Shelfies #52: Lavie Tidhar

Jared has been nudging me to do my own shelfie for the one year anniversary, which means that I am now finding out just how much of an ask doing one of these is. What do you show? How much do you show? Is a shelfie a brag, or a gross invasion of privacy?

We all love to snoop on other people’s bookshelves, and as I noticed from the ones we’ve run so far, the shelves accumulate much more than books. What is that little painting on the shelf, for instance? I have a dim memory of it coming from some curious glassblower’s workshop in – I want to say Devon? – sometime during the pandemic. On the shelf below I have a blue sandstone Anubis from El Quseir in Egypt, who guards my books, but he is not pictured here, sadly. I suppose I could have more artistically arranged the shelf – but who has time?

Like many people in my line of work, I have too many books and not enough space, so I am constantly fighting a losing battle to clear out the shelves. Not pictured here, for instance, are the ones groaning under the burden of various editions of my own novels, less a vanity and more – or so I tell myself – simply an archival record. I try to keep only one copy of each edition, but even these pile up. I have recently given up on anthologies entirely, or the whole house would be filled with them. And then, as Jared and I both keep finding out, books from the past emerge out of storage to startle us with our youthful enthusiasms, like the pile of Terry Pratchett first editions (also not pictured here), all inscribed to me sometime in the late nineties and early noughties when I was a more enthusiastic collector – what to do with them now?

This shelf holds some of my curious collection of international SF/F. I actually got into the habit all the way back when I was a long-haired backpacker. Travelling across Eastern Europe in the shadow of the Bosnian War, I picked up the Nemira anthologies of Romanian science fiction, for instance, printed on ultra-thin rice paper. When I travelled through Malaysia I picked up local horror (Tunku Halim, who I would go on to publish in my first World SF anthology) and comics. I still have my friend Wu Yan’s early, early book from around 2000 inscribed to me in Chinese from my first visit to China – twenty-five years later, I also have his latest.

Analog/Virtual is the first edition of Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s mosaic novel, published in India. It would be published later in the UK as The Ten Percent Thief. I was asking for books for the column I was writing at the time for the Washington Post and received this, complete with a lovely author letter I kept inside. I loved the book, and it was great to see it nominated for the Clarke Award a few years later and hang out with Lavanya at the ceremony.

As for Ng Yi-Sheng’s Lion City, published in Singapore – I actually first met Yi-Sheng in Korea when we were both at the Toji Cultural Centre outside Wonju. I’ve since met him in Singapore and New York as well, and I think it was in New York that he gave me a copy of this superb collection of short stories. It strikes me that this is one of the nicest aspects of having this writing career – that I get to go places and, when I meet people I haven’t seen in a while, to simply resume a conversation as if no time has passed.

You can also find a couple of books by my Italian friend Francesco Verso here – his own novel, Livid, as well as the anthology Freetaly, of Italian speculative short stories. Francesco’s been the unsung hero of promoting, publishing and talking about international sf/f – I think I got Freetaly from him when I saw him in Milan at a convention. A year later, we were in Szechuan together, teaching an international workshop... So it goes.

That Japanese manga on the shelf is by the artist Masato Hisa, who I got to meet in Japan. It turned out we were both big Kim Newman fans, so he gave me two volumes of this, one inscribed to me and one to bring to Kim when I returned to London. I also have an original piece by him, a NSFW item purchased at a room auction and – no, don’t ask me. I am not allowed to hang it up anywhere!

But it occurs to me I’m talking more about the authors than the books themselves! One of my prized possessions on this shelf is John Clute’s magnificent The Darkening Garden, his study of horror literature, published in an edition of just 500 signed hardcover copies. I have been a John Clute fan since I was sixteen and got the 1992 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which I read cover to cover and know off by heart. I got to meet John in Poland over a decade ago, when we were both guests at a convention, and hit it off. Over the years, I’ve expressed my ardent desire for The Darkening Garden several times until John, taking pity on me, gifted me this, the last of his author copies, and personally inscribed it besides. (You can find the complete text in a more easily-accessible format in Clute 2014 collection Stay – I highly recommend it!).

The book next to it, incidentally – A Fun Magic Colouring Book – is exactly what its title suggests. It’s a magic prop, where the pages can be coloured in and then erased by the magician. You can also find the gorgeous UK paperback (with its unforgettable cover of a bikini-clad warrior girl riding a giant lizard!) of Barry B. Longyear’s Circus World. It’s a mosaic novel about a circus ship that crash-lands on a remote planet, and the circus-based society that its passengers create there... it’s just wonderful. I recently re-read it to remind myself just how much I love it. If you’ve ever read my The Escapement, then you’d know my interest in magic, circuses and so on. If you haven’t read it, I have to say it is one of my favourites!

Finally, Intoxicating Zion in the corner there, is the history of hashish in Mandatory Palestine – you can also find a book on Turkish heroin smuggling next to it, and next to that, but somewhat hidden in the photo, the history of the British CID in Palestine. These come from my side-hustle as a Serious Novelist, and were research for the three Maror novels, of which the third, Golgotha, is out next week. If you’ve read Adama and thought the opening section was too far-fetched – if only! It’s lifted from a story in Intoxicating Zion. The CID stuff was for Golgotha, but that particular book was less helpful than I expected. I ended up relying much more on Geoffrey J. Morton’s wonderful autobiography, Just the Job: Some Experiences of a Colonial Policeman, a copy of which I most certainly don’t have, as getting one would set you back at least £150. In the event, I had to request the book from the British Library.

As I just found out, one could spend hours – and expend too many words! – writing about just a tiny shelf, so I should call it a day now. I hope I haven’t put you off, and that you stick with us for another year!

Lavie Tidhar’s work encompasses literary fiction (Maror, Adama, Golgotha and Six Lives), cross-genre classics such as Jerwood Prize winner A Man Lies Dreaming and World Fantasy Award winner Osama, and genre works like the Campbell and Neukom winner Central Station. His work has been translated into multiple languages. He lives in London, where he also co-edits Shelfies.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. For more shelfies, join us on Instagram at @shelfiesplease.