The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt.5: Dennis Danvers

 

2025: Reading Ellen Glasgow

by Dennis Danvers

 

 

 My reading this year has been confined almost exclusively to a single writer. After a lifetime of literary study, I was delighted to discover a "new writer" in my own backyard, Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945), who lived her whole life in Richmond and wrote all of her novels but one here at her house at One West Main, now an historic site. I started with The Romantic Comedians and soon devoured all twenty of Glasgow's brilliant novels with relish and came to lament that she is insufficiently appreciated today. She is unparalleled as a psychological realist at least on a par with Edith Wharton and others. Her once substantial fame was eclipsed decades ago, though her twenty published novels remain brilliant as ever. Long out of print, her works are mostly only available in eBooks or from used-book sellers.

She was a big deal in her lifetime, winning most of the prizes but the Nobel. She knew everyone in the literary world, and they knew her, calling on James, Conrad, and her favorite, Hardy, who seemed quite fond of her and her work. She was a leading figure in Southern letters. Ellen and James Branch Cabell, well known in the fantasy world, were close friends, so close he gets a chapter in her posthumously published autobiography The Woman Within (1954).

Literary history isn't a meritocracy, however. As a Southern woman, she was doubly doomed to obscurity in American letters, chucked into the same bin as the dreadful and deluded Gone With the Wind. Ellen rebelled against the racist, sexist, xenophobic "Great America" long before the current crop of MAGA goons were born. No one deconstructs the notion of Southern Womanhood better than Glasgow.

Her first two novels, reminiscent of Dreiser and set in New York City, were written quite young but still hold up, in my opinion. In her critical examination of her work, A Certain Measure (1943), she explains her intention, beginning with The Voice of the People, of providing, through fiction, a social history of Virginia from the decade before the Civil War until the beginning of World War I. They are set in various locales in the Commonwealth from the piedmont to the mountains with several set in Richmond. Her later novels, beginning with Barren Ground, expand upon this program with novels she regarded (accurately in my opinion) to be her best work, most notably a trilogy of comedies of manners —The Romantic Comedians, They Stooped to Folly, and The Sheltered Life. Her last published novel, In This Our Life, won the Pulitzer in 1942. I also recommend Susan Goodman's 1998 scholarly biography, Ellen Glasgow.

 For anyone who is interested in understanding the South beyond the romantic nonsense of the Lost Cause or Faulkner's blood and thunder approach, she is unparalleled.

 

The novels:

·         The Descendant (1897)

·         Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898)

 

·         The Battle-Ground (1902)

·         The Deliverance (1904)

·         The Wheel of Life (1906)

·         The Ancient Law (1908)

  ·         The Voice of the People  (1900)

·         The Romance of a Plain Man (1909)

·         The Miller of Old Church (1911)

·         Virginia (1913)

·         Life and Gabriella (1916)

·         The Builders (1919)

·         One Man in His Time (1922)

·         Barren Ground (1925)

·         The Romantic Comedians (1926)

·         They Stooped to Folly (1929)

·         The Sheltered Life (1932)

·         Vein of Iron (1935)

·         In This Our Life (1941)

 

 

Dennis Danvers has published ten novels, including NYT Notables Circuit of Heaven and The Watch, and Locus- and Bram Stoker-Awards nominee Wilderness; The Perfect Stranger (2020)and The Soothsayer & The Changeling (2021). His short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex, F&SF, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Electric Velocipede, and elsewhere. His story collection, Leaving the Dead was published in 2023. He taught Literature and Creative Writing for over thirty years at Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Richmond, VA. Aqueduct Press released his Tales from Mnemosyne in 2024.

 

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt.4: Lisa Tuttle

 

Pleasures of Reading in 2025

By Lisa Tuttle

  

 

Because I am still writing a monthly roundup of SF/Fantasy/horror books for The Guardian, nearly all my reading has been of books in those genres, published this year, with an eye to review.  Because I have less than 700 words and am expected to include between four and six titles each month, I tend to concentrate on the books I have most enjoyed.  What follows is my “best of the best of 2025”—the books that I’d want on the list if I were a judge for The Clarke Award or World Fantasy or similar.  I urge you to seek them out for yourself!

 

Best SF/Speculative Fiction (six of my favorites, in no particular order): SF is a big tent; it can include  near future fiction concerned with vital issues we’re already facing, like climate change (E.J. Swift), or AI and inequality (Naylor and Liu), or really wild, mind-boggling speculation (Huang, Oyebanji, and especially qntm) – this was a very good year for SF.

All That We Are or Seem by Ken Liu

 

There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

 

Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Naylor

 

Immaculate Conception by Ling Ling Huang

 

When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift

 

Esperance by Adam Oyebanji

 

Best Fantasy:  I tend to prefer speculative fiction to most genre fantasy; I avoid books marketed as “romantasy,”  and violent “grimdark” epic fantasies rarely appeal – but so much depends on the writing, the voice, and style.  If I am unconvinced by the blurb, or the first few pages, I will open a book at random and read a few paragraphs – that’s usually enough to either intrigue or dissuade me.  Anyway, these are the ones that kept me hooked to the end: one very dark fantasy with vampires; one perfect fairy tale; the second volume of an epic fantasy sequence; and a magical time-travel mystery  – all supremely well written.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Matar

The Strength of the Few by James Islington

 

The White Octopus Hotel by Alexandra Bell

 

 

 

Best Horror:  This genre, long overlooked, although always with its fans, is booming as never before. It has sub-genres (ghost stories, weird tales, gothic horror) and often crosses into fantasy or crime or SF. These are the ones I can’t forget:

 

The Cat Bride by Charlotte Tierney

 

Animals by Geoff Ryman

 

Darker Days by Thomas Olde Heuveldt

 

One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford

 

Exiles by Mason Coile 

 

King Sorrow by Joe Hill

 

Lisa Tuttle began writing professionally in the 1970s. Although she also writes novels and non-fiction, her preference is for the weird short story. Her most recent collection is Riding the Nightmare (Valancourt), a new collection of short stories. Her 2004 novella My Death, previously published by Aqueduct Press (number 21 in the Conversations Pieces list) has been reissued in the acclaimed NYRB Classics series. She lives in a forest on the west coast Scotland. 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt.3: Eleanor Arnason

 

The Pleasure of Reading Nghi Vo

by Eleanor Arnason 

 

 

Gaylaxicon was in Minneapolis this summer, and I went. It’s a good con, and I hope it continues happening. In any case, one of the guests of honor was Nghi Vo. I am way behind in reading current SFF, so I hadn’t read her work. But I figured I ought to check it out and 
picked up The Empress of Salt and Fortune in the dealers’ room. I liked it so much that I went back to the dealers’ room the next day, bought the second book in the series and got it autographed by Vo. 
 

 When I got home from the con, I tried to buy the third book at my local independent bookstore, but it is currently out of print. However,  I got books # 4 and # 5. What do I like about them? Several things: they are short, part of Tor’s novella series. Too many books are too long. Second, they share a universe and a main character, a traveling cleric who wanders through the stories of other people. 

 

The books can be read in any order according to Vo. I read them in the order of publishing, except for # 3, which I will buy as soon as it is reprinted. I like linked stories and shared-universe stories a lot. Finally, the books draw on the folklore of East Asia, Vietnam in this case. I think the mammoths are not East Asian, and I’m not sure about the companion birds who remember everything: feathered recorders. Vo’s stories are strange,
 often disturbing, and wonderful. I like the companion hoopoe, the wandering cleric, the foxes and tigers and mammoths… I just discovered that # 6 is available. I will see about ordering it today. 

 

 Eleanor Arnason has written several novels and many short stories. Her fourth novel, A Woman of the Iron People (2001), won the James Tiptree Jr. award for gender-bending science fiction and the Mythopoeic Society Award for adult fantasy. Her fifth novel, Ring of Swords (1995), won a Minnesota Book Award. In 2018, Aqueduct reissued Ring of Swords with an introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin, as the fifth volume in its Heirloom Books series. Aqueduct Press published her collection Big Mama Stories in 2013, her Lydia Duluth adventure, Tomb of the Fathers, in 2010, and her collection Ordinary People in 2005. In 2016 Aqueduct released  e-book editions of The Sword Smith, To the Resurrection Station, and Daughter of the Bear King. In 2017, Aqueduct published a collection of her Hwarhath stories, Hwarhath Stories, which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and was named to the James Tiptree/Otherwise Award's Honor List.