THE PREPOSTEROUS BOLLOX OF THE SITUATION
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She has such an interestingly beautiful face
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Rose Leslie by Rebecca Miller for Bust
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Carice van Houten by Janey van Ierland
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Drew Barrymore
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Léa Seydoux
“VURT: The 20th Anniversary Edition, with a foreword by Lauren Beukes and three fantastic new short stories, all set in the extraordinary world of Vurt. Take a trip in a stranger’s head. Travel rain-shot streets with a gang of hip malcontents, hooked on the most powerful drug you can imagine. Yet Vurt feathers are not for the weak. As the mysterious Game Cat says, ‘Be careful, be very careful’. But Scribble isn’t listening. He has to find his lost love. His journey is a mission to find Curious Yellow, the ultimate, perhaps even mythical Vurt feather. As the most powerful narcotic of all, Scribble must be prepared to leave his current reality behind.”
“Brand new covers for five of George Orwell’s works feature in a new series published today by Penguin and designed by David Pearson. The set includes a remarkable take on Orwell’s most well known novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four…
“Pearson’s adept use of type – as demonstrated in his work on Penguin’s Great Ideas series of short, influential texts – is once again at the fore of each of the designs. And that includes what is perhaps one of Penguin’s most radical covers of recent years, for Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the title and author’s name are almost completely obscured by black foiling.”
“Dick dissects modern insanity through the cypher of Bob Arctor. Arctor is a man on the fringes of society. A man who realises one day that he hates his suburban existence, and so trades it in for a life among the hippie drop-outs, drug addicts and street people of Orange County, California. But Arctor is also Agent Fred, an undercover narcotics officer whose identity is hidden even from his police handlers by a “scramble suit” that makes him appear as an unmemorable blur. When an administrative error results in Agent Fred being assigned to monitor Bob Arctor, Arctor/Fred has the strange experience of monitoring his own activities through the holographic scanning equipment that gives the novel its title…”
“The Gunslinger is a quiet, meditative novel; as inauspicious a way to start a sprawling epic fantasy series as I’ve ever encountered. In Roland Deschain, the titular Gunslinger, there’s a superb, violent, powerful and thoughtful protagonist – Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name by way of Robert Browning’s poem, Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower Came. He’s cold and dark, and we see him wander through dusty western towns, shooting and fucking his way towards his nemesis, The Man in Black. This is Randall Flagg, whom you might remember from The Stand (though he is never called by that name here). He’s a Very Bad Man. It transpires that he’s been a part of Roland’s life, in various guises, since the Gunslinger was a child, and that’s he’s responsible for some horrible things. Roland has to find him, catch him and kill him. That’s what a Gunslinger does…”
Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the 165th birthday of Bram Stoker.
“Abraham “Bram” Stoker (8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912) was an Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned.”
The Complete John Thunstone, by Manly Wade Wellman (via Haffner Press).
The Key of Cthulhu, limited edition HP Lovecraft collectible statue (via Joyner Studio)
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
There are some books you read (Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle springs to mind), which, despite having been written before I was born, I have never read until late in life. Shamefully, Flowers For Algernon joins that list.
This is a cleverly written, slyly designed book, perfectly judged and executed. The format expertly engages the reader’s attention and emotion, turns their expectations, attitudes and opinions against them, and tells a relatively simple story with aplomb, plumbing every depth of feeling along the way.
The beginning was upsetting, the middle was uncomfortable, and the ending was simply heartbreaking. A tour de force.
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