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K. Nichols, Washington, USA

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At Sea with Slocum

At Sea with Slocum

Books can be ill served by the company they keep. In my childhood home they were shelved in the only bookcase and consisted entirely of anthologies published as Reader’s Digest Condensed Books plus the several volumes of Churchill’s The Second World War. None was ever read or even consulted. They were just part of the furniture. Something as slight as Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone around the World was lost amongst them. ‘That was Dad’s favourite book,’ said my mother as we cleared the house after his death. I’d no idea he had a favourite book, and it was not till some years later that, hoping to understand him better, I began turning its pages.
SF magazine subscribers only
Against the Current

Against the Current

Wallace Stegner seems on the brink of being forgotten. Half a century ago he was acknowledged as a major figure in American letters; one of his novels won the Pulitzer Prize, and another the National Book Award. He was highly regarded, not just as a novelist, but also as a pioneering teacher of creative writing and as a mentor to a generation of younger writers. Yet when I asked around recently, not one of my bookish acquaintances recognized his name. I had never heard of him myself until a friend recommended him on a pandemic relieving country walk.
SF magazine subscribers only
Verse and Worse

Verse and Worse

If the name Baring-Gould seems vaguely familiar, perhaps you grew up as I did, exposed every Sunday to Hymns Ancient and Modern. The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924) wrote many of them, including such traditional favourites as ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and ‘Now the Day is Over’. He was a hagiographer and an extraordinarily prolific writer, credited with over 1,240 publications on various subjects. He also found the time to father fourteen children, one of whom emigrated to America where his grandson, William Baring-Gould, was born in Minnesota in 1913.
SF magazine subscribers only
Such Devoted Sisters

Such Devoted Sisters

I read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) one summer as a teenager. It’s a work of gothic horror, and a mystery novel. More specifically, it’s a strange, haunting story about a town that fears and is obsessed by two of its residents following the fatal poisoning of their family. I have always thought of it as a book about sisters, about Merricat and Constance, ‘two halves of the same person’. Endlessly self-absorbed, I spent my first reading thinking of my own sister. Our relationship was the most important and the most constant in my life, as we moved back and forth between the homes of our divorced parents. And so, of course, in the heat of the summer, with my sister my main source of company, I felt that this book had been written specifically for me.
SF magazine subscribers only
An Unusual Case

An Unusual Case

Richard Cobb’s memoir A Classical Education (1985) opens on a spring day in 1950. He is at St Lazare station in Paris awaiting the arrival of an old schoolfriend he’s not seen for fourteen years. Cobb has spent much of that time on the Continent, first as a soldier in the war and then as a historian researching various French archives. His friend, by contrast, has been shut away in a Dublin asylum for the entirety of those years, serving out his sentence for the murder of his mother.
U and I and Me

U and I and Me

I hadn’t read much John Updike when I picked up Nicholson Baker’s book on him during lockdown; but then neither had Baker when he wrote the book. This is one of the novelties of U and I. Where most non-fiction strives for mastery of its subject, this little book pursues that ‘very spottiness of coverage [that] is, along with the wildly untenable generalizations that spring from it, one of the most important features of the thinking we do about living writers’. The result is a funny, profound meditation on what writers actually mean to readers as opposed to what academics tell us they should mean.
SF magazine subscribers only
1st September 2023

Slightly Foxed Issue 79: From the Editors

New contributors to Slightly Foxed sometimes ask us which issue their piece is going to appear in and the truth is, we’re usually hard put to tell them in advance. One pleasure of SF is that we’re not bound by publication dates for new books, so we rarely plan a piece for a particular issue but instead welcome good contributions and select from what we have. We’ve always worked on the bran-tub principle that we’d like readers to dip in and find something unexpected that they wouldn’t normally have been looking for. But despite this, each issue does seem to come together with a particular atmosphere and character of its own.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors

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