Books

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So Hip It Hurts: The ‘Soft’ Science Fiction of Izumi Suzuki

Hit Parade of Tears: Stories | By Izumi Suzuki; translated by Helen O'Horan, Daniel Joseph, Sam Bett & David Boyd | Verso, 2023 | 288 pp. | $18.55 Buy this book on Bookshop.org Historically, postwar ...

So You Think You’re An Anarchist? (Review)

The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian AnarchismBy John P. Clark, PM Press (2022)Buy this book on Bookshop.org Overcoming Capitalism: Strategy for the Working Class in the 21st CenturyBy Tom Wetzel, AK Press (2022)Buy this book on ...

‘Scorched Earth’: Fighting Fire with Fire (Review)

"Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World"By Jonathan Crary, Verso Books: 2022Buy this book via Bookshop.org Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, by Jonathan Crary, has a multiple-entendre ...

‘Half-Earth Socialism’: Half-Baked or Half a Chance?

"Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics"by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass, Verso Books: 2022Buy this book via Bookshop.org The authors of "Half-Earth Socialism" are visionaries, utopians, and ...

Urban Fantasy Has a Political Edge in Jadie Jang’s ‘Monkey Around’

‘Monkey Around”By Jadie JangSolaris (2021)ISBN: 9781781089200 Buy this book on Indiebound In Jadie Jang’s “Monkey Around,” urban fantasy is the milieu — specifically the richly diverse, politically activated, increasingly gentrified San Francisco Bay Area of the ...

Let’s Get Lost with Izumi Suzuki’s ‘Terminal Boredom’

Terminal Boredom: StoriesBy Izumi Suzuki (Verso, 2021)ISBN: 9781788739887 Buy this book on IndieBound! At first, Izumi Suzuki's short works of self-spelunking science fiction — complete with shapeshifting aliens, interspecies relationships, dream machines and gendered dystopias ...

Book launch: ‘Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1955’

Our friends at PM Press have another socko book launch currently live on Kickstarter that we commend to your attention. "Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1955," edited by Andrew Nette and Iain ...

Revisiting Bradbury’s ‘skin illustrations’

I've had a really hard time reading in the last month. I was tearing through books all spring and then I absolutely hit a wall. I don't think I read anything for 3 or 4 ...

Ellen Klages on the ‘fantastic constructs’ of her magical San Francisco

[Ellen Klages has won her share of literary awards, but the biggest prize of all goes to the reader, who gets to explore the familiar, but distinct, worlds she creates. A San Francisco Bay Area ...

What Poe can teach us about the pandemic

But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, ...

‘Read me a story’: Libro.fm and the rise of the indie audiobook (review)

I love books, I love stories, and I love being read to. Growing up my parents read to us almost every night, and it's always felt like such a loving, nurturing thing when a partner ...

Strange transits through “The Daylight Gate” (review)

The Daylight GateBy Jeanette WintersonGrove Press (2012) Buy this book via IndieBound Unfailingly dire, unflinchingly bloody, full of love and license, and brimming over with real devotion and all-too-human devilry, Jeanette Winterson’s “The Daylight Gate“ ...

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie: Gene Wolfe’s ‘The Fifth Head of Cerberus’ (Review)

Support indie booksellers and buy this book via IndieBound • Amazon users can buy this book as a trade paperback (Gollancz SF Masterworks edition) or a Kindle ebook. The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three NovellasBy ...

On Octavia E. Butler’s Birthday, Why Not Read Some of Her Game-Changing Classics?

[All links to books are via IndieBound.] Octavia E. Butler's birthday is today, June 22, and her death in 2006 at age 58 — attributed variously to a stroke and also a head injury — ...

It’s a Wonderful Apocalypse (Review)

“Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch,” by Neil Gaiman and Terry PratchettHarperCollinsISBN: 0-575-04800-X400 pages Buy this book from an independent bookseller via IndieBound • Amazon users can buy this book ...

When History Goes ‘Wonderfully Wrong’ (Review)

Review: “The Lucky Strike,” by Kim Stanley RobinsonPM PressISBN: 978-1-60486-085-6128 pages Support independent booksellers buy purchasing this book via IndieBound • Amazon users can get it in paperback and Kindle ebook editions. It takes no ...

Magical Escapes in a City of Sunlight and Shadows (Review)

“Passing Strange,” by Ellen KlagesTor/ForgeISBN: 9780765389527224 Pages Support independent booksellers by purchasing this book via IndieBound • Amazon users can get it as a Kindle ebook or a trade paperback. What a sparkling jewel-box of ...