Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/9

Sometimes I assume that anyone reading this already knows what I'm doing, which is a dangerous assumption. So let me explain:

"Reviewing the Mail" is a weekly post; I run it early on Monday mornings, and it lists the books I've gotten in the past week. That list is mostly from the worlds of comics and science fiction & fantasy, though not exclusively, and is also mostly things that were sent to me by publishers for reviews -- though also not exclusively. The point is to note new, recent, and upcoming publications, since I won't be able to review them all -- and the book I don't manage to review might just be the one you're most interested in.

With that out of the way, here's what I saw last week:

Dororo, Vol. 3, the finale of Osamu Tezuka's 1967-69 samurai adventure series, published by Vertical at the end of August.

Seiichi Hayashi's Red Colored Elegy, one of the most famous and influential comics of the Japanese equivalent of the underground movement, originally published in Japan in 1970-71 and never before translated into English. Just looking through it, the style is startling and exciting -- more like graphic design, or like Western comics of the time, than the usual manga we see these days. Drawn & Quarterly published this in July; they're the house that brought Yoshihiro Tatsumi to the West, so they have a great eye for art-comic manga.

David Anthony Durham's first fantasy novel, Acacia, is coming out in mass-market paperback on August 26th, which I hope will gladden the folks I've been chatting with on rec.arts.sf.written about how fewer and fewer books from the regular SFF world are going into mass-market these days.

Stephen Hunt's first novel, The Court of the Air, has sounded like my kind of thing since I first heard about it: a mannerist steampunk novel influenced by both Jack Vance and Charles Dickens. Tor published it in June, and now it joins my already groaning to-be-read shelves. It's got a great cover, too.

The Wall of America will probably be Thomas M. Disch's final book; he died on July 4th in New York City. It collects his recent short stories, and will be published by Tachyon in November.

The second volume of Del Rey's series reprinting all of Michael Moorcock's Elric stories and novels in the order they were written is Elric: To Rescue Tanelorn, which was published July 29th. But, looking through it, it seems to just include short pieces and to be skipping over a number of novels that were published during the same time period. (It also seems to include several stories that might not be, in the very strictest sense, Elric stories.) This one may warrant closer attention, to figure out just exactly what Moorcock is and isn't doing with this series.

Cory Doctorow is as well known -- if not more so -- for his positions on intellectual property and technology as he is for his fiction, so it's no surprise that his essays are being collected. Tachyon will publish Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future in September.

And last this week is a book I'm thrilled to see back in print, one of my favorite fantasy novels of all time: Tim Powers's The Stress of Her Regard. This is also from the great folks at Tachyon, and will be available in September. If you haven't read it yet, and you're not allergic to fantasy in which real historical figures appear (and do things that they probably didn't do in "real life"), you should track this great book down.