Photo: SH Design via AdobeStock “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, / ‘To talk of many things: / Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — / Of cabbages — and kings — / And why the sea is boiling hot — / And whether pigs have wings.’”—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding …
Continue reading Stepping through the Looking Glass: A Journey through Speculative Fiction
Authors: Bridget Collins, Laura Purcell, Elizabeth Macneal, Imogen Hermes Gowar, Jess Kidd, Natasha Pulley, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, and Andrew Michael HurleyPublished by Sphere, 2021, 293 pages There is something about December that seems to call for ghost stories. So I have picked a collection of eight ghostly tales written by contemporary writers. The stories are …
Continue reading The Haunting Season—Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Nights
Translated from Norwegian by Becky L. CrookPublished by Penguin, 2017, 144 pages. Original version published in 2016. “Whenever I am unable to walk, climb or sail away from the world, I have learned to shut it out.“Learning this took time. Only when I understood that I had a primal need for silence was I able …
Photo: Terria Clay/WCS Jonathan C. Slaght is an American wildlife biologist and author. He is one of the leading experts on Blakiston’s fish owls. His book, Owls of the Eastern Ice: The Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl (2020), won several awards, including the 2021 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, the …
Continue reading On the Trail of Fish Owls: An Interview with Jonathan C. Slaght
Photo: karina_lo via Adobe Stock Another year is almost over, and it’s time to look back at the books we read in 2025. As always, it’s a rich and varied collection. The fiction section includes three Booker Prize longlisted books, including the winner, David Szalay’s Flesh, as well as Tash Aw’s The South and Benjamin …
Published by BluOne Ink, 2023, 540 pages “We eat our poisons young and then trawl the world the rest of our lives, looking for antidotes.” Humans are intrinsically storytellers, and the stories we tell about ourselves shape who we are. They give form to our world, and each of us carries our own personal world …
Continue reading All Stray Dogs Go To Heaven: Krishna Candeth
Edited by David Stuart DaviesPublished by Macmillan, 2024, 310 pages There is something about reading a well-written horror story: the chills that run down your spine, the fear, and the feeling of being in the story while sitting at a comfortable distance from any actual danger. This collection is guaranteed to make you shiver, with …
Published by Vintage, 2023, 136 pages “Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams—of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in the dark, and of the bright energetic black of space …
Published by One, 2020, 217 pages A girl watches her mother make the perfect peach cobbler every week for her date with the married pastor; a woman writes to her half-sister about whose existence she learns only after their father dies; and two women live together in the cold north, far from their southern roots. …
Continue reading The Secret Lives of Church Ladies: Deesha Philyaw
Published by Allen Lane / Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2020, 348 pages “This dishevelled mass of wood-chip brown regarded us warily with electric-yellow eyes. ... It was clearly an owl, but bigger than any I’d seen, about the size of an eagle but fluffier and more portly, with enormous ear tufts. Backlit by the hazy …
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