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+27 +1
Noël Carroll on the paradox of horror
The desire to be scared or disgusted is odd. So why do audiences enjoy the unpleasant in horror fiction and film?
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+19 +4
Here Be Dragons: On Literary Cartography
Jonathan Russell Clark on “Plotted: A Literary Atlas.”
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-2 +1
Sci-Fi’s Hugo Awards and the Battle for Pop Culture’s Soul
The year is 2108, and things aren’t going so well for Team Humanity. Earth is so overcrowded that people live in hive-like concrete cubicles called Public Residence Clusters and subsist on reconstituted soy. Things aren’t much better 30 light years away, in Earth’s run-down Outer Colonies. No wonder the hero of Marko Kloos’ first novel, Terms of Enlistment, joins the spacegoing military to escape those terrestrial slums.
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+25 +2
The Conspiracy Against a Good Night’s Sleep
Cosmic horror tends to be synonymous with H.P. Lovecraft, but others, from Thomas Ligotti to Nathan Ballingrud, show the many ways in which tales of a monstrous world can scare the hell out of us. By Tobias Carroll.
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+19 +3
Umberto’s echoes
Terry Eagleton reviews Umberto Eco’s “Numero Zero,” translated By Richard Dixon.
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+25 +2
Should Writing Be an Art or a Career?
Novelists have a choice: stay in and write or get out and promote.
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+1 +1
32 Life Lessons from the Cutest Creatures in Fiction | AAA State of Play
Enjoy our colorful collection of life lessons learned from popular fiction characters. The knowledge is geared for people of all ages.
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+21 +3
Zelda, Burning
Winner of the 2016 Great American Fiction Contest: At Highland Hospital, Zelda Fitzgerald found refuge from the world — but not from Scott.
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+30 +2
It’s about time: how sci-fi has described Einstein’s universe
A century after the publication of the general theory of relativity, sci-fi is still grappling with its implications, and still trying to explain it to the rest of us. By Damien Walter.
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+4 +1
Chick Lit Meets the Avant-Garde
Alexandra Kleeman’s novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine stands out among the many books published this past year— The Beautiful Bureaucrat , The Ghost Network , Revision , Dietland —that stake out a territory at the intersection of experimental fiction and chick lit. By Tess McNulty.
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+22 +1
Mortal Fire by Elizabeth Knox
Sixteen-year-old Canny Mochrie's parents go away on a vacation, so they send her off on a trip of her own with her step-brother Sholto and his opinionated girlfriend Susan, who are interviewing the survivors of a strange coal mine disaster and researching local folklore in 1959 Southland, New Zealand. Canny is left to herself to wander in a mysterious and enchanting nearby valley, occupied almost entirely by children who all have the last name Zarene and can perform a special type of magic that
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+3 +1
In Defense of Unlikable Women
We forgive our male heroes even when they’re flawed, aimless brutes. But if they’re female? Forget it. By Kameron Hurley.
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+23 +1
17 Brilliant Short Novels You Can Read in a Sitting — Electric Literature
This week author Ian McEwan expressed his love of short novels, saying “very few [long] novels earn their length.” Certainly it seems like a novel has to be a minimum of 500 pages to win a major literary award these days, and many genre novels have ballooned to absurd sizes.
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+13 +1
Breathless and Unexplainable Dread: On This Summer's Horror Fiction
If you listen very closely, you can hear it even now: the sound of the human heart beating. Often, in particularly good horror fiction, this sound is the thing that resonates most, the sound of life springing forth from the void of confusion and danger around it. The best horror fiction accounts for the heart’s profound sensitivity — its vulnerability to alarm and suspense — and the best horror writers understand that the heart, as much as the mind, is able to gauge and comprehend the forces, processes, shadows, and shapes of fear.
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+8 +1
Miette’s Bedtime Story Podcast
Curl up and fall asleep to the world’s greatest short stories, the known treasures and the once-forgotten, purred to you as only Miette can.
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+1 +1
Cookie Jar
By Steven King.
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+16 +1
Arthur C Clarke award goes to Adrian Tchaikovsky's novel of 'universal scale'
Children of Time, about humans who leave a dying Earth for a terraformed planet where they meet a strange new species, praised for Clarkean sense of wonder
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+20 +1
Women and writers of color win big at Hugo Awards and the Puppies are even sadder
The winners of the Hugo Awards were announced at a gala ceremony in Kansas City, Mo., on Saturday, marking a good night for women and authors of color, and a very bad one for the “Puppies.” By Michael Schaub.
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+19 +1
Do Dystopian Settings Inspire Their Creation? - Schooled by Science
Many of the gadgets we have today were inspired by science-fiction stories. But are dystopian science-fiction stories inspiring real world chaos?
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+6 +1
A Guide to the Birds of East Africa: Nicholas Drayson
Drayson's charming descriptions of the Kenyan wildlife and his sharp take on the foibles and follies of the people and politics sketch a rich picture of contemporary life in Nairobi. Fans of Alexander McCall Smith will delight in this transporting and witty novel.
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