Pornokitsch finishes determining essential epic fantasy, with statistics, graphs and lists of their selections. Nice to see Homer in there.
The AV Club consider the emotional impact of Game of Thrones’ Red Wedding episode. Gus Mustrapa considers pranks, punchlines, Schadenfreude and the Red Wedding: “This weekend a booby-trap three years in the making was sprung. Millions of TV viewers watching A Game of Thrones took the proverbial blow. A good many nerds, having read the books [...]
Jess Nevins writes about Sato Minoru’s The Foreign Farm (1931), Japanese science fiction in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries and “the White Peril.”
Tenth Letter of the Alphabet examines the elaboration of the Star Wars logo–with an extensive gallery of images!
“[T]he mainstreaming of Jane Eyre as a vanilla romance, or even as an exploration of a woman’s pure, uncompromising, and uncomplicated (and religious! and feminist!) integrity, says all kinds of things about our inability to speak honestly about violence and sex.” More on Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, consent, sex and submission, here. (via K.A. Laity)
At the School of Visual Art, Greil Marcus delivers a commencement speech discussing “high art” vs. “low art,” art, and influence. (Thanks, Andrew!)
“So Charlaine Harris’ last Southern Vampires book, Dead Ever After, is out May 7. Except it’s kind of out now, which is why the interwebs are exploding. Some random asshat got their claws on an early copy, which is sneaky enough, but then posted the ending online, which is borderline sociopathic.” Mary Janice Davidson has [...]
Jane Austen responds to Michael Chwe naming her a master of Game Theory.
In April, the Guttersnipes like to mix it up a little. This month, Comics Editor Carol Borden writes about romance. “You hit him with a frying pan,” he said to her. “How come you didn’t grab a knife?” “The frying pan was closer.” Her eyes slid away. “It’s not like I had time to pick [...]
Mike White and Rob St. Mary talk about Lee Marvin and Prime Cut on The Projection Booth.
At Pornokitsch, Jared takes a look at The Dragonlance Chronicles’ influence on contemporary fantasy: “[C]ool or not, Dragonlance has done more than almost any other post-Tolkien property in influencing fantasy. Its narrative and conceptual tropes can be found in every nook and cranny of the genre, and much of the modern low fantasy resurgence can be traced [...]
Gutter friend and Coach House Press publicist Evan Munday is in ongoing Canadian book publishing Twitter rap battle with Found Press/Cormorant Books’ Bryan Jay Ibeas.
The Gutter’s own Founding Editor, Jim Munroe talks about creating an alternate reality game based on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 for the Toronto Public Library.
“I’d originally started writing a list of the mistakes made by poor smut writers, but I’ve decided that it would be more fun to write an absolute shit piece of erotica that illustrated, to an admittedly ridiculous degree, most of these errors.” Get your bad smut on here.
Sophia McDougall writes about “sexual assault and ‘Realism’ in popular culture.” (via @Pornokitsch)
Erin Horakova looks at author Shirley Jackson’s masterful, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived In The Castle. “Haunting is stunning, and while it’s a must-read for anyone interested in ghost stories, haunted houses, or psychological horror, it also stretches beyond its demographic.”
Vintage Ninja offers, “A 1962 Point of View” on “ninjutsu”–including covers and pages from an out of print copy of Jay Gluck’s Zen Combat. My favorite line, “The ninja never swaggered.”
“For a couple of years I’ve been predicting in column after column that B&N was eager to get out of the brick-and-mortar business of selling books, but seeing it finally kick into high gear was no fun.” Melville House’s Dennis Johnson draws out the implications of Barnes and Noble closing stores for the book business, [...]
Beloved shipmates, Joe Hill has started a Moby-Dick big read along. The New Bedford Whaling Museum is holding its annual Moby-Dick Marathon today. And the Moby-Dick Big Read Podcast is still downloading a chapter a day with such dauntless readers as Tilda Swinton and ! It’s enough to keep you from knocking off gentelmen’s hats [...]
The Gutter’s own Chris Szego is quoted in Quill & Quire‘s list of Canadian booksellers’ top science fiction and fantasy for 2012! Chris manages Bakka Phoenix, Canada’s oldest science fiction and fantasy bookstore.
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What, it’s June already? I’m sure a I had a whole year here a minute ago. In any case, summer means humidity, allergies, and a sad lack of home AC. This year, it also means squirrels in the roof (don’t ask. No, really).
