Penguins on Parade: The Shahnameh!

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Penguins on Parade: The Shahnameh!

Some Penguin Classics, as I’ve noted before here at Stevereads, feel like they’re a long time in the making, and the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi more than most and in two different ways. Not only has this sprawling tenth century Persian epic waited a long time for an attractive, affordable paperback edition in English, but this particular text, a prose translation by Dick Davis that Viking brought out ten years ago, has waited a long time to become a Penguin Classic.

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Author & Book Essays: The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat

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Author & Book Essays: The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat

A debatably wise man once said that the best-seller was a gilded tomb for a mediocre talent. As with all easy aphorisms, it’s only 90 percent true. 
 
The riddle is solved one of two ways: either the writer of the best-seller stumbled blindly upon a winning formula that one time only, or the writer always knew what they were doing and some combination of chance and synergy caused that one book to take flight.  

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In the Penny Press! The TLS!

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In the Penny Press! The TLS!

The TLS’ house line regarding books about what could sloppily be termed ‘animal rights’ can be summed up as bemusedly Tory: the people who write such books are obviously a little dotty, but they aren’t doing anybody any harm, so we might as well pat them on the head from time to time with a review or two.

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SFF: Star Trek - Crucible: McCoy! Hunters of Dune!

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SFF: Star Trek - Crucible: McCoy! Hunters of Dune!

You know, the main enemies of science fiction aren’t the genre-snobs who think it starts and stops with Philip K. Dick (or that Margaret Atwood has ever written a word of it).

The real enemies of science fiction are the writers of it who’ve bought into the mainstream idea that genre readers are a little dim.

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