The Angel Bird

My local skailine this morning that followed yesterday’s reading and reviewing HERE of THE MONK’S BIBLE by Harold Billings.

Skai: river (as in HPL), stream, torrent and, by assonance, sky.

“…and soon afterward he came to the great stone bridge across the Skai, into whose central pier the masons had sealed a living human sacrifice when they built it thirteen-hundred years before…” from ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ (a novella that I review here).

The Stream & The Torrent

THE STREAM & THE TORRENT
The Curious Case of Jan Torrentius and the Followers of the Rosy Cross: Vol.1
By Brian Howell

Photo by Zagava

Les Éditions de L’Oubli MMXIV

Previous ‘Les Éditions de L’Oubli’ in the modern age are shown here.

Previous reviews of all my purchased Zagava – Ex Occidente books are linked from here.

I shall report on my experience of this book in the comment stream below as and when I happen to read it.

It is a highly luxurious book, with 160 pages. “Limited to 86 numbered copies for sale, plus extra copies, which are reserved for private distribution.” Mine is numbered 25.

Today’s “found art” – and L’Oubli

I have long expounded on ‘the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’ (please google the expression) ever since it was used as the sub-title of the Prime Books ‘WEIRDMONGER: The Nemonicon’ in 2003.
In the last few days I have been real-time reviewing ‘LETTERS FROM OBLIVION’ by Andrew Condous: a history of Bucharest’s historic Les Editions de L’Oubli published in 2014 by Bucharest’s modern Les Editions de L’Oubli. Here in this real-time review I stumbled on a replacement for the now obsolete ‘shards’ expression above and this is ‘both sides of the truth’ which, admittedly, is not an original set of words on my part. But posing it as a dilemma between those two sides of the truth with regard to the art of fiction I think there may be some new food-for-thought – for those who think about such things at all!

The Magic of LEDLO

The modern day canon of the LES ÉDITIONS DE L’OUBLI to date:

Orphans on Granite Tides – Adam S. Cantwell

The Madman of Tosterglope – Louis Marvick

The Light is Alone – Thomas Phillips

Aornos by Avalon Brantley

The Emperor’s Pavement by John Howard

Cities and Thrones and Powers by John Howard

A Dead Monument To Once Ancient Hope

A Dead Church by Harold Billings

HISTORY OF ‘LES EDITIONS DE L’OUBLI’: Letters from Oblivion by Andrew Condous

.

Plus these three books that are also modern day LEDLOs from Bucharest:

CANAPÉS FOR THE DAUGHTER OF CHAOS by William Charlton

The Aesthete Hagiographer by Derek John

O Altítudo by Thomas STRØMSHOLT

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All the above links are to my real-time reviews.

Warm Monument

My new book has landed here:

It is gorgeous. More photos of it in the comments here: http://admtoah.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/orders/

CANAPÉS FOR THE DAUGHTER OF CHAOS

Description quoted from an on-line source:
“CANAPÉS FOR THE DAUGHTER OF CHAOS
by William Charlton
Publication Date: October 2012
ISBN: N/A
Sewn hardcover, limited to 100 hand numbered copies, 120 pp with illustrated end papers and a full-color frontispiece.”

“This edition is limited to one hundred numbered copies of which this is number:” 45

There appear to be 112 pages in the version I hold in my hand. There is also a deluxely stiff dust-jacket with an aubrey-beardsley style design on the front. The front of the hard-back cover beneath the dust-jacket shows the words: “E FINIBUS”. Nothing on the inner spine.

Les Éditions de l’Oubli, Bucharest, 1945

which, based on extramural evidence, I guess is another name for Ex Occidente Press or Passport Levant…

This highly aesthetic book measures 4 by 5.5 inches when closed.

This is my very first post-real-time review after recently announcing here my retirement from real-time reviewing after four ostensibly self- and autre-fulfilling years doing it.

Five stories – Benighted, The Elusive Real, The Music Festival, The Antistrophe, The Main Road – by an author whose work I don’t think I have previously encountered.

Delightfully traditional and sporadically supernatural fictions, with quirky almost gratuitous endings, but endings that stay with the reader defiantly, all stemming from an engaging and well-crafted prose style. The characters seemed as if I were meeting real people who happen to find themselves inside the quirky world of this book, amazed at finding themselves thus liberated from carnal existence but equally hidebound by the book’s accoutrements of de luxe paper and print. Inspired by one of the stories, I will say that reading this book was like stepping off the main road for ostensibly gratuitous reasons into whatever land bordered it but finding much with which to durably haunt myself as a result.

I’d say this is a belit as well as a benighted literary book in a new genre called  the Defiantly Quirky with touches of the feistily effete or feminine or the Realms of Traditional Supernatural Literature with Jokes as well as Serious Visions, or Tricks and Trips (in both senses of the word ‘trip’). Physically tangible with baths and things, at times, but not always felicitously physical! And a girl called Woody.

“And now for my kiss.”