protean depravity

Don't miss the grand season finale of Ugress livestream - this Thursday, December 17th, live 8pm CET on Youtube , Twitch or Facebook . What has Gisle prepared for us this time? I hear there will be some mad cybership experiments, battle houseplant duets and multiple vintage competition winner requests. The streaming starts as usual around 30 minutes before 7:30pm on Youtube just in case you want to hang around or chat, and the show starts at about 8:00pm. Thank Gisle for providing a little light in this dark winter 2020, see you there!

So having talked to Caro from Otherland this morning who is preparing the store's Christmas recommendations and bumping almost everywhere into the 'best of's and 'worst of's of this worst year of all, inspired me to make my own end of the year list with the books I liked best. At first I came up with a draft of runners-up; but then again, I thought I already know which books will win. Seeing no need to pretend that I have gone through an intense elimination process in an attempt to create suspense, I'll directly post both my 5 runners-up and the winners of this year without further ceremony. Let me just quickly note that some books are just a tiny little bit older than 2020 because I have left some room for books from my old TBR-list I carried into 2020 with me. Reason is that some great books I have recently read still should have a chance up here, even if they aren't necessarily buzzing new. Since this is a purely personal list I took that liberty but ho...

It is finally time for the shorties of my recent reads and here they are for you to enjoy!

Well played, Catherine Cavendish, very well played… You had me fooled throughout the bigger part of this book, had me thinking I had figured it out, rolling my eyes at the ostensible Victorian banality of it all... And then you speed up toward the end and come up with that bombshell in the last quarter that I can only applaud. The Garden of Bewitchment is an exquisitely crafted, wonderfully astonishing, plain fantastic book! Forget all you know about cozy Gothic fiction because Cavendish is here to push the boundaries of convention and rewrite it all in letters of dread!

With a discussion that stretched over two days, we had a rather unusual Otherland book club session last weekend on a rather unusual book - Stonefish by Scott R. Jones. And I'm using unusual in the best sense of the word! A Lovecraftian skeleton and existential body in gnostic clothes, as described by its author, this great debut centers on Den Secord, a journalist who is set on the mission of finding the eccentric tech guru Gregor Makarios. And that mission is a truly, distressingly, depressingly mind-bending experience which will turn all reality toroidal and poloidal . Stonefish is a very thought-provoking and profoundly interesting work which will grab, occupy and frighten your mind while playing with and yes, even reinventing traditional tropes and notions. It is a blast to discover new good books, new authors and when those authors turn out to be great people who are genuinely interested in their readers, the whole experience turns into double the fun. This is what happen...

It's Ugress time again! Don't forget to tune in on Thursday, November 12, at 8 pm; the warmup starts at around 7:30 pm. http://www.ugress.com/live/ or participate live with comments on Youtube , Facebook  or Twitch . I'm really excited about this upcoming show because listeners can determine the locations this time! How, you say? Just take a picture of your living room and send it to ugress@ugress.com , and let the show in your living room begin!

For my beautiful home city; geçmiş olsun İzmir'im! Thanks to several members of my family who worked in various theaters around the world scooping the contingencies of free tickets for family and friends, I have been lucky enough to have free access to watch as many theater plays as I want, whenever I happened to live or stay in the same city with them. As it is with everything that you do often from an early age on, watching lots of stage plays has left its mark on me - not only am I hopelessly enchanted by the performative side - stage, backstage, costumes, props, atmosphere -, I am also completely fascinated, on a pure textual, dramaturgical level, by the immediacy, as Oscar Wilde put it, this art form conveys. A text that needs to transmit whole universes in an hour or two, a text relying on the spoken word and gestural implications, without narration, needs to compulsorily rely on a stripped, archetypal presentation and a very precise, concentrated sense of aim. There is somet...

I’d read Frankenstein in AP English, so I knew you don’t just walk away from your creations. Not without consequences. 2020 is the year of Stephen Graham Jones! With two seriously grand novellas and an impressive full-sized novel within only a couple of months, he is hard to keep up with right now and is finally achieving the breakthrough he deserves in and outside the horror zone. His latest release that completes the literary Tour de Jones'20 (apart, I think, from his annual contribution to Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year ), Night of the Mannequins , is a small slasher story that holds in store quite a few surprises for the unsuspecting reader.

With his heartwarming and funny Death and Life of Schneider Wrack, Nate Crowley brought us the aquatic Zombie-Klassenkampf here to Berlin. Then, with the first post-truth book in history, he took us back to the good old days when we never had outrageous fun playing the 100 Best Video Games (That Never Existed) … And now he is taking us on a 100% corona-free voyage around science fictional and fantastic worlds in his latest book, a delightful travel guide - Notes from Small Planets ! Meet Floyd Watt: disgraced diplomat, journalist, television personality, a self-important, arrogant assh*le, who, in Crowley’s own words “thinks he’s an enlightened, progressive fellow who enriches the places he visits by his very presence”. He’s also the author of the extraordinary travel guide Notes from Small Planets . Extraordinary, because these destinations and hundreds of other planets have been accessible to us Earthlings only temporarily and this book is the sole witness of those glorious times....