Nonfiction
Book Review: Faeries Never Lie, edited by Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker
Looking for your next fantasy anthology read? Arley Sorg recommends Faeries Never Lie, edited by Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker
Looking for your next fantasy anthology read? Arley Sorg recommends Faeries Never Lie, edited by Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker
Are you looking for a Caribbean futurist queer feminine space opera retelling of the Alexandre Dumas adventure classic The Count of Monte Cristo? Well, that’s just what Suzan Palumbo’s new book Countess is–and Melissa A Watkins recommends it.
The crimes that the world heaps upon women, the cycle of violence and beatification—there’s nothing gorgeous or rich or poetic about that. And at first, I thought that was something the title needed to convey. The evil we’re fighting is banal as fuck and let’s not forget it.
Be sure to read the editorial for a rundown of all this month’s terrific content!
I wrote the first draft of “Babywings” after rereading Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.” The older I get, the more magical realism hooks its claws deep into me. Coming at the story through this genre, at a sideways angle, has allowed me to grapple with themes that are, for me, more emotionally challenging.
To me, caste, race, class, privilege, identity, are all forms of societal structure designed to divide people into “us” and “not us.” Education, culture, and language have become part of these structures now, along with the weaponization of language.
There’s the old saw about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic; I think we were playing with the notion that magic in the hands of human beings would eventually be indistinguishable from technology—including the lifecycle that takes it from genuine awe-inspiring discovery, to commercial adaptation, to profit-maximizing iteration, to a climate-destroying tool for focusing wealth.
Arley Sorg has a new anthology recommendation: Sinophagia, edited and translated by Xueting Christine Ni. Get all the juicy details here.
Chris Kluwe says that this month we’re heading to early nineteenth-century France for a mysterious tale of ghosts and goblins, werewolves and witchy women, magic and mayhem and the occasional rat in lipstick and eyeshadow (applied humanely, of course). That’s right, we’re reading Strange Beasts, Susan J. Morris’ debut novel!
During the writing process, I discovered this was a story about control. Before Roger Abbott was convicted, he was a jaded man. Pessimistic and hopeless. A disgraced journalist who lost his family and found himself in a pit of disillusionment. But he wanted to share his story. His whole truth.