Recommendation nation

Stuff you wouldn't ordinarily come across recommendation thing:

A day late, but better tardy than never: A Halloween Story, by Interzone bod Peter Tennant. It's an amusing A Christmas Carol pastiche with lots of in-jokes for horror fans.

Requiem for the East, by Siberian author Andrei Makine. Makine pretended to be the translator rather than the author to sell his first novel in French. (He does the Nabokov/Beckett trick of writing in a language other than his mother tongue). Poetic and kinda heart-breaking. This book is the only one to have made me cry in public. I was on a train heading to work.

Fisher of Devils, by that rogue Steve Redwood. A perfect comic fantasy for those not of a Christian-fundamentalist mindset.

How about some music. Camden's Beatmolls were doing the Scissor Sisters thing with more verve, sparkle and dreaded hair long before the New Yorkers put the Bee Gees through the blender.

Can never recommend Monkey Boy enough, but only if you're of the garage rock persuasion.

And if your thing's more science-fiction new-wave surf punk, that can mean only one thing. It's time for the sadly disbanded Man or Astroman.

Dick, Jane and the Beatniks, man

Lavie Tidhar, he of travelling and science fiction short story fame (he has the lead story in the current issue of Interzone), quite some time back commissioned a load of stories for his Dick & Jane Primer for Adults. The stories come from folks like Adam Roberts, Conrad Williams, James Lovegrove, and son. There's an absolutely cracking story from Liz Williams and, yes, this isn't all about the altruism as there's a story from me in there too. Well, it is finally be published, in June, but only available to members of the British Fantasy Society. I'm assuming it will be mailing out with Prism, their magazine.

In other news, it looks like back in August of last year, hepcat online litzine the Beat published one of my stories. They may have told me about it, but if they did, I forgot. You can read it for free anyway, and it's quite good. It's called The Flautist.