Solrad

Jan 6, 2025 | solrad.co | Tony Wei Ling

Yasmeen Abedifard’s When To Pick a Pomegranate arrived––fittingly––right at the beginning of pomegranate season. When my copy came in the mail, our neighbors had just started to pick their own tree’s fruit, which looked like cheerful, Halloween-y ghosts in squirrel-proof draping. A few pomegranates have stayed on the tree since then, getting progressively lonelier as their peers ripened and got picked off. There’s a whole silly micro-tragedy to be witnessed, just in walking by.

Dec 30, 2024 | solrad.co | Tom Shapira

The Call of Cthulhu, or to give it its full name – H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, is the fourth English language translation of Gou Tanabe’s works. Like all the previous collections, it’s an adaptation of a story by (quite likely) the most influential horror writer of the 20th century.

Dec 23, 2024 | solrad.co | Hagai Palevsky

A man and a woman—the former a host, the latter his guest—sit together for tea. They talk about a new menace in town, creeping around at night and invading people’s homes, “collecting things.” The woman has heard about this ‘nightwalker,’ and she doesn’t seem particularly concerned, only intrigued. She asks the man to explain his process. Man: When the moon is rich and ripe, he’ll step outside for a walk. Woman: In what direction does he go?

Dec 16, 2024 | solrad.co | Daniel Elkin

Prior to becoming editor-in-chief of SOLRAD, I ran a comics criticism (among other things) site called Your Chicken Enemy. On that site, I did a capsule review column called Books in Bites which featured books that I was reading. Now this feature has a new home on SOLRAD. Here’s installment 26!SKIN DEEPby Flo Woolleypublished by Silver SprocketWhat matters? Is it the recognition of one’s existence by the world at large?

Dec 9, 2024 | solrad.co | Hagai Palevsky |Elias Rosner |Nicholas Burman |Hank Kennedy

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to listen to the 1968 song “Do It Again” by the Beach Boys. If you listen to it on its own, paying little attention to the rest of the Beach Boys’ discography up until that point, then all you’re getting is an effort that, though largely straightforward, is incredibly charming and compelling, a highlight of late-’60s pop-rock.