For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] There’s a scene very early in Andy Weir’s The Martian where a storm threatens the astronauts’ rocket, kicking off the rest of the plot. Well and good. But Weir—in a novel praised for its science to the exclusion of any other literary aspect—also included the wind speed, and it is, spoiler, not remotely strong … Read more
[ad_1] First, I think we need to get Barbenheimer out of the way. I very much doubt that Scott Guild intended Plastic, his debut novel about life-sized plastic figurines and the nuclear Armageddon that threatens them, to come so close on the heels of Greta Gerwig’s and Christopher Nolan’s films. It’s a fascinating accident, though: … Read more
[ad_1] Though a fairly slender book, and a compelling read, Lavie Tidhar’s The Circumference of the World is difficult to summarize—a stream of stories and events flowing into each other like a Möbius strip. Delia Welegtabit, a mathematician, reflects on her island childhood in Vanuatu and hires a rare book dealer to track down her … Read more
[ad_1] Mostly set around Atlanta, with excursions to Louisiana, Stephen Kearse’s Liquid Snakes is a psychotropic crime thriller, a revenge story, and a bitter invective against environmental racism. It’s also an immensely engaging read—clever and nimble in its narration, pointed in its critiques—with a chorus of interesting voices and arresting images. Although the novel is … Read more
[ad_1] Mostly set around Atlanta, with excursions to Louisiana, Stephen Kearse’s Liquid Snakes is a psychotropic crime thriller, a revenge story, and a bitter invective against environmental racism. It’s also an immensely engaging read—clever and nimble in its narration, pointed in its critiques—with a chorus of interesting voices and arresting images. Although the novel is … Read more
[ad_1] Theodore McCombs’s debut collection, Uranians, is a remarkable achievement, a polished and varied set of stories: speculative, queer, and cerebral. The entire set shines on a prose level, from the off-hand description of a climate-ravaged San Francisco with “Hail, thick as eyes” in “Laguna Beach” to the repeated floral metaphors of the title story: … Read more
[ad_1] Emily Tesh’s World-Fantasy-Award-winning Silver In the Wood and its sequel Drowned Country are deeply lovely books: quiet, yearning, and full of ancient straining curses and redemption. Tesh turning her novelistic sights to space opera is an event that should make every speculative fiction reader take note: Some Desperate Glory is a masterful take on … Read more
[ad_1] The Western, as a genre, is rife with horrific elements: its frequently alienating landscapes, its history of violence, and its strange and unrestrained collision of cultures. In Lone Women, Victor LaValle takes horrors both human and supernatural as his subject: a haunted vision of the American dream that accelerates into a bloody exploration of … Read more
[ad_1] Nathan Ballingrud’s The Strange is set on Mars in the early 20th century—not a scientifically accurate Mars, but one more like Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles or earlier planetary romance, with a breathable atmosphere and signs of earlier civilizations. Colonized by Americans, among others, this is a distinctly frontier-like Mars, with most of the main … Read more
[ad_1] D Doon Arbus’s debut novel, The Caretaker, feels both firmly grounded and strangely out of time. It’s textured, densely, with brick and cloth, with an overabundance of artifactual detritus, furtively character-driven, and yet one could easily forget what century it’s from. Arbus embraces a slightly awkward distance from her subjects, enough to leave the … Read more