Saturday, September 15, 2007
Hot on the heels of the Riddley Walker annotations project I found a couple of months ago, the extraordinary Zarf11. Author of some damn fine interactive fiction, a bunch of apps and libraries, many reviews and a wonderfully strange column, among many, many other things. [↪] has produced a monumental cross-indexed reference for John M. [...]
Riddley Walker is a good contender for my all-time favourite novel. It’s a post-apocalyptic story told in the first person, with altered spelling and reinterpreted expressions and the rhythms of oral history to match. The language is at first intimidating, and it’s a testament to Russell Hoban’s writing that you get caught up in the [...]
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Life is busy, but nothing exciting to report. So instead, a couple of nice things you might not have read:
Wired have a collection of incredible
six word short stories. The brief was
for science fiction, fantasy and horror, so they might not be to your taste, but there are some
awfully clever ones. My favourite is by Eileen [...]
Apparently Susanna Clarke, of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell fame, is putting out a short story collection this coming October. I’ll recommend it, sight unseen. This gives you four months to read Strange & Norrell and fall in love… you could also check out the online story on the site, and the Crooked Timber seminar. [...]
Hal Duncan writes books, of which so far one has been published: Vellum, which I tried to review a while back. Recently a friend who occasionally reads this blog mentioned that he intended to give Vellum a try, and just today I came across a couple of pieces by Duncan that throw some light on [...]
One of my favourite online authors is considering publishing a best-of. Anacrusis is a collection of short-short stories, 101 words per piece, more-or-less daily since mid-2003. It’s sometimes funny, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes interlinked, and pretty much consistently brilliant. In particular I recommend the Rita stories. (I’m proud to say the Mambo reference entirely escaped me [...]
This essay comes from my experiences proofreading LaTeX documents,
both semi-professionally and for friends. It is intended mainly for
technical writing, where LaTeX really comes into its own and where
attention to detail can both greatly assist the proofreader or
typesetter, and greatly improve the readability of the
manuscript. This is neither a description of how to use LaTeX nor [...]
Online version of Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman. This is a wonderfully dark and twisted retelling of a classic story. It seems to be available all over the place — I first read it in a collection but it’s apparently here by permission.