is revealed to have longer-lasting implications for the politics of the Mouse Territories and the integrity of the Guard, while Sadie, Kenzie, and Saxon’s descent into the mindblowingly byzantine tunnels and vaulted caverns of Darkheather brings us closer to the darkness and horror that lie in the Guard’s recent past. On Lieam’s end of things, Celanawe drops hints about the mythology of the Black Axe – a lone, mysterious arbiter of justice – and teaches some lessons about self-reliance. All of this is clearly paving the way for Lieam’s impending ascension to full-blown badass. And then there are epic battles with a vengeful one-eyed owl, and torrents of bats in purplish gloom, and beautifully desolate lamplit snowscapes, and Kenzie/Saxon bromance (brodentmance?)…

Also, I underwent a weird little cognitive tweak reading this volume. During the first I’d felt I just couldn’t get the characters, and tenatively chalked it up to the dialogue being a bit stilted. This time around I realized that it’s also that the mice generally only have two facial expressions: peering intently, or squinting determinedly. And once I realized that, I was fine with it; it’s like I’d placated an otherwise expectant emotional processing circuit. Conclusion: Brains are weird. Have some more cute mice.

Mouse Guard: Winter 1152

Go to:
David Petersen: bio and works reviewed
Mouse Guard: Fall 1152, by David Petersen, review by Emera

Readercon 22, a week later

Readercon 22 took place Thursday – Sunday, July 14 – July 17, 2011; Kakaner and I made it to the associated reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge on Thursday night, and Friday and Saturday of the con proper. This was her first literary con, and my first con of any sort, so needless to say we spent a lot of time being really, really, really excited. I’ll try to keep the frothing to a dignified minimum in our reports, though.

Thursday night! A reading from the Ellen-Datlow-edited anthology of urban fantasy, Naked City, featuring a line-up of six authors that had K and I, as above, really etc. goddamn excited: Kit Reed, John Crowley, Jeffrey Ford, Matthew Kressel, Ellen Kushner, and Caitlín R. Kiernan. All images link to high-res versions.

L-to-r (seated): Ellen Kushner, John Crowley, Ellen Datlow, Jeffrey Ford, Matthew Kressel (blue shirt)

(Also, that’s Theodora Goss in the center of the audience there.)

Editorial powerhouse Ellen Datlow introduces the collection. She explained that she hopes to reintroduce readers to urban fantasy as it used to be understood – e.g. the works of Charles de Lint, the Bordertown series – and do some work towards reclaiming the term from paranormal romances and magical detectives. Re: The Jim-Butcheriffic cover and prominent billing of other writers of said PR and magical detectives – “If it sells more copies, do you think I care?” Cover still gives me decidedly mixed emotions (guilty, compartmentalizing Dresden fan right here), but if Ellen Datlow can deal with it, so can I. Also, the totally flipping awesome cover for Supernatural Noir, another recently released Datlow collection, almost makes up for it.

On to the author readings, and numerous more photos:

Continue reading Readercon 22, a week later