Links to Today's Friday's "Forgotten" Books

Patti Abbott is on vacation this week, so I've gathered up a list of the "forgotten" books for this Friday...before finally going to make my own NoirCon plunge. What I'm aware of so far:

Paul Bishop: Whiteout and Black Camelot by Duncan Kyle (Bish is also heavy on the "men's sweat" magazine and other colorful cover illos this week)
Bill Crider: The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker
Scott Cupp: Pixie Dust by Henry Melton
Martin Edwards: Heir Presumptive by Henry Wade
Ed Gorman: The Crime Lover's Casebook (aka The New Mystery) edited by Jerome Charyn
Glenn Harper: The Coast Road by John Brady
George Kelley: The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (the new edition)
Steve Lewis's The Mystery File, as usual, has a plethora of arguably FFB reviews.
Todd Mason (that guy): Death Qualified by Kate Wilhelm; In Deep by Damon Knight
Ann Parker: Rose by Martin Cruz Smith
Eric Peterson: Men, Women and Chainsaws by Carol Glover
James Reasoner: Tarzan and the Lion Man by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Kerrie Smith: Deadly Variations by Paul Myers

Honorable Mentions:
Peter Enfantino's story-by-story run through the issues of Manhunt magazine
B.V. Lawon's round-up of crime-fiction ezines

If you've done an FFB and I've not listed you, I'll appreciate the update! Patti will be back at it on her blog next week.

The Fear of Sanity: the Rally and the Election

Well, I tried, if not extraordinarily hard, to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear at the National Mall on Saturday. My brother and sister-in-law were amused enough by the prospect to fly over from Silicon Valley, so it was an opportunity for a brief family reunion. I wasn't too enthusiastic about the message of the rally, which was predicated on the notion that leftists such as myself were equally culpable with the right for the problems we face, while centrists such as Jon "Stewart" and Stephen Colbert (when not in persona) were comparitively noble creatures of measured judgement and sweet reason. You know, in the manner of such fine centrist administrators as Obama, Clinton, Carter, Ford, Nixon...



(It has occurred to me that Obama has spent his entire political life in areas where the Democratic Party is the inarguably dominant/business as usual/corruption of power/default Establishment party--the not particularly progressive Democratic Party machines, despite occasional and usually smothered outbursts of reform, of Hawaii, Boston/Cambridge, and Chicagoland. This might help to explain a number of his failings, some of which have been much chewed over today, including by he himself.)

And the election has followed, with a very mixed bag of results...notable how many of the Tea Partisans have failed to be elected, particularly when they were making the claim of being the populist expressions in their districts as opposed to just Republicans with vociferous cheering sections (and money from such Republican PACs as the "Tea Party Express")...the most "outsidery/mavericky" of the Teabaggers to be elected, at least to get much national attention, Rand Paul, not only had his father's organization to support him but had a Democratic opponent who attempted to attack him from the right--I tend to think of this as Doing a Joe Leiberman). The Tea Partisans are going to be "tamed," as much as they aren't already. The Democrats got yet another lesson as to why it's necessary for them to not simply be, as they have been for most of the last forty years, the less crazy echo of the Republicans. Harry Reid's smarmy statement of how he and his colleagues need to Work Together, Boldly Ignoring the Far Left and Far Right, to continue offering the kind of clumsy governance they've offered so far is just a small example of the kind of irritation we get to suffer...as we continue to suffer more from their actions and inactions, as well as those of their fellow corporatists, ranging with few exceptions from the political dead center to the extreme right.

At least on Saturday I didn't quite miss the Philadelphia debut of the traveling version of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me..., the NPR comedy news-quiz series...I heard it live via WYPR-FM in Baltimore and WAMU-FM in DC, as opposed to the afternoon delay broadcast in Philly by WHYY, while trying to make my way through the ridiculously slow southbound traffic on I-95 (also thus saving the price of a ticket to the Academy of Music, wherein the audience was subjected in person to Bobby McFerrin's aggressive self-congratulation). So slow that I heard the coverage of the rally on DC's FM broadcast signal of C-SPAN Radio for the first hour and a half of its run, excepting the musical introductory set by the Roots (the Philadelphia-based rap/funk band currently working as the house orchestra for NBC's Late Night with a Boring Guy with Good Taste in Music), some of it with John "Legend", with whom they've recently released an album (the Roots were to support the other musical actions throughout the show). Eric and Paula were less fortunate in their attempts to see and hear what was going on...after bad jam ups at the DC-area commuter rail Metro, they were able to arrive about 45 minutes late, and far enough back that the available JumboTrons and loudspeakers could only infrequently be clearly perceived. By the time I made it to a Metro station with iffy parking, I decided to simply go to my parents' home and watch the coverage on Comedy Central and C-SPAN (a pretty rare, if not unique, simulcast).

The rally went on without the small stack of fliers I had in support of my sign proclaiming God Hates Mopes, one of a number of parodies of that fine Christian band of jackasses who enjoy disrupting the funeral services of various people they have no rational reason to disrupt (among those seen at the rally, God Hates Figs and God Hates Snuggies).

The text of my flier (composed in few minutes the night before, and seeming just like it):

God Hates Mopes!
Don’t support the lifestyle choice that depressives and sad-sacks choose to choose for their lifestyles!

Sad people wilt our crops!

Their tears deplete our precious bodily fluids, and lead to unnecessary shortages of the sports drinks WE ALL NEED to keep those fluids topped off!

Their medicines and headshrinking deplete our pocketbooks and wallets, if we’re men who don’t carry purses…the way mopey men sometimes do!

Look at them just moping over there! God Hates Mopes!

Don’t Mope!
The Society to Let Everyone Know That God Hates Mopes Approves of This Message.

Quoting Barry Malzberg

from an interview posted 13 October at Locus Online

I did a body of work which represented my best possibility, and some of that could not have been done by anyone else. [Critic, fiction-writer, editor and writing teacher Algis] Budrys could have done [critical volume] Breakfast in the Ruins better, but he didn’t do it at all. Phil Klass [who wrote most of his usually sharply satiric sf as "William Tenn"] could have done Herovit’s World better, but he didn’t. And I think it had to be done.

FFBonus: Citation of the reissue of 4 Thomas Disch novels

I come to this late, but in August, University of Minnesota Press reprinted four of the late Thomas Disch's straightforward horror novels, and you can do worse than any of them...or any of the other books Disch wrote.

And a reminder of why I want a complete file of Cele Goldsmith/Lalli's Fantastic:

CONTENTS for Fantastic Jan 1964 Vol 13 No 1

5 • Editorial (Fantastic, January 1964) • essay by uncredited (Noman Lobsenz, usually, the editorial director)

6 • The Lords of Quarmall (Part 1 of 2) • [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] • serial by Fritz Leiber and Harry Fischer

52 • Minnesota Gothic • short story by Thomas M. Disch [as by Dobbin Thorpe]

66 • The Word of Unbinding • [Earthsea Cycle] • short story by Ursula K. Le Guin

74 • Last Order • novelette by George Locke [as by Gordon Walters]

114 • A Thesis on Social Forms and Social Controls in the U.S.A. • short story by Thomas M. Disch

27 • Fantasy Books (Fantastic, January 1964)  • essay by S. E. Cotts:
127 •   Review: The Sundial by Shirley Jackson • book review by S. E. Cotts
128 •   Review: Stranger Than Life by R. DeWitt Miller • book review by S. E. Cotts

The "Emsh" cover illustrating Fritz Leiber and Harry Fischer's
The Lords of Quarmall part 1 of 2 (not, on balance, one of Emshwiller's best)

FFB: "New" Movements This Morning: THE NEW MYSTERY (Charyn), THE NEW GOTHIC (Morrow and McGrath), THE NEW WEIRD (the VanderMeers), et al....

(Thanks to Ed Gorman for reminding me of the "alternate" title, for some reason, pasted onto later US editions of this anthology)









(The Italian edition, as no pictures of the English-language edition were poachable--when this was first posted)





















The James Blish anthology New Dreams This Morning, an excellent candidate for a forgotten book piece, instead supplies the less than (or post-)gustatory title pun for this quick rumination...things are happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear (well, it's clear enough, actually, just not enough free time at the moment to get them down properly).

What shouldn't be taken away from that weak joke is that I'm mocking the quality of the fiction being gathered under these banners (and such others as steampunk and slipstream and neo-noir, splatterpunk and quiet horror, cyberpunk and humanist sf, surfiction and The New Fiction)...not by a long shot, even if the mediocre and sometimes utter trash is often nestling with the good and great. What's more likely to be noxious is the wind broken over why these are New And Distinct Movements And Much Different From What You've Already Been Reading, Or Not And You've Just Been Too Dense To Note The Shape of The Movement, Haven't You, Mis-Ter Jones?...given how many Mister Joneses of the literary world we have, of all ages and genders, this isn't altogether an incomprehensible approach, and it's certainly helped with marketing and convention and classroom arguments, if not too much else. Each of these would-be movements, and the books and magazines that have fomented them or attempted to capture their essence, or both, are amusingly examples, loudly and accurately proclaiming, of why the Old Boxes and Labels are outdated and inutile, but mistakening insisting instead that the new boxes being built from their smashed walls are less restraining or more accurate, whether or not one carries over smug notions of why something is Generic vs. Literary, or other distortions that should've been seen as useless, at best, decades back. The eclecticism that people such as Judith Merrill and Nelson Algren brought to their anthologies, that I've dealt with in previous entries in this series, is simply furthered by these folks here, and such others ranging from Joe David Bellamy to Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio to George Plimpton to Michael Chabon to Peter Straub to Ellen Datlow, among so many others, who have said, Hey, Look...this is art, this is art in fields and with approaches you may not've considered, c'mon, catch up, catch on. Take a look and think about it. No, it's not Just Good For That Sort of Thing, nor is it An Amusing Fusion of High And Low Art. It's living work among other living work. You should realize that.

Which, again, doesn't begin to excuse the work of William Vollmann. But he's but one among his betters, in the stories and approaches collected in these books, one expanded out of a magazine issue, two of them out of print despite their connected and respectable editors, and one from an industrious but still small press. New Mystery Magazine tried to steal some luster from the Charyn, and had it been published competently, might've sustained itself, as that wasn't the worst idea. Ann VanderMeer is New Weirding Weird Tales these days. Conjunctions still publishes.

The New Gothic:
CONJUNCTIONS:14
FALL 1989
Edited by Bradford Morrow; Guest Edited by Patrick McGrath

Salman Rushdie, An Interview by Catherine
Bush
Walter Abish, Reading Kafka in German
Charles Bernstein, Common Stock
Marjorie Welish, Two Poems
Martine Bellen, Deception
Barbara Guest, Three Poems
Jacques Roubaud, From Some Thing Black
(translated from the French by Rosmarie
Waldrop

THE NEW GOTHIC, guest edited by
Patrick McGrath
Hillary Johnson, From Physical Culture
William T. Vollmann, The Grave of Lost
Stories
John Hawkes, Regulus and Maximus
Jamaica Kincaid, Ovando
Peter Straub, From Mrs. God
Bradford Morrow, From The Almanac
Branch
Robert Coover, Night of the Assassins
John Edgar Wideman, Fever
Clegg & Guttmann, Nine Portraits
Kathy Acker, The Beginnings of the Life of
Rimbaud
Gary Indiana, Dreams Involving Water
Robert Kelly, Carville
Lynne Tillmann, The Trouble With Beauty
Mary Caponegro, The Sound
Sylvia Kelly, Colors
Paul West, A Whore's Agincourt
Afterword by Patrick McGrath

D.E. Steward, March
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Irises
Robert Creeley, Four Poems from Helsinki
John Taggart, Vaguely Harmless
Diane Williams, Five Stories

READINGS: Reviews and Criticism
Paul West on Juan Goytisolo
Paul Metcalf on Lucia Berlin
Peter Cole on Edmond Jabès
Ann Lauterbach on Leslie Scalapino
Robert Kelly on Pierre Klossowski
Tom Clark on David Markson

...and the expanded anthology:
The New Gothic ed. Bradford Morrow & Patrick McGrath (Random House 0-394-58767-7, Oct ’91, $22.00, 336pp, hc, cover by Albert Pinkham Ryder) Anthology of 16 contemporary literary gothic stories and five novel excerpts. 12 of the stories seem to be originals, and three of the excerpts are from works in progress. There is an introduction by the editors.
xi · Introduction · Bradford Morrow & Patrick McGrath · in
1 · Ovando · Jamaica Kincaid · ss Conjunctions #14 ’89
15 · Horrorday [from London Fields] · Martin Amis · ex London: Cape, 1989
37 · Newton · Jeanette Winterson · ss *
51 · Banquo and the Black Banana: The Fierceness of the Delight of the Horror · Paul West · ss *
71 · Freniere [from Interview with the Vampire] · Anne Rice · ex New York: Knopf, 1976
85 · Blood · Janice Galloway · ex Blood, Secker & Warburg, 1991
95 · Didn’t She Know · Scott Bradfield · ss *
113 · Regulus and Maximus [from Monks in Shadow] · John Hawkes · ex Conjunctions #14 ’89
129 · The Fish Keeper · Yannick Murphy · ss *
135 · A Dead Summer · Lynne Tillman · ss *
147 · Why Don’t You Come Live with Me It’s Time · Joyce Carol Oates · ss Tikkun Jul/Aug ’90
165 · The Dead Queen · Robert Coover · ss Quarterly Review of Literature #18 ’73
179 · The Merchant of Shadows · Angela Carter · nv The London Review of Books Oct 26 ’89
201 · The Road to Nadeja · Bradford Morrow · ss *
217 · For Dear Life [from King Solomon’s Carpet] · Ruth Rendell · ex *
231 · Rigor Beach · Emma Tennant · ss Bananas #1 ’75
239 · The Smell · Patrick McGrath · ss *
249 · The Kingdom of Heaven [from Throat] · Peter Straub · ex *
267 · Fever · John Edgar Wideman · nv Conjunctions #14 ’89
301 · J · Kathy Acker · ss *
311 · The Grave of Lost Stories · William T. Vollmann · nv Conjunctions #14 ’89


The New Mystery, edited by Jerome Charyn
Dutton, New York, 1993.
Babel, Isaac,
--The King, 1955.
Barthelme, Donald, (1931-1989)
--Captain Blood, 1987.
Bayer, William,
--Mirror Girl, 1993.
Biermann, Pieke,
--The Law of the Eye, 1990.
Block, Lawrence, (1938- )
--The Merciful Angel of Death, 1993. Shamus
Borges, Jorge Luis, (1899-1986)
--Death and the Compass, 1964. (reprint)
Calvino, Italo, (1923-1985)
--Cities & the Dead, 1974.
Carter, Angela,
--The Werewolf, 1979.
Carver, Raymond, (1939-1988)
--Cathedral, 1983.
Chesbro, George C.,
--Imagine This, 1993.
Daeninckx, Didier,
--Goldfish, 1993.
DeLillo, Don,
--In the Bronx, 1988.
Ellison, Harlan, (1934- )
--Soft Monkey, 1987. Mystery Scene Reader #1, 1987.) Edgar
Ellroy, James,
--Gravy Train, 1990.
Friedman, Mickey,
--No Radio, 1993.
García Márquez, Gabriel, (1928- )
--The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship, 1972.
Gold, Herbert,
--Nicholas in Exile, 1993.
Gordimer, Nadine, (1923- )
--The Moment Before the Gun Went Off, 1991.
Gores, Joe,
--Ishamel, 1993.
Grafton, Sue, (1940- )
--The Parker Shotgun, 1986. (reprint)
Greene, Graham,
--I Spy, 1947. (reprint)
Grimaldi, Laura,
--Fathers and Daughters, 1993.
Highsmith, Patricia, (1921-1995)
--The Snail Watcher, 1964. (reprint)
Hillerman, Tony, (1925- )
--Chee's Witch, 1986. (reprint)
James, P. D., (1920- )
--Devices and Desires, 1990
Kaminsky, Stuart M., (1934- )
--The Man Who Hated Books, 1993.
Lispector, Clarice,
--Pig Latin, 1974.
Mishima, Yukio,
--Martyrdom, 1900
Montalbán, Manuel Vásquez,
--A Boy and His Dog, 1988.
Mosley, Walter, (1952- )
--The Watts Lions, 1993.
Oates, Joyce Carol, (1938- )
--How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again, 1970.
O'Connor, Flannery,
--A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 1953.
Paretsky, Sara, (1947- )
--Dealer's Choice, 1988.
Sciascia, Leonardo,
--Mafia Western, 1983.
Semionov, Julian,
--The Summer of '37, 1993.
Simon, Rober L.,
--Just Say No, 1993.
Taibo, Paco Ignacio, II,
--Manufacture of a Legend, 1993.
Thomas, Ross,
--Missionary Stew, 1983.
Vachss, Andrew, (1942- )
--Cain, 1992.
Westlake, Donald E., (1933- )
--The Ultimate Caper, 1975.
Wright, Eric,
--The Casebook of Dr. Billingsgate, 1993.

The New Weird edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Tachyon, 2008)
New Weird : The Luck in the Head - M. John Harrison
New Weird : Crossing into Cambodia - Michael Moorcock
New Weird : In the Cities the Hills - Clive Barker
New Weird : The Braining of Mother Lamprey - Simon D. Ings
New Weird : The Neglected Garden - Kathe Koja
New Weird : A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing - Thomas Ligotti
New Weird : Jack - China Miéville
New Weird : Immolation - Jeffrey Thomas
New Weird : The Lizard of Ooze - Jay Lake
New Weird : Watson's Boy - Brian Evenson
New Weird : The Art of Dying - K. J. Bishop
New Weird : At Reparata - Jeffrey Ford
New Weird : Letters from Tainaron - Leena Krohn
New Weird : The Ride of the Gabbleratchet - Steph Swainston
New Weird : The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines - Alistair Rennie
New Weird : Death in a Dirty Dhoti - Paul Di Filippo
New Weird : Cornflowers Beside the Unuttered - Cat Rambo
New Weird : All God's Chillun Got Wings - Sarah Monette
New Weird : Locust-Mind - Daniel Abraham
New Weird : Constable Chalch and the Ten Thousand Heroes - Felix Gilman
New Weird : Golden Lads All Must - Hal Duncan
New Weird : Forfend the Heavens' Rending - Conrad Williams

For more forgotten books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

(Finally, the qp, and inferior, cover for the US edition.)

October's "Forgotten" Music: Louisville Symphony First Edtiion/VMM Music from Six Continents Records

The Louisville Symphony Orchestra came up with a wonderful win-win idea, particularly for a professional orchestra in a small city in the 1950s...let's commission new works in the "classical" tradition, and release them on our own label, First Edition Records. And certainly every public library with a decent record collection had to have them (as they were an impressive series, well-reviewed and selling reasonably well, in a subscription series to many). That's where I found them, and through them the work of Lou Harrison, Alan Hovanhess, and a raft of others, many relatively unrecorded by others even yet. They, up through the '70s, had uniform white covers, since they felt that what record-store sales they'd get would be furthered more by being part of the series than by the utter novelty of their content, but for the cd reissues and repackages they've spiffed up the covers a bit...in fact, First Edition was rather slow in moving over to cd issues, and I'm not sure to what extent they are taking advantage of MP3 sales, but I'm glad to find at least a somewhat representative selection available on Amazon, for example.





Vienna Modern Masters, headed up by composer Nancy Van de Vate, has been reaching for an intenationalist variation on the First Edition formula since getting going in the 1980s, and their Music from Six Continents series (cruelly snubbing Antarctica, unless of course one faces the fact that Eurasia is one continent) has helped introduce me, at least, to another wide array of composers and impressive performances...I'm particulary prone to return to their Penderecki recordings, and Van de Vate has ensured that she herself is well-represented here...which is fine, as she's not too shabby, herself. (I suspect that it is almost as much a budget as self-promotion measure...she might well be waiving her own royalties, in these tough times.) They were formerly distributed in the US by the fine small label Albany Records, which also distributed the New Albion release of the suite inspired by Rudy Rucker's autobiographical novel All the Visions, Like a Passing River (a partial concert performance of the title song can be heard starting just before the twelth minute of this video), and released on its own ticket at least one opera based on Ray Bradbury's Mexico stories, The Lifework of Juan Diaz...but now seem to be working on their own in US distribution (given the lack of brick and mortar retail outlets, not too surprising...Borders and B&N are probably the biggest surviving record-store chains in the US now). Happily, all the initial VMM discs are still in print, and the latter-day selections I haven't yet picked up look interesting and worth the listen.

For more "forgotten" music, please see Scott Parker's blog.