2026 read #36: The Travels of Marco Polo by Rustichello da Pisa and Marco Polo.*

The Travels of Marco Polo: A Modern Translation by Rustichello da Pisa and Marco Polo*

Translated by Teresa Waugh from the Italian translation by Maria Bellonci

Photographs by Sergio Strizzi

207 pages

Published ca. 1300 (English translation published 1984)

Read from July 1 to July 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I call this a reread even though I never read this specific translation, which seems like a fair way to handle classics in translation. Whatever version I read as a kid was probably some standard midcentury edition. This one is a typically 1980s tie-in edition for an Italian docu-drama film, with color plates from the film’s production and extensive medieval and early modern illustrations, but no modern map, no glossary, and no endnotes. Context was not yet a priority, I guess.

I found this edition in the library a few months back, and was struck by two thoughts: I miss when nonfiction books were lavish, illustrated affairs, and also I want to read more weird old books wavering on the line between folklore and nonfiction to get more ideas for Sword & Sorcery stories. So that’s what we’re doing here.

Unfortunately for my purposes, Travels is more of a medieval gazetteer than an adventure story. It’s fascinating in historical context: what mattered more to their sensibilities was the information attributed to distant places rather than one person’s narrative of adventure (even if said information was extensively massaged and augmented to suit European expectations by romance writer Rustichello). When they get to itemizing every single province of Cathay, with the same three rudimentary bits of information, it becomes particularly tedious.

The most disturbing thing about reading this mix of just-so stories and Islamophobic screeds is the realization that, over 700 years later, a substantial number of my compatriots still literally believe in this “wicked Saracen” shit. It’s a lot like understanding that modern antisemitism is rooted in medieval economic politics. People are just that gullible, eager to believe made-up bullshit from the men in charge, whether those men be kings who owe money or trillionaire failsons who have an apartheid axe to grind. (The medieval sexism and colorism is just as awful.)

The gazetteer format makes it all the more jarring when a stray biographical detail — “Marco Polo was totally made a baron of this city, and the elder brothers Polo totally helped the Khan take this other city” — appear without any context. It’s pretty funny, in a way.

There are nuggets of potential world-building material here and there, like the rolling porcupines of Ishkasham, the palace of gilded reeds (bamboo?) at Xanadu, the lodging-houses for travelers of every nationality (including Lombards and Germans) at Khan-balik, mounted couriers and their post-houses, unmounted couriers with belts of bells, magic anti-beheading stones in Japan, and so on. How accurate any of it might be as anthropology is, of course, debatable. But we’re here to find inspiration for Sword & Sorcery, not history.

I want to reiterate my frustration with this particular edition: no effort was made to link the names Polo reported to any kind of historic location. I had to search online every time I wanted to know what, say, Kinsai relates to on the map of today. It would’ve been so easy to add a glossary, or even some footnotes.

2026 read #35: The Dead Hours of Night by Lisa Tuttle.

The Dead Hours of Night: Stories by Lisa Tuttle

Introduction by Lisa Kröger

233 pages

Published 2021

Read from July 1 to July 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I’m still trying to read short stories (whether in anthology, collection, or magazine form) at least every fifth book this year. Which really puts into relief how slow my reading pace has gotten of late. What do you mean the last short stories I read were back in May? What do you mean this is only the fifth book I’ve read in two months?

Anyway, I picked up Dead Hours pretty much randomly at the library way back in May (or was it April?). I’ve read just two of Tuttle’s stories before this: “Jamie’s Grave” (read and reviewed here) and “Where the Stones Grow” (read and reviewed here), the latter of which appears again in this volume. Still, the titles and range of publication dates in this collection seemed interesting enough.

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“Objects in Dreams May Be Closer than They Appear” (2011). A weirdly old-fashioned story for its publication date. In its structure and rhythms, it brings to mind 1930s or ’40s short horror, despite its plot hinging on Google Street View and sat-nav. “Weirdly idyllic house that no one can find” feels like a plot straight out of that era, as well, as is the denouement. Still, it wasn’t a bad story.

“Closet Dreams” (2007). I remember reading stories from the 1980s horror boom and feeling scornful of “exploitative” pieces, stories from comfortable white male writers who used crimes against children for shock value. In the decades since, horror has become the genre for the oppressed and traumatized. This rumination on sexual violence and PTSD is thoughtful and feels far from exploitative.

“Born Dead” (2013). A stab at literalizing grief, but it’s too prim and managerial class for me, and I felt the ending didn’t land.

“Replacements” (1992). Obviously not every piece of feminist writing is going to be queer or inclusive — hell, this publication date puts it firmly in Second Gen territory — but this story is much too heterosexual and gender essentialist for my taste. Tuttle’s upper middle class professional milieu continues to alienate me, as well.

“A Birthday” (1993). Moderately enjoyable tale of a middle-aged woman’s “change of life.”

“My Pathology” (1998). A chilling examination of how men use women as objects of convenience, which sees an alchemist isolating and manipulating the narrator into growing and birthing the Philosopher’s Stone. Quite good.

“Food Man” (1994). Based on this collection so far, Tuttle’s bread and butter (pun intended) appears to be literalizing a social issue generally associated with women or girls, and seeing where it leads. This time the issue at hand is anorexia. I’m not sure that “a teen accidentally cures her anorexia by fucking a man made of the rotting food under her bed” is, perhaps, the most sensitive path Tuttle might have taken. All the same, I do think it holds up as a story, especially when contrasted against contemporary horror fiction. It certainly isn’t the most awkward social allegory I’ve read from the Nineties. Possibly my favorite entry here so far.

“Mr. Elphinstone’s Hands” (1990). In a change of pace, we switch from contemporary-set pieces to a tale of Spiritualism and PTSD in nineteenth century New England. It’s a fascinating allegory that uses ectoplasm as a proxy for revolting, nonconsensual male touch, and explores the lack of support from fellow women in a patriarchal society. It’s a bit long, but effective.

“The Dream Detective” (2013). Aside from some mild amusement at the noirish touches, this tale was an upper middle class shrug for me.

“Where the Stones Grow” (1980). I read and reviewed this one in Circles of Stone. There, I called it “ Well-written but just a tiny bit silly, as 1980s horror frequently was.”

“Vegetable Love” (2017). Another tale of vague heterosexual dissatisfaction leads to our protagonist turning into Japanese knotweed. More or less.

“The Book That Finds You” (2015). Finishing on a slightly livelier note, this is a rambling tale of books and fixations and the reputations of our literary heroes. It meanders without much emotional impact, but it was a fine enough read.

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And that’s it! That’ll teach me to take a chance on a full collection from a writer I barely know. (I kid, I kid.) I didn’t dislike anything here, but so much of it puttered along in one gear and didn’t build to anything.

2026 read #34: Three Miles Down by Harry Turtledove.

Three Miles Down by Harry Turtledove

275 pages

Published 2022

Read from June 26 to July 1

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Let’s just get this fact out of the way: this is literally just Sphere. Because it’s Turtledove, it’s played as alternate history, packed with every 1970s cliche you can think of, from bellbottoms to boiling-over radiators to Richard Nixon, but it’s still just Sphere.

Jerry Stieglitz is a young longhair academic who occasionally sidelines in sci-fi stories (which is such an old-school self-insert trope that I haven’t seen it done so nakedly in a long time). He gets hired by some shady feds to lend scientific cover to their search for a lost Soviet sub in the Pacific. Naturally, the Soviet sub recovery is a cover story for an attempt to haul an alien spacecraft from the seabed. It’s Sphere.

Well, okay, I guess Down doesn’t involve deep sea habitats or reality-warping constructs. It’s more interested in progressive Jerry’s crisis of conscience than it is in gee-whiz sci-fi. And Turtledove’s politics center on wry cracks about “at least we defeated fascism and don’t have to face it again” and “American politics can only be better fifty years from now,” rather than Crichton’s “only a straight white man is above identity politics and can keep a cool head on his shoulders in a crisis.” Which makes it a lot less cringy to read than Sphere.

More than anything, the book feels like an excuse for Turtledove to indulge his nostalgia with an authorial alter ego and ramble through every stray bit of ’70s lore he could recall. His characters stop and make pop culture references nearly every page. Whenever the plot threatens to start moving, we get wisecracks instead. It gums up the pace, just not enough to aggravate me, mostly. Overall, Down is both inoffensive and inessential, a self-indulgent adventure that’s worth a read if you’re into that sort of thing.

2026 read #33: Between Two Rivers by Moudhy Al-Rashid.

Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid

262 pages

Published 2025

Read from June 15 to June 26

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

After being stuck for over a month reading my last book, I wanted to kickstart my reading again with a lightweight nonfiction piece. This book promised to be just that, a breezy look at Mesopotamian history told from the lens of artifacts associated with the supposed “museum” of Ennigaldi-Nanni in Ur. It aspires to be a history of how ancient people thought about history, but does it really do more than gesture in that direction?

Between Two Rivers is the platonic ideal of a 2020s nonfiction book: large type, cheaply printed, no illustrations, written by a specialist academic for, shall we say, a non-specialist audience. As so many contemporary writers do, Al-Rashid simplifies topics to the point of condescension. She repeatedly describes personal cylinder seals as ancient “Instagram bios” (as if making the comparison once wasn’t enough). She contextualizes pottery as “the Tupperware, [and] Amazon packaging… of the ancient world,” as if even a 2020s reader doesn’t know what pottery is.

It’s a shame, because the range of topics here is fascinating. Al-Rashid’s academic specialty is the history of ancient science; I would much rather have read a tome dedicated exclusively to that than baby’s first introduction to Mesopotamia. But that’s not what sells, apparently, so that isn’t what gets published, at least not in the sort of mainstream history you’re likely to find in a small library system.

But does Rivers manage to be something of a history of history? Well… maybe a little bit, in the opening and closing chapters. For the most part, though, Al-Rashid just goes through the usual pop history motions, and Rivers suffers as a result. It’s no Weavers, Scribes, and Kings.

2026 read #32: She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore.

She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore
297 pages
Published 2018
Read from May 13 to June 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

This is the 1000th book I’ve read and reviewed on this blog. It’s taken thirteen and a half years to get here. Along the way, while I’ve reread books from my past, I haven’t read a single book twice. That’s a thousand different reads, good and bad, classic and contemporary, spanning centuries of literature and countless different versions of me. We’ve gone from the ineffectual center-right liberalism of Obama, when my kid was a toddler and groceries cost half what they do now, to the current spiral of fascism and ecological collapse and corporate inflation, with my kid now almost an adult. I’ve gone through a thousand iterations of self, as well—the person I was when I began is as far distant as my kid’s toddlerdom.

I first tried to read She Would Be King back in March 2019. After a promising start that year, my reading habits deteriorated quickly; this was one of several books I began with enthusiasm that spring, only for my attention span to atrophy. According to my ancient iPhone, I only read 14% of the file before lapsing. But this review of it has been stuck in my drafts for over seven years now. That was half the duration of this blog ago. This seems like an opportune time to blow the dust off King and try again.

It is an ambitious first novel, capital-L literature, dense and weighty. At her best, Moore refuses to sanitize or look away from horrors and griefs no words will ever fully encompass. Yet beauty mingles with the cruelty like blood and water.

The opening sections of the book function like novelettes introducing us to each of the three central characters. The stories are compelling, compressing generations of trauma into taut, moving narratives. It’s when the characters and their stories converge that King wobbles. Our three protagonists meet for approximately five minutes before plot contrivance forces them apart again. The structure of Moore’s examination of Liberian history requires them to part in order to witness different aspects of it, so off they must go to see it. But they keep thinking about each other, because the plot requires that too.

The second half of King occasionally still burns with vengeance, strives against the weight of trauma, and examines the injustices of colonialism, but the immediacy and intensity of its opening chapters gets lost in the business of nation-building. Liberia’s founding is especially nuanced, a colonialist adventure that opened a path forward for oppressed populations while also creating new conditions of oppression for displaced locals. Once her characters are placed where they need to be, Moore gestures toward some of this complexity and uneasiness, but none of it matches the powerful storytelling of the first half.

2026 read #31: Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey.

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

176 pages

Published 2020

Read from May 11 to May 13

Rating: 3 out of 5

It was the summer of lockdown. My local library had just reopened on a “reserve books and pick them up” basis. As with so many other folks, I had taken the preceding months to reflect upon and reevaluate myself. The queerness that had always lurked in the background of my self-understanding wanted to take a form. For the first time, I wanted to make a conscious effort to seek out queer fiction. Fortunately for me, the last few years had seen a change in publishing norms; queer genre fic was in the mainstream like never before.

Upright Women Wanted was in the first batch of books I requested that lockdown summer. Like every other book I tried to read, it glanced off my anxious, preoccupied brain. I don’t think I finished a full chapter before abandoning it with the rest. I didn’t even get far enough to realize it’s set in a post-collapse future of patriarchal assholes and climate change rather than a Weird West alternate history. (I wonder why I read only six books that year.)

Here we are now, bounds and bounds closer to the dusty patriarchal dystopia Gailey portrays, with its state-controlled media and furtive queerness surviving in its margins. Women feels uncomfortably relevant in ways the last few years have only exacerbated; its message of “No matter what, be yourself and don’t let the patriarchs control your fate” is urgently needed.

As a story, Women could have used some space to breathe. The characters don’t develop much beyond archetypes, which makes big twists feel perfunctory, reading more like an outline than a novel. Rushing as we do from one scene to the next, the world doesn’t get much of a chance to shine, either. Gailey gives us some of the texture and odor of her future West, but I would have liked a lot more.

2026 read #30: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Summer 2024 issue.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Summer 2024 issue (1:3)

Edited by Oliver Brackenbury

80 pages

Published 2024

Read from May 8 to May 11

Rating: 4 out of 5

Out of this first batch of issues, this is the one I’ve been most excited to read. Not only do we get a new, officially-approved-by-the-estate Jirel of Joiry story by Molly Tanzer, we also get Sword & Sorcery tales from Premee Mohamed and Thomas Ha, two of my favorite contemporary authors. There’s also an array of flash fiction that sounds intriguing.

Saša Ðurðević’s cover painting of Jirel, cape billowing across a stark white background, is instantly iconic, so much so that it’s used in NESS’s promotional materials to this day.

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“Beating Stars, Dying Hearts” by Matt John. Crisply paced and evocative Dying Earth-adjacent tale, full of weird creatures, towering ruins, and inventive details. A solid story and a fun start to this issue.

“The Betrayal of the Rhinoceros” by Premee Mohamed. A fortress under siege faces a new peril: huge fucking ants with human faces climbing its walls. I’m honestly shocked I’ve never read an S&S story with giant ants before (though I’ll admit I haven’t read many of the pre-1970 classics). Of course, this being Mohamed, there’s some emotional depth to it, as well as themes of climate disruption and the corruption of authority. Loved it.

“St. Fario’s Feast” by Thomas Ha. This story is everything you’d expect from Ha: a sumptuously fucked up fairy tale of rabbit men, otherworldly abominations, and dark rivers of cosmic magic. It successfully expands what Sword & Sorcery can be, while never losing that S&S flavor. Superb.

“Gravediggers of Carsonne” by John R. Fultz. Serviceable tale of would-be grave robbers running afoul of an undead wizard, and one agreeing to do an errand for him to earn back their lives.

“Something Oath-Like” by Oliver Brackenbury. Included as a fundraising reward, this piece from the editor is a bit busy and breathless, penned in the voice of someone who’s read a lot but hasn’t necessarily written much fiction on a professional level. A sample: “Her scream had barely begun when, satisfied, Enmed pulled on the iron rod in his one-cubit-deep closet of stone.” I’m not sure whether the effect is meant to be comedic or not.

We begin a section of flash fiction pieces with Samantha Rich’s “The War-God’s Hound.” I was curious to see how Sword & Sorcery would be handled in a flash format; Rich packs ample atmosphere and hints of a wider world in this brief piece. Well done.

“Sister Soldier” by R. L. Summerling is another flash piece, well-written and evocative.

“Of Cabbages and Stone” by Timaeus Bloom brings fairy tale energy to a yarn about an aged ex-sorcerer who has no time to entertain disrespect.

“Against the Witch-Prince of Emdal” by W. O. Balmer also packs in a lot of atmosphere, suggestive of a bigger story beyond the vignette.

“High Water” by James Estes is another solid flash piece, an enjoyable anecdote of an undead saint visiting a delightfully Venetian city. Felt somewhat Riverside-esque.

“The Ferry-Man’s Price” by Melissa Burlock is another expertly done flash piece, a Sword & Soul number that sprinkles in references to past events to expand the story far beyond its word count. My favorite flash here.

“Jirel and the Mirror of Truth” by Molly Tanzer. One last fiction piece, an all-new Jirel of Joiry tale officially approved by C. L. Moore’s estate. Tanzer evokes Moore’s prose and storytelling pace while producing something fresh, the story’s more updated touches cleverly integrated into the plot. Loved it!

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That brings us to the nonfiction section of this issue. We begin with Jay Wolf’s essay “The Untrammeled Wilds,” which is about disability and the possibilities (and pitfalls) Sword & Sorcery offers in its portrayal. It’s a really good essay.

Next, Bryn Hammond brings us a biographical essay on “Jessica Amanda Salmonson: Amazon,” editor of the classic Amazons anthology series. A fascinating subject, and another solid essay.

The obligatory transcript from editor Brackenbury’s podcast is “Cock & Bull: An Interview with Kirk A. Johnson.” It’s always interesting to see how contemporary S&S authors got into the genre, and the ideological background they bring to their own writing.

Lastly, Robin Marx brings us a “Review: Shared World by Jonathan Ball, GMB Chomichuk, James Gillespie, and Chadwick Ginther.” Marx’s review is solid, but I gotta say, the book itself doesn’t sound like one I’ll seek out.

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And that’s it for this issue! Overall, it felt like a mighty leap forward in story quality and editorial panache. My favorite NESS issue so far.