Reading Strange Matters

That fine critic Matthew David Surridge (who declined a Hugo nomination this past year, with reason and grace) has just published a digital collection of his Black Gate essays called Reading Strange Matters (Grace & Victory, 2015).  The writers he explores in it are an amazing set of modern fantasists, and I'm honored to be in their company:

Saints and Shrieks: Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris Fiction
A Ghost Put to Good Use: Ali Smith’s Hotel World
The Deep Structures of Dreams: Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
Precise Transgressions: Ursula Pflug’s After the Fires
The Thinning of Thinness: Susan Palwick’s The Necessary Beggar
Raising the Golden Fortress in Oil Country: Minister Faust’s The Alchemists of Kush
Unconcerned with Genre: Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
The Opposite of the Uncanny: Wonder and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus
Cosmological Intertextuality, or, T.S. Eliot by way of Michael Moorcock: Hal Duncan’s The Book of All Hours, or, Vellum and Ink
Learning to Fly: Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk
An Art Of Harmony: Mary Gentle’s Black Opera
Qualities of Richness: Steph Swainston’s The Castle Omnibus
Wandering Myths on Motorcycles: Drew Hayden Taylor’s Tales of Otter Lake, The Night Wanderer and Motorcycles & Sweetgrass
Digging Up The Dead: Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black
Underneath the Centre of the Universe: Leah Bobet’s Above
Animal Stories: Johanna Sinisalo’s Troll: A Love Story
Urban Areas: Stella Gemmell’s The City
Urban Fantasy Gothic: Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride
American Fabulation and Literary Fantasy: Matthew Flaming’s The Kingdom of Ohio
Voices and Echoes: J.M. McDermott’s Never Knew Another
Narrative Dance: Darcy Tamayose’s Odori
Stellar Archetypes: Greer Gilman and Cloud & Ashes
Reshaping the Undescribable Forest: Brian Catling’s The Vorrh
Every Kind of Story, All At Once: Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence

Think of it as a portable Readercon, road maps of the fabulous.

I love his look at Cloud & Ashes--not because he praises it, but that he gets it:  "In a sense, the book is a post-modern play with modernist theories about pre-modern folklore, imagining a world in which the theories of pagan origins and magical resonances for all these things is not only true, but that the magic and gods involved were real."

Many of you here would enjoy these explorations—do take a look.

Nine