For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Fantasy is all about situating the reader in a compelling fictional world, but some worlds are more fictional than others. Some authors in the genre excel at putting fantasy first, creating new worlds so different from our own that they have their own geography, magic, culture, conventions, and language. Others sketch the outlines of … Read more
[ad_1] I discovered the seminal punk band Angry Samoans when I was 14, thanks to the lurid cover of their second and best-known album “Back From Samoa.” The songs were idiotic, with titles like “Tuna Taco” and “My Old Man’s a Fatso,” but they winked knowingly at the listener. There is wisdom in madness, they … Read more
[ad_1] Brian Evenson’s new collection of short stories, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, is set in a not-so-distant future where the environment has unsurprisingly degraded even further than what we face now, as well as in fantasy worlds entirely unlike our own. No matter the setting, there is an ever-present sense that things are … Read more
[ad_1] Reading the poet Mary Jo Bang’s new translation of Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, I thought of a widely-circulated photograph from the COVID pandemic. An Italian doctor in a surgical gown and two face masks holds a sign reading, “When this hell ends:/…And then we emerged again to see the stars.” The quote is from the … Read more