>>Nostalgia For Infinity

Del.icio.us links for August 21st through August 28th:

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Del.icio.us links for August 8th through August 21st:

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Del.icio.us links for July 4th through July 10th:

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Del.icio.us links for January 31st through February 3rd:

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Del.icio.us links – a late and enormous update, this - for December 7th through December 14th:

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The Arcade of Cruelty, by Joseph "J.P." Larkin

I’ve reviewed a fair mix of self-published books in my time. They included a few gems but quite often they were frankly fucking awful genre novels, written by people who evidently didn’t read widely. As such I stopped accepting them for review. For some reason, in 2008, I accepted for review The Arcade of Cruelty, a book which sounded like an oddball collection of self-hating diatribes and darkly humorous artwork. About three months later, after I’d all but forgotten about it, a copy arrived in the post – sent from the US via the cheapest international tariff available, a very sensible move as it’s a huge, weighty book.

Since then it’s sat on my shelves as I’ve not really known what to do with it. I’ll be frank: it’s more of a vanity project than any of those terrible SF books I’ve read have been, even the ones that middle-aged men had been dreaming up since their university days (oh, I loved those press releases, let me tell you). You see, it’s more like a scrapbook than anything else, albeit one that’s 250 glossy, high-quality and colour printed pages. It’s also sub-titled “A Tender Cry For Help in Words and Pictures”. There’s a lot of self-deprecatory humour in this book, although most of the time it’s much more generous with the self-loathing than it is with the funnies.

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