Jared Shurin's Blog, page 125

Everywhere but here...

Where you can find Pornokitschiness elsewhere.

Friday is for folding knives, and we're up to chapter six ofthe K.J. Parker reread on Tor.com. Caution: contains plague, assassination and other cheeriness. All the posts from the beginning can be found here - you can join in at any time.

If you're on the mailing list for The Book Smugglers, your last email from them contained a vintage ramble from yours truly, waving the banner for bloggers as part of the build-up for Speculative Fiction 2012....

Reading Between the Lines by Janine Ashbless and Adrian Tchaikovsky

Our latest novelette is now available for pre-order, but if you want one, you need to move very quickly.

Reading Between the Lines is an original story co-written by a pair of fascinating authors, Janine Ashbless and Adrian Tchaikovsky. Structured as a series of letters, Reading Between the Lines tells the story of two men. One in the city, and one in the real city. If you know what I mean... 

Both a mystery and a fantasy, Reading Between the Lines is a tale of secret spaces and o...

On Criticism: Pornokitsch, Memes and the Shadow of Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert, the eminent American film critic, died on Thursday night. He was seventy. As ill as he had been for the last decade, the news of his death was still shocking. I followed him on Twitter. I read his reviews. I read his last announcement, made the day before he died, that he was going to be slowing down in his reviewing going forward. It was still a shock. As of now: a world without Roger Ebert.

Movie criticism was, for maybe 20 years, the first form of criticism people encountered...

PK Interview: Frances Hardinge interviewed by Tom Pollock

Two great authors (and Kitschies finalists!) for the price of one.

Tom Pollock, of The City's Sonand The Glass Republic, exchanged a few questions with Frances Hardinge, author of A Face Like Glass, Fly By Nightand a handful of other amazing, beautiful books. Two of our favourite authors - young adult or otherwise - having a chat about world-building, rebellion, character development and cheese.

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Tom Pollock: In A Face Like Glass's Caverna, you create a delightfully bonkers
subterranea...

Underground Reading: Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Dragonlance.

I'm afraid this isn't going to be a conventional review, more a series of, er, discursive notes, all rather indelicately glomming together to form one of my more specious arguments.

As far as an actual review:

I think the Dragonlance Chronicles - Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984), Dragons of Winter Night (1985) and Dragons of Spring Dawning (1985) - is of a time and a (hand-wavey, theoretical) place. I've reread the three books recently, and that's not really an experience I'd r...

Post-script: Stockpiling

The results of this week's shopping expeditions.

Will Hill'sDepartment 19: Battle Lines. A signed copy. Despite the size of theDepartment 19books, I find them to be incredibly quick reads. I'd love a good, clean day without interruptions (or deadlines) (or work) (or all those other things that come with being an adult) to plow through this. I'm a big fan of the series, which is a bit, um,DraculameetsGossip Girl(I mean that positively - Ilove Gossip Girl.) (Forbidden Planet)

Tina's Mouth by K...

Friday Five: Gateway Smut

With one notable exception, we've never actually written about pornon Pornokitsch. Or erotica. Or any other sort of sexually-charged literature. And, all joking aside, this is a huge and diverse genre, and, to an outsider, more than a little intimidating. What's it about? What's good? What are the classics? Where do we start?

Fortunately, we've got Tiffani Angus, here to explain where smut begins...

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I read erotica. I write erotica. But as a young reader, I didn’t jump right in and start...

Underground Reading: Dutch Uncle by Peter Pavia

This is the latest installment in our scheme to review each and every Hard Case Crime publication, one every week. You can follow along here. We're back in the United States this week with #12 - Peter Pavia's Dutch Uncle.

Dutch Uncle (2005) is a Hard Case Crime original, and, appropriately, after the last few books, it fee like we've been flung forward about fifty years. Peter Pavia pulls us out of vintage noir and flings the reader straight into the sprawling neo-noir epics of Elmore Leonar...

Pandemonium: Stories of the Smoke - one month countdown

Stories of the Smoke, the anthology of Dickensian science fiction, is about to dissipate. Smoke was publishedin celebration of the Charles Dickens bicentennial and all the stories are themed around London. Past, present and (very far) future.

The Pandemonium shtick is that our ebooks are on sale for one year only and, for Smoke, that year closes at the end of April. This doesn't mean it will mysteriously disappear from your ereader (purchased copies will remain yours forever), but it does me...

Introducing Dreamlands, the new genre imprint from HBO

NEW YORK -- In a long anticipated move, the premium cable network HBO (Home Box Office), a subsidiary of Time Warner, Inc. (NYSE:TWX)has moved into the world of publishing. The new imprint, known as "Dreamlands", will become the home of best-selling fantasy authors George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman and Charlaine Harris, as well as cross-over talents Michael Chabon, Karen Russell and Jennifer Egan.

"We owe a lot of this to George [Martin] and Neil [Gaiman]," says Vice President of HBO Properti...