Tag Archives: writers

More Monsters

Arthur Rackham's illustration for "Goblin Market," by Christina Rossetti

Over at Weird Fiction Review, several dozen writers reveal their favorite monsters. I contributed a brief defense of goblin-kind:

Goblins have gotten a pretty bad rap over the centuries. Sniveling, mean-spirited wretches, bowing to whatever power they most fear, they’ve pestered, tricked, and cajoled their way into the grimy underbellies of countless tales and legends. But I say that goblins are the great unsung worker-heroes of monsterdom. . . .

You can read the rest here, along with the responses from many others.

On a personal note, I knew a goblin once. He began life as a mischievous cat named Goblin, a fine companion to me and my siblings. He vanished one day, and though we called his name into the woods out back, and left out bowls of food, we failed to summon Goblin home.

Years later, a strange creature appeared in the back yard, huge and furry, with shining yellow eyes and battle-scarred ears. Goblin had become a goblin. He regarded us with mild curiosity, but eyed the food we offered him with obvious disdain. After an hour or so, he sauntered back into forest, to rule whatever strange domain he had conquered for himself.

The Woven Labyrinth

Tonight, while copying by hand the Jorge Luis Borges poem “The Other Tiger” onto a page destined for an altar to Brigid of Kildare, I realized that the translation of the poem to which I referred, from PEN American Center’s website, was by Alastair Reid, and that Reid had read the poem in 1999 as part of his talk at a centenary celebration of Borges in New York, and that I myself had transcribed that talk from a cassette recording so that it could be published in the first issue of PEN America, and that I had later converted that talk into HTML code, so that it could appear on the very website from which I was now copying by hand, more than ten years later, the Jorge Luis Borges poem “The Other Tiger.”

Surviving the Perilous Season

The Fixed StarsI first encountered the work of Brian Conn while helping to edit issue twenty-one of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the biannual lit zine published by Small Beer Press. Conn’s contribution, a story called “The Postern Gate,” was a dizzying narrative set in a massive castle inhabited by eccentric characters. Complex, vivid, and almost Gormenghastian in scope, the piece stuck with me.

So I was excited to learn that Brian Conn’s first novel, The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season, would be published by FC2. The book is out now, and it’s one of the more fascinating—and challenging—novels I’ve come upon in recent memory. Here’s how Brian Evenson describes it: “Brian Conn’s wonderfully perilous crossbreeding of SF and innovative prose reads like what might result if Dhalgren and A Canticle for Leibowitz engaged in salacious acts with The Tibetan Book of the Dead.”

When Brian Conn agreed to an interview recently, I used it as an opportunity to dig deeper into the process behind the creation of this strange and extraordinary book, and that interview is now up at Rain Taxi.

Take This, Brother

MeeksEarlier this week, over at the Small Beer Press blog, I revealed a handful of secrets about Meeks, a first novel by Julia Holmes. If you’ve seen me in the last year or so, chances are I talked to you about this book. And maybe talked and talked and talked to you about it. It’s an extraordinary novel, dangerous and funny and strange. It will be in bookstores on July 20th, and I can’t wait for everyone to read it. And yes, I do mean everyone.

On a related note, Julia Holmes and I participated in a roundtable on first books for Hobart recently. We had the chance to discuss the editorial process, as well as a host of other matters. Many fine writers were involved, and you can read the whole conversation here.

What else? Soon I leave for Germany, to speak to the German people about Handbuch für Detektive. But first I’m off to a super secret stronghold in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Speaking of which, here’s a little video about beards.