All Hail... King Juan III?
A reading and writing roundup for October 2023
When Try Not to Be Strange was published, in September 2022, a topical yet somewhat awkward news peg presented itself: the most recent king died, mere days before publication. (At that same time, two copies of the book inscribed to him were making their way across the Atlantic Ocean, never to arrive.)
The awkwardness stemmed from the fact that Javier Marias had much more going on in his life than the Kingdom of Redonda. And yet the question remained: Who was going to succeed him?
Well, now we know. After a year of conspicuous silence, the latest chapter in this gleefully absurd story is currently playing itself out in the Spanish-language press, and if the past 150 years are any indication, it’s far from over.
I’ll tell you all about the ascension of the latest Redondan monarch—perhaps the first true King Juan in the kingdom’s colourful history—below.
Books I Bought
You may recall that last month I somewhat sheepishly laid out the outsized pile of books I’d acquired in September. It was only when I got back home from Ontario that I looked at my desk and realized there was a whole other stack I’d forgotten to include. Whoops. But don’t worry: I’m sure we’ll see some of them in the next section of this newsletter soon.
Much of the above came from my trip to Kingston at the very beginning of October. When I travel (which really isn’t that often), I try to go to as many used bookstores as possible, and to buy something from each one of them. Berry & Peterson scratched that itch big time, providing the three titles on the bottom row—everything in the store was buy two, get the third free, a deal so intriguing you legally aren’t allowed to pass it up. And now I have a trio of mementos from a very nice trip out east.
Books I Read
Stuart Ross, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (2005) (re-read)
Patrick deWitt, The Librarianist (2023)
David A. Randall, Dukedom Large Enough (1969)
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Muriel Spark, The Comforters (1957)
Cole Nowicki, Right, Down + Circle (2023)
August Derleth, Thirty Years of Arkham House: 1939–1969 (1970)
Joyce Carol Oates, The Female of the Species (2005)
H. P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror (1929)
John McPhee, Tabula Rasa (2023)
Another very good month—but don’t let the quantity here fool you. Several of these guys are short, short, short.
I re-read Stuart Ross in my hotel room in Kingston in advance of our event at the writers’ festival. I read Cole Nowicki’s book about Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Right, Down + Circle—the latest entry from ECW’s Pop Classics, of which I am also a member—in a single evening, back home, on either end of a neighbour’s housewarming party. A few days later, the Arkham House bibliography showed up in the mail, and, without exactly meaning to, I read it end to end without getting up from my kitchen table.
With Hallowe’en on the horizon, my reading interests naturally drifted a little spooky—a genre in which I’m still trying to get even a basic handle. Loved Lovecraft, as one does. But the real discovery? Joyce fucking Carol Oates.
For as long as I can remember I’ve been intimidated by her ridiculous output and so didn’t know where to start; she’s also a noted Twitter weirdo (keyboards, feet). At some point, however, a thought occurred to me: Don’t I love prolific weirdos? If someone like William Vollmann gets the benefit of the doubt, then surely JCO should, too.
The Female of the Species is billed as a collection of stories of “mystery and suspense,” and it delivers on that hook in spades. Oates’s voice is so strange and compelling, modulating just enough story to story to suit her different characters, but always recognizable. These are tales of murderous wives, clueless stalkers, grotesque high-end boutiques, syringe-happy nurses, and other women driven to violence by nature and circumstance alike. I loved this collection—and may have ugly-cackled out loud more than once at particularly delicious turns of the plot. If anyone has other JCO recommendations, please drop them in the comments.
Stuff I’m Working On
SHORT STORY ADVENT CALENDAR
Most of my time this month was directed in the services of the 2023 Short Story Advent Calendar, which is pretty much how she goes at this time of year. I spent a weekend running a booth at the inaugural Harvest Book Fair, which was lots of fun, and worked to get copies onto the shelves of—as of this writing—32 indie bookstores across North America.
November is our real crunch month, so it’s only going to get busier from here. And then the fun starts in earnest on December 1.
TOP SHELVES
Still no links to share! Look at me, assuming video moves faster than print.
REDONDA
Readers of my most recent book, Try Not to Be Strange, will now be aware of the unique corner of literary history that is the Kingdom of Redonda—a loose, conflicting constellation of writers from various parts of the world who have claimed, at various times, to be the king of an uninhabited island in the Caribbean. And if you aren’t already onboard, well, there’s no time like the present. Because there is news. King news.
In September of last year, Javier Marias passed away. In addition to being one of Spain’s best-known novelists, he had also spent the previous quarter-century as King Xavier of Redonda, a title he inherited in 1997 and then promptly worked into my favourite novel of his, Dark Back of Time. Word of his death was surprising and upsetting. But it also led to speculation about who might succeed him on the throne.
Almost exactly a year later, we finally have an answer: the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vasquez, previously named to the court of King Xavier as the Duke of Ruins.
The story was broken, against Vasquez’s wishes, in a Spanish newspaper called ABC, which led Vasquez to write an opinion piece for El Pais clarifying the situation. (My fellow monoglots can read this piece in the TLS for a summary in English.)
In short: Vasquez met with Marias in Madrid in the spring of 2021, and during a winding, two-hour conversation, the idea of passing along the kingdom was proposed. Marias showed Vasquez a copy of a book by John Gawsworth, Redonda’s second and most infamous king, perhaps as a hint of the legacy he would be inheriting and thus sworn to carry on. That December, Vasquez received a copy of Marias’s final novel, Tomas Nevinson, inscribed to “Juan Gabriel V, who is on his way—if he wants to—to become my heir.”
(A self-indulgent pause here to note that both the TLS and El Pais singled out Try Not to Be Strange by name, and that Vasquez told me via email that he found the book particularly helpful in writing his piece.)
So where does Redonda go from here? As a lowly and unofficial court historian… I don’t know. In fact, it’s fair to say more questions have been raised than answered by this recent news. Why did Vasquez wait so long to acknowledge his new title? Who will join the ranks of his court? And what sort of monarch does he intend to be? Will another pyjama flag soon fly from Redonda’s peak? Or will it remain largely the kingdom of words that Marias preferred?
We wait.
A Few Final Letters of Recommendation
Woody Goss’s album High Loon! (2023)
WarGames (1983)
Campio Brewing’s Once in Oaxaca prickly pear horchata sour
I’m curious about the 30 Years of Arkham book — any stand-out moments of AH trivia?
I've only read JCO's We Were the Mulvaneys but it is EXCELLENT. I'm planning to leave Twitter soon, and not being able to read her tweets anymore is one of my biggest regrets.