My First Book Jacket Blurb!

Well, here's one of the first signs you're a "real" academic -- a blurb from me on an academic book. I'm actually quite excited about this volume (Magic Words, Magic Worlds: Form and Style in Epic Fantasy by Matthew Oliver), which is about style in epic fantasy texts. One thing Oliver does exceptionally well is describe stylistic features in a really concrete way, through actual quantifiable stylistic techniques. There's none of that "impression of" nonsense or cherry-picked sample sentences from which egregious over-generalizations are made.

Incidentally, my wife and I saw Oliver's presentation at ICFA 2022, and his was one of her two favorites of the whole conference. (My wife is a non-academic.) Turns out she really appreciates concrete arguments as  well!





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony ... and even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, you'll still never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, he had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than Anne McCaffrey, the next most frequent bestseller. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  21 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two distinct bo...
Read more

My reviews for WOOFUS TAKES and THE BEALLSVILLE CALENDAR

In my ongoing efforts to support alliterative poets in the Modern Alliterative Revival, I just added online reviews for two more poets: Michael Helsem (aka, "Graywyvern") and Jeff Sypeck. These are below, but if you 'd like to support the revivalist, click on the reviews below and "upvote" them ... it's very handy for the algorithms! Lancelot Schaubert ( The Greenwood Poet ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review  . Adam Bolivar ( Ballads for the Witching Hour ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review  . Amit Majmudar ( Dothead ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review Mary Thaler ( Ulfhidr ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review Zach Weinersmith ( Bea Wolf ): my  Amazon review  and this  Goodreads review Now for Helsem and Sypeck!
Read more

The GOR novels of John Norman: Better or Worse than Terry Goodkind?

Image
Turns out I had to rewrite this entry significantly -- one of the perils, alas, of doing additional research. (There must be a moral in that somewhere.) Anyway, I originally wanted to read the GOR novels of John Norman  cuz everyone in SFF scholarship knows the common narrative behind them: Norman's the genre's resident evil, the pinnacle of misogynistic assholery, one of the eventual reasons sword-and-sorcery (S&S) died a rapid death in the 1980s. However, since I'm an instinctive iconoclast who always distrusts received opinion, I had to see for myself. So I finally took the plunge into Gor and selected a novel at random from my local Bookman's. This turned out to be  Priest-Kings of Gor  (Ballantine, 1968), and the sheer strength of its writing quality surprised me deeply. I'm not going to make any two bones about it ... this is a good novel of its kind. So you can only imagine how a-quiver with zeal my grubby little paws were to rant against Received Opinion...
Read more