Friday, October 26, 2018

FFB: YESTERDAY'S TOMORROWS edited by Frederik Pohl (Berkley 1982); EDITORS edited by Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford (Toby Press 2001); Lancer Books, Airmont Classics and other "Futurian" editorial projects: Doris Baumgardt, Donald Wollheim, Robert Lowndes, Larry Shaw...and Samuel Delany's DHALGREN, Josephine Herbst's THE STARCHED BLUE SKIES OF SPAIN and Gustave Hasford's THE SHORT-TIMERS, among others...


Keith Botsford (March 29, 1928, in Brussels, Belgium - August 19, 2018, in Battersea, England)

from 14 August 2015:
This wasn't the book I was going to review this week, but it kind of shouldered its way in...it arrived the same day as what was supposed to be Editors, edited by Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford, which was a similar volume with a similar remit...both were meant to cover the previous forty years in their editors' careers as editors of various magazines and often periodical book series. But, instead, the inventory sticker for Editors had been slapped onto a back issue of Granta (and not the cleanest copy I've ever seen), #99, one highlighted by an interview with Richard Ford (I have one of his books hanging fire, waiting for me to read it for this exercise as well). Bellow and Botsford, in their fat volume (1100 pages), pulled items from their various collaborative projects beginning with The Noble Savage (and I have a book in the queue that was mostly invented there) and wrapping up with their last such effort, News From the Republic of Letters; the rather fat Pohl volume (a mere 430 pages) begins with selections from the magazines Pohl began editing when 19 years old, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories; from there, the book draws on items from Pohl's first reprint anthologies, then the new-story Ballantine anthology series (and for one issue a magazine) Star Science Fiction; then onto taking over Galaxy and its sibling magazines (most notably If), at first while officially helping out the ailing H. L. Gold, and then in the clear, for more than a decade (ca. 1958 to leaving with the magazines' sale in 1969), editing for several months at the collapsing Ace Books of the early '70s and moving on from there to rather less chaotic times at Bantam Books for most of the decade; the last years are represented by novel excerpts, as Pohl didn't have an anthology series at Bantam: one each from Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, fellow former Futurian Society member David Kyle's completion of the planned but unfinished "Lensman" adventure novels by the late E.E. Smith, and Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers, which, after this anthology was published, would be adapted for film as Full Metal Jacket, the script a collaboration between Hasford, Michael Kerr and Stanley Kubrick which won them an Oscar. 
Bantam let Arbor House do the hardcover edition (left), which they packaged atrociously as well.

In the prefatory material running through this utterly functional (and no more than that) physical package, Pohl spells out, in more detail than I've seen elsewhere, the nature of his working life at each of his editorial desks, even if the reprint-anthology selections are a bit out of any sort of chronological or other apparent order.  He can be cagy about certain matters (he mentions in passing that he met his second wife as a colleague at Popular Publications, the artist and writer Dorothy Les Tina, but doesn't mention her name here, even as he never mentioned meeting her at his first editorial job in his book-length memoir The Way the Future Was), but nonetheless is engaging and informative about the day-to-day production and business practices as well as the editorial work itself in each of his gigs.  (It's notable that the Bellow/Botsford is similarly a no-frills physical presentation, featuring memoirs by its editors that include such bits as Bellow's boyhood acquaintance with the first professional writer he knew, a 1930s contributor to Popular's Argosy magazine and Street and Smith's Doc Savage; even as Pohl includes stories he'd gathered for his reprint anthologies, the B men include some of reprinted items they'd run in their magazines, particularly The Noble Savage's front pages, and the editorial offices of their magazines were not free of the odd romantic/emotional entanglement, such as the affair that inspired Bellow's Herzog.)  The Pohl (courtesy the Homeville/William Contento indices):
The first issue of Galaxy "officially" edited by Pohl:


EDITORS  [their introductory memoirs]
Keith Botsford: On the Facts
Saul Bellow: Great and Not so Great Expectations, Noble Savage 3
Saul Bellow: Hidden Within Technology’s Empire, A Republic of Letters, The New York Times
Saul Bellow & Keith Botsford: Dialogue: As seen from the ground, ANON

ARIAS [essentially, editorials from the four magazines, including ANON and Bostonia]
Saul Bellow: Pains and Gains, Noble Savage 1
Stephen Spender: Doctor of Science, Patient of Poetry, Noble Savage 4
Saul Bellow: The 11:59 News, Noble Savage 4
Keith Botsford: Obit on a Witness, Noble Savage 4
Saul Bellow: Mr. Wollix gets an Honorary Degree, ANON
Mark Harris: Nixon and Hayakawa, ANON
Saul Bellow: White House and Artists, Noble Savage 5
Felix Pollak: The Poor Man’s Civil Defense Manual, Noble Savage 5
Philip O’Connor: A few Notes on the Changing World, Noble Savage 5
Saul Bellow: View from Intensive Care, The Republic of Letters 1
Saul Bellow: Graven Images, The Republic of Letters 2
Philip O’Connor: Last Journal, The Republic of Letters 2
James Wood: Real Life, The Republic of Letters 2
Martin Amis: Cars and the Man, The Republic of Letters 3
Julia Copeland: Objective Correlative,The Republic of Letters 7

ARCHIVES [reprints from what they reprinted in their magazines]
Samuel Butler: Ramblings in Cheapside, Noble Savage 1
DH Lawrence: Portrait of Maurice Magnus, Noble Savage 2
Joseph de Maistre: The Executioner, ANON
Victor Hugo: The Interment of Napoleon, The Republic of Letters 4

INVESTIGATIONS
George P. Elliott: Critic and Common Reader, Noble Savage 2
Harold Rosenberg: Seven Numbered Notes, Noble Savage 3
Louis Simpson: On Being a Poet in America, Noble Savage 5
Herbert Blau: The Public Art of Crisis in the Suburbs of Hell, Noble Savage 5
Marjorie Farber: The Romantic Method, Noble Savage 5
Raymond Tallis: A Dark Mirror, The Republic of Letters 2

LIVES
Josephine Herbst: A Year of Disgrace, Noble Savage 3
Antoni Slonimski: Memories of Warsaw, Noble Savage 4
G V Desani: With Malice Aforethought, Noble Savage 5
Rudolf Kassner: Sulla and the Satyr, ANON
Saul Bellow: Mozart, Bostonia, Spring 1992
Saul Bellow: Ralph Ellison in Tivoli, The Republic of Letters 3
Alan Govenar and Leonard St. Clair: Life as a Tattoo Artist, The Republic of Letters 6
Saul Bellow: Saul Steinberg, The Republic of Letters 7

POEMS
Howard Nemerov: Life Cycle of Common Man, Noble Savage 1
Oonagh Lahr: The Advance on the Retreat, Noble Savage 4
Alexander Pushkin: Count Nulin, Noble Savage 4
Anthony Hecht: Message from the City, Noble Savage 5
Cesare Pavese: What an Old Man has Left, ANON
Michael Hulse: Winterreise, The Republic of Letters 7

TEXTS 
Edward Hoagland: Cowboys, Noble Savage 1
Harold Rosenberg: Notes from the Ground Up, Noble Savage 1
Josephine Herbst: The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, Noble Savage 1
Arthur Miller: Please Don’t Kill Anything, Noble Savage 1
Wright Morris: The Scene, Noble Savage 1
Mark Harris: The Self-Made Brain Surgeon, Noble Savage 1
Louis Guilloux: Friendship, Noble Savage 2
Sol Yurick: The Annealing, Noble Savage 2
Dan Wakefield: An American Fiesta, Noble Savage 2
Jara Ribnikar: Copperskin, Noble Savage 3
John Berryman: Thursday Out, Noble Savage 3
Seymour Krim: What’s This Cat’s Story? Noble Savage 3
Thomas Pynchon: Under the Rose, Noble Savage 3
Herbert Gold: Death in Miami Beach, Noble Savage 3
G V Desani: Mephisto’s Daughter, Noble Savage 4
Louis Guilloux: Palante, Noble Savage 4
Louis Gallo: Oedipus-Schmoedipus, Noble Savage 4
Elémire Zolla: An Angelic Visit on Via dei Martiri, Noble Savage 4
Robert [Chapin] Coover: Blackdamp, Noble Savagee 4
John Hawkes: A Little Bit of the Old Slap and Tickle, Noble Savage 5
Nelson Algren: Dad among the Troglodytes, or Show Me a Gypsy and I’ll Show You a Nut, Noble Savage 5
Bette Howland: Aronesti, Noble Savage 5
Anthony Kerrigan: Don Alonso Quixano, Lineal Descendants, Noble Savage 5
Arthur Miller: Glimpse at a Jockey, Noble Savage 5
Sydor Rey: Hitler’s Mother, Noble Savage 5
Leon Rooke: The Line of Fire, Noble Savage 5
Meyer Schapiro: Lichtenberg, Diderot, Galiani , ANON
Christopher Middleton & Cristoph Meckel: Pocket Elephants, ANON
Umberto Saba: A Jewish Savant, Bostonia, November 1989
John Auerbach: Distortions, Bostonia, March 1990
Bette Howland: A Little Learning, Bostonia, May 1990
S J Perelman: Strictly from Hunger, Bostonia, June 1990 (reprint of a classic reprint)
Conall Ryan: Grace Notes, Bostonia, September 1990
Keith Botsford: The Second Life of Gioacchino Rossini, Bostonia, February 1992
Silvio d’Arzo: Two Old People, Bostonia, September 1993
G T de Lampedusa: Lighea, or the Siren, Bostonia, September 1994
Karl Logher: My Father in the Mirror, The Republic of Letters 3
Saul Bellow: All Marbles Accounted For, The Republic of Letters 4
Murray Bail: The Seduction of My Sister, The Republic of Letters 5
S Scibona: Prairie, The Republic of Letters 6 

So, basically, books you can swim around in. A lot of work to be proud of for all three men, and yet also it would've helped had Berkley taken (and perhaps Toby Press to have had the resources to have taken) more care in packaging these bug-crushers so that they might be more pleasing to the eye.  Though whether you're basking in the casual brilliance of R. A. Lafferty ("Slow Tuesday Night" is almost the template for what's best of his short work) or of Thomas Pynchon ("Under the Rose" isn't too far from his correspondent to the Lafferty), or we enjoy the work editorially pointedly solicited from Josephine Herbst and Alice Sheldon (aka "James Tiptree, Jr.") in these largely boys' clubs, you do get a good helping of why the editorial efforts of these writers mattered, and what kept drawing them back to the editorial chair.  (Certainly, I was pleased in small, petty part to be appointed editor-in-chief of Hawaii Review when 18, beating Pohl's appointment to his first professional magazines by some months, but more because I hoped to do a fraction of what he'd done in the decades since...and have done rather a smaller fraction than I'd hoped.) Bellow, too, if more distantly, had also been a spur...I was perhaps a bit too much like Herzog even as a teen, and his "Seize the Day" if anything moved me more profoundly. (It should be noted that striving to mirror either Pohl or Bellow, and even Botsford in comparison, is setting a high bar.)




















But in considering these books for today (while I'm still awaiting the delivery of Editors, I did read another copy some years ago), it occurred to me how much the complex of the former Futurians (including Pohl, Merril, Kyle, Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight and other geniuses) had an outsized influence on my literary life...not only the anthologies edited by Donald Wollheim (including the first story I read by ex-Futurian Richard Wilson, "A Man Spekith", being one of the first adult and rather grimly satirical sf stories I read, in my father's copy of the Wollheim and Terry Carr's World's Best Science Fiction 1970) but also in my wider reading, as the first edition of Dracula I picked up, about age 9, was the Airmont Classic paperback, a series edited and with introductions from ex-Futurian Robert A. W. Lowndes (he was already editing the Magazine of Horror by then, and would publish the first stories by Stephen King and F. Paul Wilson in Startling Mystery Stories not long after publishing his edition of the Stoker); even more importantly, I was collected as many of the Lancer Books Magnum "Easy-Eye" classics paperbacks, going for a quarter apiece at the local W.T. Grant's discount department store, a series edited and with brief introductions by ex-Futurian Larry Shaw (who was briefly married to Lee Hoffman, and had done a lot of interesting if usually underfunded editorial work as well...Lancer's 1960s reprints of Conan stories had done nothing to hurt the popularity of Robert Howard nor sword & sorcery fiction generally)...not solely the Poe collection (the first I'd bought of the Magnum Classics line) or sf such as Wells's The Time Machine and Edward Bellamy's socialist utopian Looking Backward, but also Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, Helen Keller's autobiography (no lack of socialists!), Booker T. Washington's and Benjamin Franklin's, O. Henry, Bret Harte, Edward Everett Hale, Henry James and such other fantasists as Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame. Signet Classics and others were important as well to my early reading, but these editions, which I could obtain by the handful through parental largesse on every trip to that store, had a profound effect.  It wasn't too many years later that I was reading Pohl's and Knight's memoirs, and even given the tough times they faced, decided that even more than a writer what I wanted to be was an editor.  It was through Knight's The Futurians that I first read excerpts from and about Doris Baumgardt, one of the first female members of the Futurians and, in the 1940s photos in the Knight, devastatingly pretty; she and Pohl married, albeit briefly, and she took her first editorial job with the same low-rent entrepreneurs, the Albings, who gave Donald Wollheim his first (barely) professional gig; Pohl and Wollheim
recall that Baumgardt, known to her friends as Doë and professionally and in fandom in those years mostly as "Leslie Perri", wrote most of the content of her no-budget stablemate, Movie Love Stories, to Wollheim's no-budget Cosmic Stories and Stirring Science Stories. I finally read, last night, one of only three short stories Perri apparently published in the sf magazines, and sadly it's probably the least of them, a vignette written in the kind of overstated prose Lovecraft favored, perhaps as an experiment; it and the longest Perri story were both published in magazines Shaw edited at the time, this one in If for September 1953 (which is highlighted by ex-Futurian James Blish's important "A Case of Conscience" as well as stories by Philip Dick and eventual hardboiled crime-fiction specialist James McKimmey), the longer one in an issue of the later Infinity Science Fiction I'm going to need to pick up, given how much interesting unreprinted fiction is contained there. Baumgardt and Richard Wilson eventually were married, a period when they were both primarily employed as newspaper journalists, before their divorce in 1965, and her death from cancer in 1970...not too long after the publication of "A Man Spekith" in 1969, and republication in the 1970 book where I would read it ca. 1973. Life is full of almost closed circles and gossamer connections such as that...for more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog (and her novel and those of several other friends and acquaintances await me in the TBR/Re-Read stack as well).
Albing magazines--better covers than they paid for...






















...whether of Rita Hayworth or by Hannes Bok...



























































































First "official" Pohl issue of If: Vonnegut, Laumer,
the two E. E.s, Jim Harmon, James Schmitz...














































































































































































































































































































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Friday, October 19, 2018

FFM: MYSTERY SCENE, November 1986, edited by Ed Gorman and Bob Randisi; SCIENCE FICTION EYE, March 1988, edited by Steve Brown and Dan Steffan; NEW ORLEANS STORIES, Winter 1993, edited by O’Neil De Noux


Three magazines from a wealth passed along by Phil Stephensen-Payne, who was trying to streamline his library/storage set. I already had a copy of the fiction issue of Science Fiction Eye in storage somewhere in the boxes, but haven't laid eyes on it recently, a large-format (in the size that Life, Look, Ebony and The Saturday Evening Post would favor in their heydays) issue unlike the others of that fondly-remembered magazine; Mystery Scene is still very much with us, but this issue (#6, I believe, but it doesn't make that explicit anywhere that I can find; nor can I find a copyright note nor true colophon) is from the early years, as founders Ed Gorman and Bob Randisi were still shaking down what they hoped to make of this crime-fiction answer to Locus...and with this issue boldly laying claim to territory closer to that of Locus, "including Horror Scene" and adding a new, meant-to-be-regular section on comics/graphic literature, with Denny O'Neil as columnist.  Also included, a short story by Ed Hoch.  And New Orleans Stories, which would produce three slim issues in its run starting in 1993, begins with some bold claims from editor and apparent publisher O'Neil De Noux about not being a home for trivial stories set in the Big Easy, but stories by and about those who live and know the city. De Noux would get two issues out, and a third would be released by another staff...the not altogether different approach of Philadelphia Stories, some years later but with a giveaway approach and better production and apparently firmer financing, would prove hardier. 

The Mystery Scene issue is packed, almost scrapbook style, with short articles, reviews, interviews and more; not hard to read and not altogether unstylish, but one gets the sense that where there's white space, it wasn't so much an esthetic decision as there simply wasn't something else to cram into that spot. A good, short interview with Robert Bloch is part of the crossover attempt to reach the then-still-booming (or only starting to recede) horror market, though of course Bloch is and was best-known for his crime-fiction work, and had been a president of the Mystery Writers of America. This was apparently the first issue of MS to receive at least regional professional newsstand distribution (and the prospect of appearing in at least some of the once-flourishing B. Dalton chain of bookstores, as Randisi mentions in his editorial--B. Dalton eventually absorbed by Barnes & Noble), and the number of professional book display ads in the issue is impressive. The Simon Ark story by Edward Hoch, part of a series mostly from early in his career (about an investigator of psychic and particularly Satanic activity), feels a bit like a trunk story, and a bit like a jape on the publishing industry, hence likely the fact of its appearance in this context. (And the evidence of things still shaking down at MS is clear in the typos that riddle the story, more than in most of the nonfiction I've read, and that the table of contents of the issue doesn't mention either Hoch nor the story's title...perhaps a last-minute addition, though mentioned on the cover.)

The SF Eye issue was ambitious even by the consistently ambitious attempts of that magazine to break ground and look good doing so. (It wasn't alone in this in this era, but it was one of the first of the small-press magazines in its field to take advantage of desk-top publishing advances, as opposed to the older fannish engagement with earlier forms of DIY publishing.) The large format, notes John Clute in the SF Encyclopedia, was not favored by the relatively few newsstands that were already carrying the magazine by its third issue, but it was a novelty, at least, in sf circles...I think only the last Arts Council-funded issues of the British magazine New Worlds and the also-British poster-heavy/fiction-light Science Fiction Monthly had published in those dimensions within the field (perhaps no one in the US, with the weak exception of the tabloid newsprint final issues of Vertex), and the latter two had seen their last issues in 1975 and '76. Along with some of the already-regular columns, an assortment of short fiction, by veterans such as Richard Lupoff (whose wife and occasional publishing partner Patricia Lupoff has apparently just died, after debilitating illness) and up and comers such as Kathe Koja, very much reflecting the esthetic of the "edginess" and sophistication the magazine sought...and co-editor Dan Steffan, a cartoonist and illustrator, was able to put his stamp on the issue to greater extent than he would any other (he had to step away from the magazine shortly thereafter). 

Emerging a half-decade after these other pivotal issues for their respective titles, the first New Orlean Stories appeared, I believe, in the wake of Pulphouse Publishing's efflorescence as a source of interestingly-focused projects, many "mixing genres" and published in a sudden flood in many different formats, from magazines in the form of fat hardcovers (reasonably inexpensively printed through high-grade photocopying) on over through paperback chapbooks to thin, newsprint magazines such as this one...which apparently wasn't actually published by Pulphouse, but much in its spirit...founder O'Neil De Noux had worked with the Pulphouse folks in several ways. Featuring in its first issue a reprinted, recent story by George Alec Effinger (a pleasant if slight fantasy about a CIA-recruitment program of a very specialized nature) and a new story by less well-known authors, even a relatively small $1.50 price tag (in his editorial, De Noux notes he apparently expected to be able to price it at a dollar) probably didn't encourage newsstand purchase of such a slim product. But a good basic notion...

For more of today's books (and perhaps other magazines), please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, October 12, 2018

FFB: THE HUGO WINNERS: VOLUME 3 annotated by Isaac Asimov (Doubleday 1977)

There are several notable things about the third volume Isaac Asimov would assemble of the winners of the Hugo Awards for short fiction, novella to short story categories. One is that it had only one printing of a two-volume US paperback edition (Steven French pointed out an oversight on my part on Facebook), despite the success, in constant reprinting of Doubleday SF Book Club editions and fairly frequent paperbacks, of the first two volumes of the series. Another is, as I noted in the entry here on the second volume as included in the book club omnibus and paperbacked on its own, that it managed to leave out Leiber's story "Ship of Shadows", a ridiculous oversight on the part of Asimov and his book editor at Doubleday (I believe Larry Ashmead at that time), that presumably cost Leiber a notable, however incremental, chunk of change over the succeeding decades. A third, rather more immediate in its effect on the reader, is the degree to which the collected, award-winning stories (with so many repeated contributors in this stretch of years) are stories of personal loss for the characters (and writers) in question, and one wonders to what degree voters' knowledge of the autobiographical element of such stories as the two Leibers, Ellison's "The Deathbird"  and Pohl and Kornbluth's "The Meeting" helped these affecting stories gain their awards (though in all four cases, they wouldn't need too much special pleading on the basis of trying to help buck up their authors). Sturgeon's "Slow Sculpture" and in an even more remote way the Le Guin stories might be said to have a certain flavor of this element, as well, while this is less true of the Larry Niven or George R. R. Martin stories, or Poul Anderson's stories, or the more thoroughly camouflaged Alice Sheldon/"James Tiptree, Jr." story...while the R. A. Lafferty story feels a Lot more like a career-award, as the story in question is far from his best, if one that demonstrates his mocking skepticism of the overly earnest. Asimov's introductory blurbs are more distant on occasion than those in the first two volumes, where if he didn't know the collected writer very well, he'd at least have an incident of interaction or so with that writer. (Though Asimov had little direct or [to the best of his knowledge] face to face interaction with either of the women writers in the volume, he did maintain a correspondence with Sheldon hiding behind her "Tiptree" persona, and might've met "Racoona" Sheldon at a convention by that time, this book published just about the time Sheldon's masquerade as "Tiptree" was admitted publicly--and she would win her first award for a story, "The Screwfly Solution", published under the byline Racoona Sheldon, not long after). 

Seems strange that with all the famous, and relatively career-changing, stories collected within (less so for Niven, probably, than any of the others, as these stories were, like the Lafferty in his case, solid examples of what he could do rather than his best work)...that this volume of the series has had such a limited success in comparison. Nonetheless, you could do much worse than investing in an inexpensive copy from the usual sources, and thus seeing how even the most rewarded and among the most successful writers in sf and fantasy were producing impressive, somewhat depressed work in the first half of the 1970s. 

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog. 
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Friday, October 5, 2018

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: the links to the reviews


Birthday greetings to bloggers Rich Horton, and Kevin Tipple's son, and blogger emeritus Sergio Angelini!

 **After two weeks' worth of mass spamming in comments, I've had to turn on comment moderation. Sorry for the potential delays, but we'll see how this goes. 

 This week's books, unfairly (or sometimes fairly) neglected, or simply those the reviewers below think you might find of some interest (or, infrequently, you should be warned away from); certainly, most weeks we have a few not at all forgotten titles.  Founder Patti Abbott is taking a break this week...so if I've missed yours or someone else's, please let me know in comments...

 Les Blatt: A Nice Class of Corpse by Simon Brett

Elgin Bleecker: Darktown by Thomas Mullen

 John Boston: Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction Stories, October 1963, edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli

 Brian Busby: Murder's No Picnic by E. L. Cushing

 Martin Edwards: My Name is Michael Sibley by John Bingham; Pushkin Vertigo publishers

 Peter Enfantino and Jack Seabrook: Atlas/Timely (pre-Marvel) horror comics June-September 1950; EC Comics September 1955; DC War Comics July 1973

 Will Errickson: Wilding by Melanie Tem

 Curtis Evans: Murder of an M.P.! aka In Search of a Villain by Robert Gore-Browne

 Paul Fraser: New Writings in SF 3 edited by John Carnell

 Barry Gardner: The Heaven Stone by David Daniel

 John Grant: Snowdrops by A.D. Miller

 Rich Horton: Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth; The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

 Kate Jackson: Heads You Lose by Christianna Brand

 Tracy K: The Murder of My Aunt by Richard Hull

 Colman Keane: Briarpatch and The Fourth Durango by Ross Thomas

 George Kelley: The Red Scarf and A Killer is Loose by Gil Brewer

 Joe Kenney: Night Crossing by Ken Kolb

 Margot Kinberg: The Sound of Her Voice by Nathan Blackwell

 Rob Kitchin: Basin and Range by John McPhee; The Atrocity Archive[s] by Charles Stross

 B. V. Lawson: The Cape Cod Mystery by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

 Evan Lewis: Marvel Masterworks: Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Vol. 1 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers

 Steve Lewis: Live Gold by Robert Sheckley 

 Mike Lind: Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

 Francis M. Nevins: First Came a Murder by John Creasey; The Fatal Pool by "John Rhode"

 J. F. Norris: Voices in an Empty Room by Philip Loraine

 Matt Paust: The Case of the Seven Whistlers by George Bellairs

 Mildred Perkins: Zombie Apocalypse Novels and Lesbian Romance Novels

 James Reasoner: The Case of the Singing Skirt by Erle Stanley Gardner

 Richard Robinson: In the Labyrinth of Drakes: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan; How Like an Angel by Margaret Millar

 Gerard Saylor: Those We Left Behind by Stuart Neville

 Jack Seabrook: "The Better Bargain" by Richard Deming (Manhunt, April 1956)

 Steven H. SIlver: "Blueprint" by Donald Wollheim; "The Fate Line" by Walter Jon Williams; "Barbarossa" by Edward Wellen; "Time Travel for Pedestrians" by Ray Nelson; "Half-Life" by Gary Couzens; "The Whisper" by Zoran Živković

 Victoria Silverwolf: Fantastic, October 1963, edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli

 Dan Stumpf: Down There by David Goodis; The Riddle of the Yellow Zuri by Harry Stephen Keeler

 Peter Tennant: Smoke Paper Mirrors and The Finest Ass in the Universe by Anna Tambour

 Kevin Tipple: Live Bait by Ted Wood

 "TomCat": The Six Queer Things by Christopher St. John Sprigg

 Danielle Torres: A Little Bird Told Me by Marianne Holmes

 David Vineyard: The Far Arena by Richard Ben Sapir

 A. J. Wright: The Bad Seed by Willam March

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Monday, October 1, 2018

Underappreciated Music: September Selections





The monthly assembly of undervalued and often nearly "lost" music, or simply music the blogger in question wants to remind you readers/listeners of...







Patti Abbott: night music

 Brian Arnold: Deborah Harry on Kids Are People, Too (1980)


 Jayme Lynn Blaschke: Friday Night Videos

Paul D. Brazill: A Song for Saturday

 Jim Cameron: Gerry Mulligan Sextet: Night Lights

 Sean Coleman: The Byrds: Sweethearts of the Rodeo (50th anniversary)

 Jeff Gemmill: Top 5s; Jade Bird in concert; Duffy: Rockferry; Labor Day songs; Stone Foundation: Everybody, Anyone

 Keiko Hassler: Cast of Rent: "Seasons of Love"
Jerry House: Hymn Time; Music from the Past

 George Kelley: Joni Mitchell: Both Sides Now: Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970; The Supremes: Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland: Expanded Edition; Ken Emerson: Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era

 Kate Laity: Song for a Saturday

Steve Lewis: Music I'm Listening To

 Barry Malzberg: Regula Mühlemann & CHAARTS made in Aargau: Five Mozart Arias; encore: the last movement, Sonata in D Minor (Hindemith) ..and...

Cecelia Bartoli and Nikolaus Harnoncourt: "Bella mi fiamma, addio" (Mozart) ...and...

 Julia Fischer & the Czech Philharmonic (under David Zinman): Violin Concerto No. 2 (Bohuslav Martinů)
Todd Mason: Insinuation (Not All Fathers and Daughters, But No Angels): Saturday Music Club

 Laura Nakatsuka: Blue Heron: "Exultent in hac die" (Hugh Sturmy)
Lawrence Person: Shoegazer Sunday

 Charlie Ricci: The Makers: The Devil's Nine Questions; slow blues; The Beach Boys

 Jeff Segal: Blood Ceremony: "The Great God Pan" ...and...

 Luboš Fišer: soundtrack: Valerie a týden divů aka Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
W. Royal Stokes: Born to be Blue (Chet Baker biopic)

A. J. Wright: early Alabama songs

 Hot Chocolate: "Brother Louie"
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