So We're Back At That Again, Eh?
Of course. We're talking about books, you know. If I didn't talk about books, we wouldn't have anything to talk about.
Seriously, my mom finally came home after a month in the U.S. and brought home a package of books from Powells.com. The good news is that thanks to their policy of free shipping on qualified orders of $50 or more, I managed to get more books (as opposed to my earlier post of the $20-limit). The bad news is that Fritz Leiber's Dark Ladies-- which has both his short novels Conjure Wife and Our Lady of Darkness combined-- wasn't one of them. Ah well...
Still, it's a good payload as it includes a number of unknown-and-yet classic titles as well as new and midlist books. A number of these actually play around with history, whether it's ancient China that never was, an alternative-universe Japan, a magic-ruled Wild West or a Steam-punk Renaissance period (okay, I'm guessing here).
Moreover, I'm rather proud of my order as some of the titles are rather hard-to-find and-- except for the occasional lucking-out in Booksale-- you definitely won't find on these shores.
To wit, the package included:
- Barry Hughart Bridge of Birds
- Mark Sumner Devil's Engine
- Cherie Priest Four and Twenty Blackbirds
- Michael Shea The Incompleat Nifft
- Jack Dann The Memory Cathedral: The Secret History of Leonardo da Vinci
- E.R. Eddison Mistress of Mistresses
- Paul Mcauley Pasquale's Angel
- Michelle West Sea of Sorrows
- Jessica Salmonson Tomoe Gozen
Quite a creepy piece of work there, hey?
4 comments:
I was making a shopping list the other day. Or, more precisely, I was whittling down a shopping list to make it manageable. And I'm sorry to say that the Leiber was edged aside by various small-press titles. I know he wasn't deliberately excluded in your list, but I kinda feel guilty about it.
But let's talk about YOUR haul! While I'm generally not one for alternate histories (or fantastic histories), what's nice about this is that I see at least two books that you've blogged about previously (the Salmonson and the McAuley). It's always nice to get something you've been itching for.
I don't want to spoil your fun by asking you when you'll get around to reading these, since that's always a problem with people like us, but I would definitely love to hear about the Priest. That's on my buy-list, too.
And yes, it's a brilliant cover. The other Palencar covers consist of his Del Rey work: Lovecraft mostly.
I'm reminded of the cover for the US hardcover of Kevin Brockmeier's A Brief History of the Dead. I hope they retain it when it goes to (trade) paperback. I thought the UK hardcover had lousy cover art.
*sigh* Yeah I kinda understand about Leiber though at least I have his Fafhrd and Grey Mouser series to tide me over (to re-read). Though am surprised you aim for small-press stuff. Isn't that expensive? (Though I did hear a couple of them are having a sale now.)
As for Cherie Priest, hey, I thought you already have a copy? At least you know her online, right? (Hehe yeah, aside from Priest's, my other Palencar is the Sherlock Holmes-Lovecraft antho.)
With Brockmeier, I'm not exactly sure about the longer work though I loved the short story. Something about perfection being marred by too many additions or something? Heh.
The small-press stuff is indeed terribly expensive, but sometimes I have no choice (and Amazon.Com does provide discounts for some of them). The contemporary authors I most want to read are available only in the small press. Believe me, I always wish mass market success for the authors I like, but it unfortunately doesn't happen.
(On a related note, if you remember what it was like collecting comics in the 80s with variant covers and people buying several copies, reading one and keeping the others as investments, I just hate that. In some ways, the small press feeds that kind of mentality, which I think is sad.)
Despite having Cherie Priest as an LJ friend and pledging to her that I will get a copy and tell her what I thought about it, I haven't gotten around to doing so. I never really got into the Southern Gothic in a big way (barring "A Rose for Emily" in school), but I've been curious about it ever since.
And this is neat, but we have the same opinion of the Brockmeier story. I'm only afraid it will suffer by being expanded to novel-length and by having parallel storylines, especially since his The Truth About Celia seems less a novel per se than a "fix-up" of-sorts, although I'm confident it's a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts kind of deal. Still, I'd pick that one up or his short fiction collection before A Brief History of the Dead.
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