Sailing against the tide
There’s a lot of doom in the Internet, especially among the alternative news crowd. People can’t get enough of the “end of the world/end of the West” type of thing. While I do understand that we are living in highly worrying times, with war expanding everywhere, economic downturn, birth rate collapse, mass migration, and radical…
If you’re into complicated hobbies, perhaps this video about “how to make a medieval book” will interest you. I thought it was nice; perhaps it might also interest the three or four readers of this website. The video has no voice-over narration, just a written commentary in the subtitles, and no music either, just the…
It has snowed for the first time just a few days ago and the city is still all covered in white. There is something magical about the first snow of the year. And even if, months later, you get absolutely tired of all that white and cold and yearn for spring and flowers and warmth,…
Just in time for Christmas, we have created a new version of Hans Andersen’s Story “The Snow Queen”. Yes, you read it right, it’s not “The Drag Queen”, to keep up with modern times, it’s the original “The Snow Queen”, Andersen’s immortal beloved classic. You can buy it now at a cheaper price in our…
We have published three new books by our imprint Contrarium. The first one is a bilingual Spanish-English edition of a selection of Horacio Quiroga’s short stories. Quiroga was a South American master of the short story genre. Many of the stories presented here are translated into English for the first time. Others are classics but…
A new book of original short stories is now available. All the stories (except two) were written during the recent “pandemic” that started on February 2020 and is still going on. A few of the stories are thematically related to current events, but others are not. Some are science fiction, some are humorous, some are…
“Educação para todos” (Education for all) is the first book in Portuguese published by Contrarium. Focusing on education in Brazil, the book discusses success stories from Germany, China and the United States in both schools and universities, and how they can be applied to Brazil. It also discusses several important themes such as IQ, research…
The last book release by Contrarium is “Dark Fairy Tales”, a wonderful collection of lesser-known fairy tales. We chose stories that were a bit darker in tone, but not all are tragic and some are humorous too. The volume includes three melancholy and not so well-known stories by Hans Christian Andersen, two darkly humorous stories…
I read this initially about a year ago, and thought it was quite interesting. A bit earlier I had read several of Strindberg’s plays, and also his novel-memoir “The Inferno”, so I was naturally interested in it. Now, I should say that what I read originally was called “Zones of the Spirit”, which was an…
Most people are happy to own a cat or a dog, or perhaps a goldfish, but some prefer other more unusual creatures. Here there’s an article I just published elsewhere that talks about a few writers and artists who had a taste for exotic or unusual pets, most of which I did not mention in…