Kirjahaku

Conclusion of the Fifth Novel of Somtow's galactic epic "Chronicles of the High Inquest" - and beginning of the Sixth novel in the series, "Stillness in Starlight/"

S.P. Somtow's novel The Stone Buddha's Tears was inspired by a real-life incident in 1991 in which the city of Bangkok, about to host an international conference, decided to throw up a corrugated iron fence around a slum in order to conceal it from the passing delegates. In this fantasy novel of innocence and hope, the lives of two boys from opposite ends of the social spectrum intersect because of the wall. The protagonist, a beggar known only as "Boy", meets a novice monk whose father, a corrupt politician, has sent him to a monastery in order to provide a picture-perfect photo-op for his election campaign. Between them the two boys concoct a team of street kids, tazi drivers and elephant herders in a wild plan to bring down the adult world's dark alliance between organized crime and politics. The Stone Buddha's Tears is a powerful story about friendship, class and society, and the power of children of speak the truth in a world in which adults have forgotten how.

Before "Harry Potter" there was "The Wizard's Apprentice" It's Hollywood, with shrimp-and-avocado pizza for those bored with the plain old Thai barbecued chicken kind. Aaron has just discovered that his crush on the pneumatic Penelope is requited and is hurrying to the Mall doing amazing, magical things on his skateboard when Zap chief-wizard Anaxagoras traps him in a time warp, explaining that Aaron really does do magic and should be his apprentice. Aaron is given a mirror that reveals his true feelings about what it reflects; he also learns a dragon-making spell and a magic way to unstop toilets. But dragons are the bad stuff-- the mean, hateful, insecure side of a wizard. Aaron's dragon, smog-fueled, expands to cover most of L.A.--until Aaron, having discovered that he doesn't really despise himself, lets it look in his mirror and the dragon dissipates. As Anaxagoras says, ecology is a subset of magic; and as the author says, the one true magic springs from the human heart. Lots of laughs and Hollywood outrageousness

Before "Harry Potter" there was "The Wizard's Apprentice" It's Hollywood, with shrimp-and-avocado pizza for those bored with the plain old Thai barbecued chicken kind. Aaron has just discovered that his crush on the pneumatic Penelope is requited and is hurrying to the Mall doing amazing, magical things on his skateboard when Zap chief-wizard Anaxagoras traps him in a time warp, explaining that Aaron really does do magic and should be his apprentice. Aaron is given a mirror that reveals his true feelings about what it reflects; he also learns a dragon-making spell and a magic way to unstop toilets. But dragons are the bad stuff-- the mean, hateful, insecure side of a wizard. Aaron's dragon, smog-fueled, expands to cover most of L.A.--until Aaron, having discovered that he doesn't really despise himself, lets it look in his mirror and the dragon dissipates. As Anaxagoras says, ecology is a subset of magic; and as the author says, the one true magic springs from the human heart. Lots of laughs and Hollywood outrageousness

An extraordinary tale of a collaboration between a composing prodigy and a Washington politician, the story of how a Thai schoolboy came to create the entire oeuvre of an American composer is fabulous in the true sense of the world ... a modern mythic journey. A true story ... yet one that beggars belief ... with cameo appearances by all sorts of members of the Washington "swamp" ... and the odd science fiction writer dropping in for a chat...."It's a story about the human need to want to break boundaries and exceed limitations. It's about dreams and aspirations, and in the end we need to ask questions about the very nature of art and about why we as humans need art in our lives."It is also the story of two people from vastly divergent cultures, two people who both, perhaps, felt alienated from the people and situations that surrounded them, and who came to share a strangely intimate bond."A never-before-told secret history, this memoir by the first Asian to be awarded the European Cultural Achievement Award is an eye-opener. ***"Once upon a time, almost half a century ago," this diary begins, "I was a college student in an elevator at an exclusive club in Washington, DC. The elevator was filled with important people - admirals and such - and I was trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, considering I was a long-haired Asian attired in quasi-hippie garb. As the elevator descended, they began discussing the Secretary of the Navy, one J. William Middendorf, the Second."One of the Very Impressive Persons said, "What do you think of Middendorf's music?"Another snickered, "Yeah, yeah, his so-called music.""I heard a rumor," said the first, "that it's all actually composed by some young oriental guy."***Thus begins the wild story of the bizarre collaboration between a powerful American politician and a long-haired 17-year-old Thai music student that produced seven symphonies, an opera, dozens of concertos, rhapsodies, ballets, and occasional pieces, and over a hundred marches in just over a decade. In a wryly ironic voice, S.P. Somtow, who composed and conducts opera under his given name Somtow Sucharitkul, spins a tale that is like a symphonic version of "Forrest Gump" - only it's true. This is a memoir with cameo appearances by the Queen of Holland, Isaac Asimov, the Grateful Dead, Oliver North, and the Governor of Bangkok. All-night orgies of playing C major scales, evenings of eating corned beef hash under a real Rembrandt in an ambassador's living room, taking notes on the Secretary of the Navy's humming while top brass waited for their marching orders, dashing off marches while wolfing down American sitcoms ... fifty years later, it's time now for this story to emerge.S.P. Somtow says of the autobiographical fragment: " It was the union of Mantovani with Schoenberg, and it should have been a marriage made in hell, but somehow, it came off."I started to write this book because I am afraid that one day someone will take the bones of this story and add to it a different kind of flesh. It could easily be made into a hatchet job, but that would be missing the whole point of it all."

After 33 years, S.P. Somtow is finally creating a fifth book in the Inquestor universe, the galaxy-spanning science fantasy series that Theodore Sturgeon called "the greatest magnitude of spectacle and color since Olaf Stapledon." The book is being released in a series of installments in pulp-sized magazine format. INQUESTOR TALES No. 2 contains the second episode of the novel, interesting notes on the Inquestral Highspeech, a bonus reprint of the original version of "The Dust", a story incorporated into the tetralogy but never reprinted in its magazine form, a lettercolumn, and other notes and mini-articles from S.P. Somtow as well as from many of the field's most interesting commentarians. This episode delves deeper into the world of the Temple of Aerat on a world called Urna, where young acolytes learn the sacred rituals of lovemaking, into the childhood of the bard Sajit and his doppling Tijas, and connects with the story of Lady Varuneh, the first Inquestor. This issue of Inquestor Tales prints for the first time an introduction to the series written by the great Theodore Sturgeon in 1985, shortly before he passed away.

two misfits lost in paradise ... a serial killer and a lonely boy S.P. Somtow's World Fantasy Award winning novella is set in a picturesque Thai village just after the Second World War. This classic reimagining of Thailand's most famous serial killer and his relationship with a fictional American boy was originally conceived as a film. Now, twenty years later, that conception is finally moving towards reality. As a bonus, the novella comes paired with the short story "Chui Chai," about a modern-day Frankenstein operating among the sex workers of Bangkok. It's one of S.P. Somtow's most acclaimed pieces of short fiction.

Author's note: For the last five years I have been working on this opera, Helena Citr nov . I cannot get the subject out of my mind. The true story of a Slovak Jew in Auschwitz who had a passionate and searing relationship with an SS-man has so many things to tell us today. It asks questions that make us question all that makes us human. Questions like: What is love, in the end? And, Can love possibly exist in a situation as extreme as Auschwitz?The lesson I have learned from this story is that in the end, the Holocaust was not only about telling someone they should starve, that they should be tortured, that they should be worked to death, that they should be gassed and cremated. It was really about telling someone, "You are not a person."If your life's work consists of telling people, day in, day out, "You are not a person," then in the end it will happen to you too. You, who steal humanity from your victims, must inevitably lose your own humanity.This then is a story about a woman who, though trapped in the darkest of possible hells, would not give up her personhood. It is the story of a man who should have given up his personhood, but instead found redemption in this woman's refusal, redemption in the very thing that he had been taught not to regard as a person.I was born a few years after the Second World War ended, in a place far from the events of this opera. But several times in my life I have had vivid dreams about Auschwitz. Since I saw an interview with Helena on a BBC documentary, she has haunted me.

"Stories within stories within stories And always, it took another story to explain the one that preceded it." That's the structure of Somtow's richly textured novel of supernatural sacrifice and redemption set during and just after the Civil War. After Abraham Lincoln's assassination, the British widow of the Reverend Grainger (whom she mistakenly believes to have died in the war) attends the New York viewing and there meets Walt Whitman. He has a tale to tell, which involves Civil War atrocities, dark magic and some vivid resurrections. And he's just the first of a series of storytellers (among them Marie Laveau, Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, a voodoo priestess, a one-eyed slave who can raise the dead and a young veteran of Andersonville) who gradually reveal the Rev. Grainger's secret life, and the secrets of undead immortality, to the hitherto sheltered young widow. Author of Vampire Junction and a werewolf novel, Moon Dance, Somtow here deploys zombies and a were-leopard in a story that makes good use of period detail and gory voodoo atmospherics. - Publisher's WeeklyWhat a rich and diverse tapestry is S. P. Somtow's Darker Angels, a dark novel of the Civil War that's told as a phantasmagorical series of stories within stories like concentric rings. There's really no way to do justice to its structure in this brief description, but it must be said that such a potentially intrusive device here causes no confusion and indeed takes nothing away from the desperately grim beauty of the words that make up each and every narration.From the strange beginning, in which the recently widowed Mrs. Paula Grainger meets Walt Whitman while clandestinely visiting the body of the just-slain Abraham Lincoln, to the whirling, wild, wonderful stories of the war later told by Whitman and his young friend, Zachary Brown, and then the stories told by those within the stories ... about the elderly voodoo prince, Old Joseph, who as a free slave raises black Union soldiers from the dead for one last skirmish, and the boy preacher who may have killed his own father, Jimmie Lee Cox, and Tyler Tyler, the young soldier with no arms, and bewitching Phoebe, the voodoo priestess who holds the power to transform herself into a black panther, and finally re(folding) back onto the Reverend Grainger--whose correspondents include Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, and the President himself, and who is not at all quite the way his wife thinks him to be.This is a novel of transformation, of being, of death, and of living the true life that only the grimness of death can bring. It's a novel less about the Civil War than about all wars, but it is quite specifically a Civil War novel, in which the richness of the themes runs like blood spilled between brothers and comrades, masters and slaves. This novel is grotesque, yet it makes such wise statements about the grotesqueness of war and slavery and religion that its own gruesomeness seems not only natural but necessary. Composer and film-maker S. P. Somtow weaves together so many disparate narrative voices yet produces a single cloth of intense beauty and rage, in which inhumanity vies with love as the fiercest of emotions. A novel such as Darker Angels cannot easily be described--it has to be experienced. It's a mystery to me that this great work of literature--yes, literature--will slip between the cracks because of its macabre subject matter. Perhaps too many critical voices need to stop paying attention to labels and focus instead on the heady work beneath this attractive cover. If you missed the first printing, by all means treat yourself to a special order--this trade paperback edition will fit easily on the shelf next to the Poe, Whitman, and Byron to which it so intriguingly refers. A true masterpiece of historical fiction, Darker Angels sings with a grim joy rarely achieved by novelists who dare touch subjects such as these.- Chi Weekly

Set against a brilliant panorama of European expansion into the West in the late 1800s, Moon Dance is the horrifying tale of the illegitimate son of the Count von Bachl-Wolfling, leader of a pack of Viennese werewolves, and of the boy's all-too-human governess, Speranza. The pack has decided to emigrate to America, in search of wild lands and unsuspicious human prey. But unbeknownst to them, the Dakota territory is already home to the Shungmanitu--a clan of the Lakota Sioux who become wolves by the light of the full moon.

Announced thirty years ago from the now-defunct Pulphouse Press, S.P. Somtow's theme collection of stories about Fathers and Sons has been "about to come out" ever since. Diplodocus Press now brings the collection into print just as it would have been in the 1990s, an interesting snapshot of Somtow's career up to that moment. There are four stories in this mini-collection, with far-flung settings. "Kingdoms in the Sky," about a mafia don taking his son to Peru to participate in an ancient and terrifying ceremony; "Fire from the Wine-Dark Sea," in which a tormented poet with twin sons meets Odysseus on the shore of Cape Cod; "The Bad News Express" about a boy who plays baseball with Death on a train from Greece, and "Darker Angels," the multiple award-nominated tale which became the center of an acclaimed historical novel. A "sampler" of Somtow's dark fantasy,

A pictorial history of Opera Siam's first 18 years - pictures and notes about all sixty productions.

After 33 years, S.P. Somtow is finally creating a fifth book in the Inquestor universe, the galaxy-spanning science fantasy series that Theodore Sturgeon called "the greatest magnitude of spectacle and color since Olaf Stapledon." The book is being released in a series of installments in pulp-sized magazine format. INQUESTOR TALES No. 4 contains the fourth episode of the novel, bonus reprints of the original version of "The Thirteenth Utopia" and "The Web Dancer", stories incorporated into the tetralogy but never reprinted in their magazine form, a lettercolumn, and other notes and mini-articles from S.P. Somtow as well as from an interview with Czech journalist Tomas Bazika. In this episode, the Finding Bird pursues Tijas and Sajit - but who is fated to become the childsoldier, and who will survive on earth? Meanwhile, two civilizations struggle to coexist on one planet by a tragic bureaucratic blunder.