- My Listener review of Edward St Aubyn's At Last is now on-line. While modesty forbids and all that, I liked the book. A lot.
Vladimir Nabokov warned readers of Lolita – in the voice of literature’s most notorious paedophile – that you can always depend on a murderer for a fancy prose style. At Last, Edward St Aubyn’s fifth and final novel featuring patrician junkie and survivor of childhood sexual abuse Patrick Melrose, reclaims high literary style from Nabokov’s evasive, self-justifying apologist for rape and allows fellow survivors something more than the clotted psychobabble of the typical misery memoir.
- While I'm still to cross the digital divide and learn to love e-books, this announcement from Gollancz made my geeky heart skip a beat.
Gollancz, the SF and Fantasy imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, announces the launch of the world’s largest digital SFF library, the SF Gateway, which will make thousands of out-of-print titles by classic genre authors available as eBooks.
Building on the remarkable success of Gollancz’s Masterworks series, the SF Gateway will launch this [Northern] Autumn with more than a thousand titles by close to a hundred authors. It will build to 3,000 titles by the end of 2012, and 5,000 or more by 2014. Gollancz’s Digital Publisher Darren Nash, who joined the company in September 2010 to spearhead the project said, “The Masterworks series has been extraordinarily successful in republishing one or two key titles by a wide range of authors, but most of those authors had long careers in which they wrote dozens of novels which had fallen out of print. It seemed to us that eBooks would offer the ideal way to make them available again. This realization was the starting point for the SF Gateway.” Wherever possible, the SF Gateway will offer the complete backlist of the authors included."
Of local interest, Victoria Emeritus Professor of Drama Philip Mann -- who published an impressive and long out of print string of science fiction novels with Gollancz in the 80's and 90's is one of the included authors. Dick Weir's reading of Master of Paxwax and its sequel The Fall of the Families are repeated occasionally on National Radio - and are available from Replay Radio -- but Pioneers (1986) and Wulfsyarn (1988) are well overdue for rediscovery.