Navigation and Backstory

E617925D-676D-41D2-B29A-67A7608E2ABBA Constructive Congeries of the Conceits, Coronas, COincidences, COinspirancies, Confirmation-Biases and Connections in Imaginative Fiction. In the pitiless passion of the reading-moment, often raw, often gnomic, often wordy, but always heartfelt. All books bought.
Now hawling Covid… A golden sphere in a fey balance of clarity and confusion.

PLEASE USE ‘SEARCH’ ON BANNER ABOVE FOR THE WHOLE SITE BY AUTHOR, TITLE OR PUBLISHER.

All reviews linked for each of these years:
2008/9 – 2010 – 2011 – 2012 – 2013 – 2014 – 2015 – 2016 – 2017 – 2018 – 2019 – 2020

And Click: HERE for full Navigation & Backstory.

 

The Three Ages of D.F. Lewis
0. 1948-1985 — Zeroist Group (1960s), The Visitor (Novel) 1973, Agra Aska (novella) 1983.

1. 1986-2000 – Over 1000 fiction publications in magazines and anthologies, some selected for the Prime Books D.F. Lewis collection ‘Weirdmonger’ (2003).
D.F. Lewis awarded the BFS Karl Edward Wagner Award in 1998.

2. 2001-2010 – Publishing the ground-breaking multi-authored ‘NEMONYMOUS’ Journal.

3. 2008 to date —
The DES LEWIS GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWING of fiction books,
Plus one novel NEMONYMOUS NIGHT (Chômu Press), a story collection and two novellas entitled THE LAST BALCONY (InkerMen Press), E617925D-676D-41D2-B29A-67A7608E2ABB and a novella entitled Weirdtongue (InkerMen Press), and a self-published reprint of ‘Agra Aska’ that was originally published in 1998 by Scorpion Press,
Plus three originally created multi-authored anthologies that D.F. Lewis published,
Plus two D.F. Lewis books from Mount Abraxas Press, and an Eibonvale chapbook called ‘The Big Headed People’. And the Eibonvale Collection DABBLING WITH DIABELLI in May 2020,
Plus a past D.F. Lewis story selected for THE BIG BOOK OF MODERN FANTASY edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

Kaleidostars’ Creative Colliding

Charles Schneider, the writer and artist, has been inspired enough to create these wonderful kaleidoscopic adaptations (shown below) of some of my wife’s quilted stars, i.e. the 28 quilt squares in their raw state as they were when I photographed them and posted them here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/this-sites-randombanner-images/ and then used randomly in my site’s heading, currently above:

Rapunzel / The Lady of Shalott

3284DEBF-B198-4F92-82A2-CA12BD70BB5FRAPUNZEL by Sue Harper
Below is from my review today HERE.

I find this synergy quite INCREDIBLE, and it perhaps shows how pre-tuned I am with parts of this book even before I have read them! Rapunzel and her dark nest of hair….
For example, in the last day or so, I have happened to propound this about its sister story in Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott (see my appended comments to this blog post HERE)…
And there are several references to Rapunzel in my real-time reviewing over the years.
This Harper story concentrates on her hair, ALL her body hair as an accretively hirsute pelisse, as it would!! — another absurdist effigy of our unbarbered lockdown times!

A Smile of a Dream

SOMETHING CHILDISH BUT VERY NATURAL by Katherine Mansfield
“I am sure he wrote it when he was half-awake some time, for it’s got a smile of a dream on it.”CDB23253-3D66-484F-9256-A1A76FEBD250
As city folks walk as though with real bodies under their clothes, and “stiff blood” (later “wild blood”), we learn of Henry and the eponymous poem that he reads at a station book stall, this love of books causing him abruptly to change carriages on the train and meet a young girl called Edna with the strange but beautiful hair he immediately wants to touch. She claims she is over 16 and he claims he is 18. But I sense she exaggerates in one direction, and he in the other. A sense of forbidden touch that lasts for most of this book’s social distancing of such supposed illicit love. The dream becomes one of Picnic at Hanging Rock, I feel, and a vision of their life together in an idyllic abode halted by the story’s ending, as all stories are halted by their endings. A story that can “steam open an elephant’s ear of an envelope.” The childish secret exposed. But did you know a cottage can stand on tiptoe?
“If I start flying suddenly, you’ll promise to catch hold of my feet, won’t you? Otherwise I’ll never come down.”

From my review of her collected stories here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/760-2/