October 2011
19 posts
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City of Saints and Madmen / Jeff VanderMeer
Dradin, in love, beneath the window of his love, staring up at her while crowds surge and seethe around him, bumping and bruising him all unawares in their rough-clothed, bright-rouged thousands. For Dradin watches her, she taking dictation from a machine, an inscrutable block of gray from which sprout the earphones she wears over her delicate egg-shaped head. Dradin is struck dumb and dumber...
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Dispatches: Helen Oyeyemi at McNally Jackson
Last night at McNally Jackson Sarah Weinman, News Editor at Publishers Marketplace, sat down with author Helen Oyeyemi to discuss her new book Mr. Fox. Helen began the evening with a reading of the fairy tale Mr. Fox, one of many stories that inspired her. Another source of inspiration was the equally dark tale of Bluebeard. The outcome of her fascination with these often-gruesome tales is a...
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Master of the House of Darts / Aliette de Bodard
The day dawned clear and bright on the city: as the Fifth Sun emerged from His night journey, He was welcomed by the drumrolls and conch-blasts of His priests – a noise that reverberated in my small house until it seemed to fill my lungs. I rolled to my feet from my sleeping mat, and made my daily offerings of blood – both to Tonatiuth the Fifth Sun, and to my patron Lord Death, the Fleshless...
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Dispatches: When Indie Bookstore Meets Indie Press
Last night independent publisher Other Press celebrated three of their authors at Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
Publisher Judith Gurewich gave a heartfelt introduction, skipping the “mission statement and speaking more about her overall philosophy. While trying to work out how three diverse writers such as Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne,...
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The Gutter Sees the Light that Never Shines /...
The Salon of Catastrophists lay on the border between the Cerebral and Cymeline districts. It was a guild frequented by an exclusive coterie of artists, poets and theoreticians renowned for their speculations on the various ways in which Life as they knew it would come to an end.
The Salon of Catastrophists was a square-shaped, spacious auditorium with a high ceiling and no upper floors but,...
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A Wizard of Earthsea / Ursula K. Le Guin
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. From the towns in its high valleys and the ports on its dark narrow bays many a Gontishman has gone forth to serve the Lords of the Archipelago in their cities as wizard or mage, or, looking for adventure, to wander working magic from isle to isle of all Earthsea....
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WatchWhy Fantasy Matters
Acclaimed authors Kelly Link, Felix Gilman, Naomi Novik, and Lev Grossman take a look at why fantasy matters in our lives and imaginations. This panel, moderated by Laura Miller, will dive into the genre and go beyond the subject of elves and wizards.
via Center for Fiction
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“Horror likes to take its time.”
– Ross Lockhart, Editor of The Book of Cthulhu on Speculate!, episode 27
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Dispatches: Colson Whitehead at McNally Jackson
Last night Colson Whitehead met with a standing-room only crowd at SoHo’s McNally Jackson. All were gathered to celebrate Whitehead’s latest novel, Zone One, a story set in lower Manhattan after a zombie apocalypse.
Instead of the standard reading and Q&A format, Colson began with a wry retelling of how he became a writer. (The crowd’s bursts of laughter was the...
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Phantastes / George MacDonald
I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies the return of consciousness. As I lay and looked through the eastern window of my room, a faint streak of peach-colour, dividing a cloud that just rose above the low swell of the horizon, announced the approach of the sun. As my thoughts, which a deep and apparently dreamless sleep had dissolved, began again to assume...
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Why Read Moby-Dick? / Nathaniel Philbrick
To write timelessly about the here and now, a writer must approach the present indirectly. The story has to be about more than it at first seems. Shakespeare used the historical sources of his plays as a scaffolding on which to construct detailed portraits of his own age. The interstices between the secondhand historical plots and Shakespeare’s startlingly original insights into...
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The Secret Garden / Frances Hodgson Burnett
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held...
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“People don’t put much faith in a beautiful transformation these days; a...”
– Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti / Genevieve Valentine
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Soulless / Gail Carriger
Miss Alexia Tarabotti was not enjoying her evening. Private balls were never more than middling amusement for spinsters, and Miss Tarabotti was not the kind of spinster who would garner even that much pleasure from the event. To put the pudding in the puff: she had retreated to the library, her favorite sanctuary in any house, only to happen upon an unexpected vampire.
She glared at the...
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Spaceman Blues: A Love Song / Brian Francis...
It is his last day, and by six in the morning he is already drinking, drinking and shot up, eyes frantic, limbs flailing like he’s ready to explode. At seven he is on the wasted docks across from Manhattan starting fights with the winos and the mechanics; by eight thirty he’s up in the Washington Heights playing dominoes on a fire hydrant some kids are getting ready to crack open...
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The Book of Disquiet / Fernando Pessoa
I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it — without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgments based on feeling instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God. I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing...
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Stranger in a Strange Land / Robert A. Heinlein
Once upon a time when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith.
Valentine Michael Smith was as real as taxes but he was a race of one.
The first expedition from Terra to Mars was selected on the theory that the greatest danger to man in space was man himself. At that time, only eight Terran years after the founding of the first human colony on Luna, any interplanetary trip made...
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How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe...
There is just enough space inside here for one person to live indefinitely, or at least that’s what the operation manual says. User can survive inside the TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device, in isolation, for an indefinite period of time.
I am not totally sure what that means. Maybe it doesn’t actually mean anything, which would be fine, which would be okay by me, because...
