Witch Hat Atelier 13

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 13

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2025

 

 

In Witch Hat Atelier 13, the annual Silver Eye Festival is still besieged by a monstrous leech that appears like a circulatory system, lowering over the fairgrounds like a cage. But in the previous volume, master witch Qifrey was able to defeat the disgraced former magical ambassador who created the monster, and most of the festival-goers have been evacuated to a safe distance. There's still great danger, but some of the most urgent issues have been addressed.
 
Coco was injured by the leeches, so Qifrey has brought her to the royal Healing Tower to receive medical attention. Master Beldaruit, Qifrey's old teacher and one of the three highest ranked witches, is there too. He creates a portable illusion of Coco, looking like a tiny little fairy with her face, to fly alongside Qifrey as he searches the evacuated capital city for Custas, the injured boy who learned forbidden magic in order to save his father.
 
Of all the things you might do with magic that are forbidden by the Pact, healing is by far the most tempting to try and the most difficult to understand restriction. The witches who use forbidden magic have used that possibility to draw in Custas, and may be trying to appeal to Coco along the same line. (Though Coco and her friend Tartah have both realized this on their own anyway, and are actively questioning why healing is forbidden, and if they might be willing to break the Pact to try it.) 
 
The forbidden witches hope that once someone tries one form of forbidden magic, they'll readily throw out all the rules and try the others too (and the Knights Moralis, who enforce the Pact, fear the same), but I wonder if the slope is really so slippery.
 
The Knights Moralis routinely use the one form of magic that directly affects people's bodies that the Pact allows - magic to erase memories. This lets them keep the secrets the Pact requires. Non-witches who learn how magic works can be made to forget it; witches who use forbidden spells can forget how to cast them. I suppose these spells are only allowed when they're defending the Pact, that you can't just erase someone's memory for your personal benefit and have it be okay, but there's an obvious contradiction here. Memory erasure is a much worse thing to do to somebody than healing them, and it does affect their body, so that the usual objection to healing sounds silly in this context.
 
That contradiction comes to a crisis point in this volume, because when Qifrey finds Custas, he's used more counterclock tattoos to save dozens of people from the poorest neighborhood from their injuries. Draw a counterclock spell on a shattered water jug, and its existence will rewind to a time before it broke, giving you a chance to pour the water into another container, or set down a cloth to catch the fragments, before it catches up to itself and shatters again, exactly as before. Draw it on an injured person and their body AND MIND will return to an earlier time before they were hurt. Custas saved his dying father and has kept him in a kind of half-life for weeks by drawing and redrawing the tattoo each day. For his father, it is perpetually the day before he died - he has no memory of being hurt, or anything else that's happened since then. He doesn't know and can't understand that his son is using forbidden magic.
 
While this is happening, the royal prince meets Riceh's timid older brother. (This is our first time meeting him too.) We learn that he was physically abused by a cruel teacher, who also tried to crush Riceh's creative spirit, which is why she reacts so badly against any compulsory or rote parts of her education. Shirahama has shown us over and over how bad teachers can basically destroy the students trusted to them. With the brother's help, the prince finds Riceh, Tetia, and Agott, and they use Tetia's sand-tents to provide temporary shelter to all the evacuees. We also briefly meet Agott's mother, who is pleased to see her daughter looking happy to be helping people in need.

The Blacktongue Thief

 
 
The Blacktongue Thief

by Christopher Buehlman
Tor
2021 
 
 
The Blacktongue Thief is an inventive, humorous, and very dark fantasy by Christopher Buehlman. It's the first book in a series (although the next entry is a prequel set a decade earlier), which becomes clear somewhere in the long middle section of cross-continental travel, when you realize that there isn't enough time left for the cast to complete their 'there and back again' in this book, and will probably only make it 'there'. The mission is to go into a land ruled by giants and ... well, there's some disagreement about what to do there.
 
Thief is set in a fantasy Europe that hues fairly closely to reality (and stereotype). Spain on the Iberian peninsula becomes Ispanthia, home to the Spanth, known for their fiery tempers and love of horses. Gaelic Ireland becomes Galt, a conquered region of English-analog Holt, home to people with literal black tongues who are known for being short, musical, and good at thieving and lying. The biggest difference from reality (aside from Manreach being a mirror image of Europe's geography) is an alt-historical element that's a classic of science fiction: most of the adult men died in a catastrophic war against the goblins, leaving women as the numerical majority and as the elites across the now matriarchal human civilization.
 
There were three human-goblin wars in the recent past. Humans won the Knight's War with the help of our war horses. Then goblins created a plague called the Stumbles that killed all the stallions and most of the mares and invaded again. Goblins won the Thresher's War, so-called because so many men were conscripted even the farmhands had to go fight. This was the route that wiped out a generation of men. Most recent was the Daughter's War (the subject of the prequel I mentioned) where humans trained and fielded an army of women, supported by magical, horse-sized war corvids, driving the goblins off the mainland and back to their island. 
 
You can see how Buehlman has taken some of the real world consequences of the Black Death, the invasions by Attila the Hun, intra-European fighting like the Thirty Years War, and more recent memories of women adopting new roles during WWII, and transformed them into elements of fantasy. His alt-historical worldbuilding is pretty impressive, and I hope to see more of his medieval women's world later on. As we travel the continent, we encounter everyday words in a half-dozen invented languages, verses of poems and songs, and see a number of ways women have taken charge. I would say Buehlman is relatively pessimistic - we mostly see women stepping into men's old jobs and titles and continuing them, rather than the roles themselves changing much.
 
Blacktongue Thief is narrated in the first person by Kinch, a low-ranking member of the Thieves' Guild, a continent-spanning mafia that seems stronger than most of the formal governments. He's a Galt, and thus the titular character. Kinch has a good voice; he's funny, profane, and basically good natured, he gives everyone nicknames, and Buehlman gets a lot of use of his many invented swears that all mean variations on "pussy" and "shit", and he mostly manages to make them seem humorous without just sounding silly. Kinch owes crippling student loan debts to the guild for training him (yes really), which is how he gets conscripted to go on a mission to travel to the mountains at the western edge of Manreach, where giants have recently started invading human lands, and to aid the guild in its goals once he gets there.
 
Kinch is assigned to accompany Galva, a Spanth corvid knight, who has her own reasons for going to the giant lands. She wants to rescue a princess and return her to the throne of Ispantha. Galva is brave, noble, serious, a demon on the battlefield, basically everything Kinch, the lovable loser, is not. The downside of having him as a narrator is that we don't get access to the interiority of any other character. You very quickly begin to suspect that the guild wants Kinch to sabotage Galva. Kinch suspects it too, and that they'll kill him and his family back home if he betrays the guild by not betraying Galva, but he might be willing to take the risk...
 
The pair get up to a fair number of other adventures along the way to the far west, despite the urgency of their goal. I found the book most engaging as they prepared to leave and once they arrived. The middle half of this 400 pager are taken up by the journey, and I wish that part had been shorter or more engaging, because it seemed to lack the energy and purpose of the first and last hundred pages. There's a hunt for a minotaur, a voyage at sea, a shipwreck, two separate encounters with goblins, a (cringe) comedy of errors when Kinch realizes they're being followed by an assassin from the Guild but can't tell anyone she's there... It's a lot. 
 
An early standout is a visit to the inverted tower of the witch Deadlegs, which also gives us the witch's apprentice Norrigal as a traveling companion. Kinch is instantly smitten with her, and watching their tentative romance shows us one place where women's equality has truly changed things. There's kind of a lot of magic in the book, especially magical tattoos, but some of Buehlman's best writing is when the magic is at its strongest and most mysterious.
 
This is definitely a fantasy world that's compatible with Dungeons & Dragons. Thieves have named levels within the guild. Adventuring types have clear roles and are basically fantasy superheroes. Magic is abundant, and even though we're told most of it is 'weak', it enables all sorts of cinematic combat and action. There are goblins and giants. Religion is polytheistic and the gods are interventionists, though mostly in minor ways. Kinch is aware of his 'luck' and knows if he's likely to succeed or fail at whatever he does next. This felt like he could see a pre-rolled dice at all times, and was probably the D&D-ism I liked least.
 
Overall though, there's a lot to like here, and I will probably try to continue the series.

Seek You

 
Seek You

A Journey through American Loneliness

by Kristen Radtke
Pantheon

2021 
 

 

Seek You is graphic nonfiction about loneliness. Kristen Radtke says she was inspired by the widespread social isolation of the coronavirus pandemic. Isolation isn't quite the same as loneliness - it's possible to enjoy a certain amount of time alone, and possible to be in the presence of others and still experience loneliness due to a lack of connection. What Radtke has produced is partly a personal essay where she looks back on the times in her own life when she's felt loneliest, partly an intellectual history of the idea of loneliness, and partly a tour through a few ways people have responded to being alone.
 
Radtke's tour includes the invention of the laugh track, Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, the visual artist Yayoi Kusama, the rise of 'cuddle parties', and Casey Kasem's long distance dedications, among other topics. She talks about American gun culture, the way distrust of other people encourages gun ownership ... which then fuels more distrust, and the way mass shooters are invariably described as 'loners'. Cars are also isolating, especially compared to public transit, something Radtke feels viscerally when she moves from New York to Las Vegas.
 
At two different points in the book, Radtke talks about the research of psychologist Harry Harlowe, who is best known for his study showing that orphaned baby monkeys prefer a 'soft mother' made of cloth, who provides only comfort and nothing else, over a 'wire mother' made of metal but equipped with a milk bottle nipple. Many of Harlowe's experiments seem like animal torture, and he seems to me to have continued long past the point of learning anything new. These parts of the book were genuinely upsetting to read. Harlowe himself appears to have been a very lonely person. Radtke says that one benefit of Harlowe's research was to overturn the prevailing parenting advice at the time, which amounted to physical neglect in the name of preventing the spread of infectious diseases.
 
Two of the book's strongest sections are when Radtke talks about her father's teenage hobby as an amateur radio operator, and his late-night CQ searches for other operators, and later, when she talks about her own teen years on the early internet, maintaining a personal website and talking to strangers in chatrooms. Despite increasing concern about loneliness, it's not actually clear if more people are lonely now than in the past, or if it is simply more part of the public conversation. The similarity of Radtke's and her father's two activities serves as a kind of embedded metaphor for the universality of the human search for connection with others.
 
If Seek You has a throughline though, it's a growing pessimism about how people are harmed by loneliness and isolation, and how that harm becomes self-reinforcing as those people then find it harder to reconnect with others afterward. One of the findings of Harlowe's monkey research was that monkeys who had endured long isolation found it increasingly difficult to interact with others; they became stressed and overwhelmed by time spent with others, even to the point of self-harm. Beyond a certain length of isolation, they basically cannot rejoin the group; beyond another threshold, the other monkeys simply kill them.
 
Among humans, Radtke notes that lonely people often fear rejection more than they fear remaining isolated. This fear becomes self-fulfilling and self-defeating, as it taints every interaction with anxiety, making them awkward and uncomfortable, and can lead to people preemptively avoiding or rejecting others before they can be rejected. Loneliness is contagious with social networks - knowing a lonely person makes you feel lonelier yourself. And because lonely people withdraw from public and create solo spaces for themselves, they reduce the pool of potential people for others to meet or interact with and the shared space where such chance encounters might occur.
 
Seek You predates the much-discussed 'male loneliness crisis', and reading it, I thought about how people sometimes talk about men's very special and important pain as though women never feel lonely. The book also predates the rise of ChatGPT and Claude, although I suspect that Radtke must've felt more resigned than surprised when we started seeing news that lonely people were using chatbots as substitutes for human friends, that some people were even falling in love with chatbots, and that some people were developing 'AI psychosis' as their too-long chats overrode the sense of shared reality that comes from interacting with other people. It's easy to see links between Radtke's observations about the difficulty of connecting with others in "Seek You" with Alison Pugh's findings about the importance of it in The Last Human Job. 

The Spire

 
 
The Spire
by Simon Spurrier

art by Jeff Stokely

Boom! Comics

2016 
 
 
The Spire collects an 8 issue comic book miniseries written by Simon Spurrier and drawn by Jeff Stokely. It tells a neo-noir mystery, complete with a hardboiled investigator protagonist, set in a New Weird fantasy city. 
 
The namesake city of the comic, the Spire itself, is a towering cone of adjoining buildings, all in the same shade, like a sandcastle or a wasps' nest. It sits in a wasteland, called the 'Nothingland', and the outside air is poisonous to normal humans. The city's residents are a mix of humans and beings who are politely called 'Sculpted' but usually called by the slur 'Skew'. Their name seems to me to imply that the first sculpted were created from humans by genetic modification, probably to survive the outdoor pollution, and possibly to perform specialized work, during the 'antiki-times' where all the best tech comes from. 
 
There are various tribes of sculpted who all share the same traits, like the messengers - tiny bald men with the proportions of infants who fly on miniature wings and are propelled forward by farting. Humans resent the sculpted for taking up space in the Spire (when they could live outside), exploit them economically (giving certain low-paid jobs to the sculpted, and demanding annual tithes from the wasteland tribes), and then resent that too (because "they're taking our jobs"). The city is a multiracial society with an official policy of strength through diversity, but it's also tense. Also living in the wasteland are a religious sect who preach death to all the sculpted, and who use antiki-tech environment suits and shelters to survive the toxic air.
 
The modern-ish city, the unique nature of the humanoid residents, and the attention to race and class inequality reminds me of China Mieville's city of Bas Lag from Perdido Street Station. (I think Mieville had some babbling little flying men too, now that I think of it.) Stokely makes everyone look vaguely grotesque in a way that matches the low tone of Spurrier's writing. The city is dirty, people piss themselves in fear, mock each other for smelling like shit, swear constantly. The upper city dwellers, who get the majority of the natural sunlight, are racists and snobs, the religious are zealots who preach genocide, the cops and military are reading to beat anyone who's insufficiently respectful, and they'll actually carry out a pogrom before the book's over. But the overall tone mostly varies between ironic detachment and darkly humorous. There are only a few moments when it seems we're encouraged to feel sincere emotion.
 
Our hard-bitten investigator is Sha, the captain of the city watch. Sha is a Medusi, a sculpted person with jellyfish characteristics, including thin tentacles she can use for climbing and catching criminals, the ability to heal from injuries (except the missing eye she wears a patch over), and the ability to reshape her skin, temporarily as a disguise or more permanently if required. Sha's an amnesiac who is estranged from her tribe and never ages. She's like one "snikt, bub" away from being a female Wolverine. Sha is foul-mouthed, an overly demanding boss to her put-upon subordinant, obnoxiously rude to ever other member of the city government, and , inadvisably, is sleeping with the younger daughter of the royal family (who can't really understand that her family won't allow her to make a lesbian relationship with a racialized commoner public or official).
 
The mystery here is a series of murders of servants close to the matriarch of the royal family that start right after her husband dies of a disease of old age. The older daughter will soon take the throne ... unless the murderer ultimately plans to kill a royal and not just their staff. Sha is determined to solve the case and protect the family, even as the incoming queen prepares to undo her father's progressive reforms, make peace with the zealots, and persecute the sculpted anew. The solution to the mystery is based in events from decades earlier, shown in cryptic flashbacks, when the matriarch was young, and in the specific details of several sculpted tribes' abilities.
 
One detail we learn near the end is something Sha forgot long ago because of her amnesia - she's transgender. As a Medusi, she could fully and permanently reshape herself to become female without any outside help. That forgotten transition turns out to explain a number of things about Sha, and to be an important piece of the puzzle to finally solve the mystery by unraveling the killer's motivation. You can file The Spire next to All About My Mother as stories where a closeted trans woman gets someone pregnant, then abandons them in order to finally come out and begin living as a woman herself. I can only imagine the level of dysphoria that becoming a father might trigger in someone who was previously resigned to life as a man, but the nature of both narratives are that we see the aftermath of that decision, rather than the pain that led up to it, and the possibility that the couple could've remained together is never really considered.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer

 
 
Michael Robartes and the Dancer
WB Yeats

Cuala Press

1921, reprinted 1998

 

 

Michael Robartes and the Dancer" is a collection of poems by WB Yeats. It was self-published in 1921 and many of the poems seem to me to be inspired by WWI. In the introduction, Yeats claims his main inspiration was the work he was doing translating a philosophy text.
 
The first few poems, including the title poems, which has the most obvious claim to philosophical inspiration, are written as dialogues between a man and woman. In one, they debate mind/body dualism and the way some men, including some philosophers, view women as all body, no mind. In another, a woman seems to describe at length an orgasm so good it reminded her of the creation of the world. Later, in a poem meant to be a prayer for his infant daughter during a particularly rough storm, Yeats wishes for her to be somewhat beautiful, but not so much that people only value her for her looks, and to be good at keeping her opinions to herself so she doesn't get in fights.
 
A couple of the poems are dated, either 1916 or 1919. In one, Yeats mentions several people he knew who died, I think during WWI but perhaps from other causes. Those dead friends' names then go on to show up in several more poems, as he continues to think about them.
 
The showpiece of this very slim volume us "The Second Coming", which was indeed the reason I sought this book out at all. If I found TS Eliot too obscure, and The Waste Land's commentary on WWI too opaque, "The Second Coming" offers no such difficulty. It is direct and explicit, and in a hundred years has lost none of its urgency. It is not, fortunately, trite or sentimental, but well-said in a way that's made it part of our common language to describe unsettled times. I've seen almost every line of this poem quoted, and so have you, and yet put together they remain a powerful description of a world falling apart.

The Third Reich of Dreams

 
 
The Third Reich of Dreams
The Nightmares of a Nation
by Charlotte Beradt
translated by Damion Searls

Princeton University Press

1966, reprinted 2025 
 
 

The Third Reich of Dreams is a work of social science by the German journalist Charlotte Beradt. Between 1933, when Hitler came to power, and 1939, when Beradt fled the country for refuge abroad, she collected over 300 accounts of people's dreams that seemed to be inspired by fears about the Nazi government. In this novella-length book, Beradt identifies about a dozen recurring themes and describes each along with examples and a bit of anaysis about the connection between the dreams and life under Nazi rule. Beradt wrote the accounts in code in the bindings of books, which she then mailed to friends overseas. She finally wrote her own book in 1966; it was recently republished by Princeton.
 
The first dream in the book is the one that led Beradt to start her project. A socialist factory-owner dreamt the Goebbels visited his factory. In the dream, the man knew that if he did not give Goebbels the Nazi salute that he would lose his factory, and if he did he would lose the respect of all his workers. He dreamt he spent an agonizing eternity raising his arm in salute, and as soon as he finished, his back broke from the effort. Most of the dreams are like this, they are dreams of submission and defeat. In one chapter near the end, Beradt discusses the handful of dreams from people who dreamt of defying the Nazis. All the rest are from people whose unconscious minds could imagine only terror, not resistence.
 
There were dreams of surveillance and snitching. People imagined being arrested for having private thoughts against Hitler that they never spoke aloud, they dreamt that ordinary household objects were listening to every word that was said and then speaking the most incriminating passages aloud in deafening voices. They dreamt of failed resistance, of writing a letter of complaint but, even in the dream being so afraid of punishment that they mailed a blank page, or of speaking out to denounce the Nazis, but choosing to speak in a made-up language so no one could understand them.
 
Some dreamt of new propaganda or new restrictions, new punishments for Jewish Germans. Beradt notes that many of these dreams seem prophetic, they anticipate real political events that happened later, years after they were dreamt. It is as though, Beradt claims, people subconsciously understood the direction the Nazis were taking the country in, and imagined likely signposts along the way. It is also as though living under the Nazi government was a waking nightmare, governed by a regime that operated on dream logic, that demanded and often received total obedience, so that people were afraid even to imagine themselves saying what they really thought. Some of the people Beradt spoke to had partial Jewish ancestry but dreamt that it defined them totally and led to them being treated exactly like other Jews, which was indeed what eventually happened.
 
The most shameful dreams are by those who imagined themselves knowing Hitler or some other Nazi official personally, who dreamt of wanting some form of praise or affection, of receiving it, and then in the dream of feeling inordinately proud after.
 
As a work of social science, this is a fascinating document precisely because it's so unusual. Beradt was a journalist rather than an academic, but this is not just a collection of interviews, and someone hoping for only the dreams, or a transcription of all of them, is going to be disappointed. Beradt quotes several dozen dreams in full, but these are examples. They show us the patterns she found, and they allow her to perform close-readings, looking for meaning. 
 
The strangeness of this as a study owes both to Beradt's status as an outsider to the academy and to the conditions of its production. Obviously Beradt has no strategy for sampling, beyond collecting whatever she can; her methodology is idiosyncratic, her theory minimal. But her subject was urgent and her data were collected under duress. It reminds me of mass observation, another early 20th century attempt to learn from directly from members of the public by compiling first-hand accounts of important events, a way of knowing that takes advantage of exigence, but is mostly overshadowed by more formalized academic approaches. There are good reasons to prefer rigor when it's possible, but I think there's also real value in projects like this, that manage to snatch something from the lion's mouth before it closes. 

Paintings of Portugal & Paintings of Italy

 
 
Paintings of Portugal

by Angela Pan

self-published
2024
 

 

Paintings of Italy
by Angela Pan
self-published

2024 

 
 
Paintings of Portugal and Paintings of Italy are a pair of self-published art books by Canadian artist Angela Pan. They're similar to Pan's earlier Paintings of Japan books that I read previously, though longer - the "Japan" books were about 40 pages each, while Portugal and Italy are about double that.
 
Paintings of Portugal collects city scenes from three trips Pan made to Portugal from 2021 to 2024. Italy covers two trips there from around the same time; it's mostly views of the city, but includes a few countryside landscapes from Tuscany and the Dolomite mountains. Pan paints using acrylic, and her paintings use a mix of bright colors and pastels. There's not a drop of black or brow or gray here - nothing is drab; everything is the color of candy.
 
The paintings are accompanied by a sort of travel diary describing where Pan went and what scenes she sought out. She's an intensely crepuscular painter - most of her scenes are captured in the 'golden hour' after sunrise or before sunset or the 'blue hour' before it's up or after it's down. In Portugal, she was usually able to find an elevated viewpoint to capture the cities from above; in Italy more of them are from ground level.
 
Pan has visibly grown as an artist since her earlier books, and I was most aware of the refinement of her technique in Portugal. That book also benefits from the relative novelty of its subjects. Lisbon and Porto and the like are simply much less scene in art than Venice and Rome and such. If I had one complaint, it's that I wish she'd say a bit more about the places she visits beyond naming the cities and describing the walks to and from her chosen viewpoints.