Monday, February 4, 2008

Steven Brust

Steven Brust is the bestselling author of Issola, Dragon, The Phoenix Guards, Five Hundred Years After, and many other books.

Last month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:
I've just finished The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker, an interesting and sometimes delightfully wrong-headed look at how language affects thinking.

I'm in the middle of Grant Wins the War, a study of the Vicksburg campaign by James R. Arnold; good detail work.

I'll also be reading Kushiel's Justice, the latest book by Jacqueline Carey, just as soon as I can get my grubby paws on it.
Adapted from a Brust bio at Tor Books:
Steven Brust worked as a musician and a computer programmer before coming to prominence as a writer in 1983 with Jhereg, the first of his novels about Vlad Taltos, a human professional assassin in a world dominated by long-lived, magically-empowered human-like "Dragaerans."

Several more "Taltos" novels followed, interspersed with other work, including To Reign in Hell, a fantasy re-working of Milton's war in Heaven; The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, a contemporary fantasy based on Hungarian folktales; and a science fiction novel, Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille. The most recent "Taltos" novels are Dragon, Issola, and Dzur. In 1991, with The Phoenix Guards, Brust began another series, set a thousand years earlier than the Taltos books; its sequels are Five Hundred Years After and the three volumes of "The Viscount of Adrilankha": The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black, and Sethra Lavode.

While writing, Brust has continued to work as a musician, playing drums for the legendary band Cats Laughing and recording an album of his own work, A Rose for Iconoclastes.
Learn more about Steven Brust at Words Words Words, The Dream Café weblog.

--Marshal Zeringue