Search Results for: book club

Real Magicians: Interviewing the Editors of Podcastle

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The thing is, I love Podcastle. I can’t help it. I love theatre and oral storytelling, I read a lot, I listen to audiobooks myself; I love big collaborative projects that involve massive influxes of talent, that are broad-minded and multi-faceted, that promote both exciting new voices and the old classics. Podcastle — with its podsisters EscapePod and Pseudopod — does all that. Every time I hear a story over at Podcastle that guts me or makes me fly a…

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The Nightmare Men: “The Haunted Wanderer”

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While Robert E. Howard is perhaps best known for creating Conan, he had his share of occult investigators of one stripe or another. There was Steve Harrison of River Street, Solomon Kane with his fiery Puritanism and cat-headed ju-ju staff and, of course, John Kirowan. Kirowan is of an age and appearance with a number of Howard’s other characters, being tall, slender, brooding, and black haired — a Celt of the modern age. Sorrow hangs about him like a shroud,…

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Mark Rigney Reviews Ivy’s Ever After

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Ivy’s Ever After Dawn Lairamore Holiday House, Inc., (311 pp, $16.95, 2010) Reviewed by Mark Rigney There is a land where children go, to fill their minds with castles and kings and queens and rescues and, well, you know. All that stuff. For some, that land comes equipped with polyhedron dice. For seasoned readers ready to dispense with their dice, one can always fall back on Tolkien, Sir Walter Scott, or Le Morte d’Arthur. But what if you happen to…

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14 Questions for David Barr Kirtley

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Nowadays, most anyone who’s into science fiction and fantasy will know Dave Kirtley, half of the team that hosts The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. What I bet a lot of people don’t know is that he has copied GAME OF THRONES, word for word, by hand, to learn about style and sentence structure, or that he’s also a talented artist who wants to help other up and coming artists get exposure. When I first met him, he was still…

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Special Fiction Feature: “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum” by Joe Bonadonna

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Back on August 9, 2011, I wrote an article entitled “Dorgo the Dowser and Me,” which John O’Neill graciously posted on the Black Gate website here. It was all about my first published novel of swords and sorcery, Mad Shadows: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser, the influences that inspired the book, plus some teaser “trailers” about each story. Mad Shadows is really a picaresque novel — a collection of six stories linked together by a main character, and…

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The Desert of Souls is One of the Best Fantasy Novels of 2011

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Howard Andrew Jones’ first novel The Desert of Souls has been named one of the best fantasy novels of the year by Barnes & Noble. Paul Goat Allen, a full-time genre book reviewer who’s reviewed thousands of titles over the past 20 years, posted his choices for the Best Fantasy Releases of 2011 at Explorations, the highly respected Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy Blog. In addition to Desert of Souls (#4), the list also includes Prince of Thorns by Black…

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Immortals Sucks. Sorry I Don’t Have a Funnier Title Than That

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Immortals (2011) Directed by Tarsem Singh. Starring Henry Cavill, Stephen Dorff, Mickey Rourke, Freida Pinto, Isabel Lucas, Luke Evans, Kellan Lutz. Relativity Media and Rogue Pictures should be thankful that they released Immortals the same week as Adam Sandler’s Jack and Jill, which has turned into the One-Stop Shopping place for hilariously negative reviews. The Adam Sandler beat-up took the attention away from Immortals’s poor reviews, and likely helped push the film to its #1 spot at the box office…

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Romanticism and Fantasy: The French Experience

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In my previous posts about Romanticism and fantasy, I looked at British literature in the 18th century through to 1789, and tried to track the emergence of a certain kind of fantastic fiction. In order to understand what happens in British writing (and politics) after 1789, though, we have to look at what happens in France. Before continuing, I need to emphasise: I am not an academic, or a professional historian. I’ve read a fair amount about the period, and…

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Art of the Genre: A Gaming Family Tree

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I began my journey here at Black Gate telling everyone that I was a gamer, a lifer as I put it, and that’s something I just can’t seem to shake. It all began when I was in junior high school, very early eighties, and with that damnable Red Box… but that isn’t to say that there weren’t thousands of others who did the same things I did concerning the D&D hobby in their school years. What makes me different is…

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Romanticism and Fantasy: The Emergence of the Romantic

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Last week, I described the neo-classical attitudes of the Age of Reason, which dominated English literature through most of the 18th century. This week I want to take a look at how and when things changed. In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poetry that some critics have pointed to as the start of Romanticism in English literature. In fact, you can fairly easily find precursors to one aspect…

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