Review
[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 resident since the 1970s, Klages paints a sparkling alternate vision of that city as literally magical in her World Fantasy […]
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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, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his crenellated abbeys.— Edgar Allan Poe, “Masque of the […]
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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 reads to me. I’m a longtime fan of audiobooks, and pretty much always have one going. The right performance can […]
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“The Mandalorian,” the first live action Star Wars TV series, is the Star Wars fan’s wet dream. It is a gritty take on Star Wars, so obsessed with the scum and villainy side of the story that it crams two cantina scenes into its first 40-minute episode. No one in this slice of the galaxy […]
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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“ is at once a history lesson, historical fiction, and a romantic tale of the fantastic. Centered on England’s first recorded with trials in the grim aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, this post-Elizabethan milieu is peopled with historical figures Winterson has made entirely her own.
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Trust is a slippery prospect in Gene Wolfe’s collection of interconnected novellas, “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” — and while the oft-unfortunate characters that populate the book certainly have their own issues of trust, confidence and reliability in their lives, the one who really is left grasping after truth, and even a genuine sense of reality within this singular narrative collection, is the reader.
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