Elsewhere

Some recent (and not-so recent) writing by me that LGM-ers might find of interest.

• Hey, remember Avengers: Endgame? It was the biggest movie of the decade, and then we stopped talking about it maybe ten minutes after it came out? Anyway, here’s my review, from way back in late April when this was still an important cultural artifact. (Note: this review starts by discussing an essay by the critic Emily VanDerWerff, a discussion that uses her previous name and pronouns. Earlier this week, VanDerWerff published a very moving essay about the decision to transition, in her private life and now in her professional one, at a time when that choice seems more fraught and dangerous than ever.)
• Also at my blog, I reviewed Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first volume in a trilogy that he has described as an “African Game of Thrones“. It’s a strange book, hard to get into but, once you get past the initial hurdle, a lot more conventional than James’s history as a boundary-pushing author might lead you to expect.
• Speaking of Game of Thrones, here’s my final review of the show, in which I try to argue that its messiness and inability to come to a coherent conclusion is part and parcel of why we found it so fascinating and engaging.
• And over at Strange Horizons, I participated in a roundtable discussion of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin, along with Zen Cho and Charlotte Geater, moderated by Aishwarya Subramanian. Warner was an early 20th century fantasist as well as one of the founding members of the New Yorker short fiction department, and the stories in Kingdoms of Elfin were published in that magazine during the last decade of her life, following the death of her partner, Valentine Ackland. They’re reminiscent of the writing (and particularly the short stories) of Susannah Clarke, but with a much chillier tone. The collection isn’t exactly a fun read, but it is an interesting one, and worth a look for people interested in strange corners of the fantasy genre.