Our favorite purveyor of Sword & Soul has added a great new post to his blog, wherein he casts his Imaro novels with a selection of Hollywood’s best and brightest. Just click over to Charles’ website and select BLOG from the menu on the left — the post in question is titled “A Nyumbani Facebook.” Great fun. His selection of Gary Coleman as Pomphis reminds me of the time I bumped into Coleman here in Los Angeles circa 1998 or so. I was waiting in line at a Koo Koo Roo restaurant here in Marina del Rey, and the diminutive actor strolled in to pick up a take-out order. No one bothered him, but there was a lot of staring at the Mutt and Jeff absurdity of his standing next to me, a six-foot-eight Jolly Green Giant.

Charles also has a new menu item on his site marked RECOMMENDED, in which he has listed a number of books and authors he’s read recently, all of whom he’s jazzed enough about to share with his own readers. Fans of Howard’s boxing tales — an ever-growing group which includes virtually everyone who hunts them down and reads them — will want to pick up the new biography of the great Golden Age pugilist Sam Langford that Charles discusses in one of his posts.

Finally, Charles tells me that the long-awaited Imaro III is almost ready to be released by Brother Uraeus’ Sword & Soul Media — The Cimmerian will let you know as soon as it hits the mean streets (you can get the first two Imaro novels, Imaro and The Quest for Cush, both completely revised and updated, at Amazon). And if you haven’t picked up Sword & Soul Media’s first release, Dossouye, what the hell are you waiting for? If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a hundred times: Saunders’ mythic, sorcerous, fantasticated Africa — lushly imagined with liberal amounts of thoroughly enchanting real-life history, culture, and folklore, and sprinkled with bloody droplets of Howardian fairy-dust — constitutes the most effective attempt at subcreation since Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Pick whatever nits you wish about plotting, pacing, wording, whatever — the world-building is that good.