Stuff & Nonsense

Henning Mankell is a prolific Swedish mystery writer, whose police procedurals featuring Inspector Kurt Wallender have reached bestselling status in a number of countries and spawned a BBC miniseries.  His latest novel to reach U.S. shores (translated from the original Swedish), titled The Man from Beijing, interweaves a traditional whodunit with seemingly autobiographical details of [...]

Paul McAuley’s The Quiet War debuted in the UK in 2008 before getting a well-deserved release a few months back in the US by Lou Anders and Pyr Books.  For those who don’t know, Pyr and Anders have done a great job of bringing high-quality international SF/F authors to the US market, including Joe Abercrombie, [...]

As every sentient being in the world knows, Apple announced the iPad on Wednesday, complete with shiny book reading features and an ebook store designed to compete with Amazon and the Kindle.  During the iPad unveiling, Steve Jobs indicated that he had agreements with a number of major publishers to sell books for the iPad [...]

My introduction to K.J. Parker came in the form of her* first novel, Colours in the Steel, which I picked up on a visit to the U.K. around ten years ago.  Colours is the first in a fantasy trilogy in which weapons-making and political machinations play large roles, and “magic” is poorly understood and rarely [...]

Although the last few months have been a little light for me in terms of new books, the next couple of months promise some big titles.  Perhaps the most anticipated is Blackout by Connie Willis, her first published novel since 2001’s Passage.  Blackout is a return to her Oxford-based time travel milieu, and takes place [...]