Happy Thursday! How’s your summer TBR pile doing, dear readers? I’d love to hear about any recommendations you might have for fun beach reads to take on vacation. My own TBR list is slowly becoming more manageable, so of course, I need to gather some more recs to pick up!
As it stands, I might just have to add new J.R.R. Tolkien to the list of things to read, as one of his rare poems will soon be republished 70 years after being launched in The Welsh Review. “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun” is a tragic romance and may hint at the inspiration for Lord of the Rings elf Galadriel. The structure and style of the poem is similar to classics, like Tam Lin. Tolkien clearly had a deep fascination with the presence and dark nature of faeries in Celtic legends.
Speaking of myths and legends, Tor has compiled a list of 100 African writers in speculative fiction, and I don’t know about you, but I’m so ready to get started on reading all of these books. Geoff Ryman interviews some of the listed writers and details Nairobi’s literary scene in the first part of the series.
Mehul Gohil, SFF fan and writer, shares some of his earliest influences in SFF:
When I was ten years old the mall had a secondhand bookshop. It was my birthday and my dad said pick what you want. I wanted big thick books, not the picture books. The first books I picked up were Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delaney and Fritz Leiber. I really thought Leiber was good and I understood Dick even as a kid. I liked that in Dick no one is surprised by the new technology—it’s normal and everyday. The spaceship lands and no one cares. Right now I love Ann Leckie, Alastair Reynolds and C.J. Cherryh.
Ray Mwihaki, manager and sub-editor of Manure Fresh, considers “how the past influences the present, and our inability to detach ourselves from the past” in her short stories. There’s an amazing range of stories and experiences to be found in Nairobi’s speculative fiction, and I can’t wait to see the next parts!
From Nairobi, we circle back to the United States, where Nathan Scott McNamara contemplates the need for independent (indie) publishers in the American literary market. Those of us who work within the book publishing community can probably rattle off two or three of the Big 5 publishers, but may struggle to identify small presses that are nevertheless shifting the face of American literature. McNamara talks of Greywolf Press and Dorothy, both of which have seen some of their authors landing on bestseller lists and becoming reader favourites in recent years. It’s particularly interesting to see where small presses set their focus and the books that are then able to get unique attention from the teams that work on them. Plus, it’s a great way to learn of even more books to add to your reading list!
