Posts in the Books category.
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December 9
Book: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
The apocalypse will be televised!
You know what’s worse than breaking up with your girlfriend? Being stuck with her prize-winning show cat. And you know what’s worse than that? An alien invasion, the destruction of all man-made structures on Earth, and the systematic exploitation of all the survivors for a sadistic intergalactic game show. That’s what. [more inside]
November 2
Book: The Shadows Between Us by Tricia Levenseller
From SLJ: Hand this fantasy to readers who want a fun read with villains as the stars. [more inside]
October 31
Book: The King In Yellow
Chambers' influential, haunting stories of the play that seems to break down reality for those who read it. [more inside]
October 28
Book: A City On Mars
Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no Twitter—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space technologies and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered [more inside]
October 23
Book: The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
A solitary unicorn wonders what happened to the others of her kind. She goes to search for them, and finds herself travelling through a world that has changed beyond her recognition, full of dangers and unexpected companions. [more inside]
October 16
Book: Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented―notably the slasher movie's "final girls"―as they endure fear and degradation before rising to save themselves. The lesson was not lost on the mainstream industry, which was soon turning out the formula in well-made thrillers. -- publisher
October 15
Book: Refugee by Alan Gratz
From Kirkus: Poignant, respectful, and historically accurate while pulsating with emotional turmoil, adventure, and suspense. (maps, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 10-14) [more inside]
October 4
Book: The Message
Ta-Nehisi Coates structures this set of essays as letters to his students on the purpose of writing, and grappling with questions on how reporting and narratives are structured, define and distort reality.
Coates' bibliography for the Israel/Palestine essay. [more inside]
October 1
Book: The Reappearance of Rachel Price
The second book for the September Middle Grade/YA fanfare book club is a twisty mystery from Holly Jackson. [more inside]
September 25
Book: Foul Days
As a witch in the walled city of Chernograd, Kosara has plenty of practice treating lycanthrope bites, bargaining with kikimoras, and slaying bloodsucking upirs. There’s only one monster she can’t defeat: her ex, the Zmey, known as the Tsar of Monsters. She’s defied him one too many times and now he’s hunting her. Betrayed by someone close to her, Kosara’s only choice is to trade her shadow—the source of her powers—for a quick escape. [more inside]
September 13
Book: The Masquerades of Spring
Meet Augustus Berrycloth-Young--fop, flaneur, and Englishman abroad--as he chronicles the Jazz Age from his perch atop the city that never sleeps. That is, until his old friend Thomas Nightingale arrives, pursuing a rather mysterious affair concerning an old saxophone--which will take Gussie from his warm bed, to the cold shores of Long Island, and down to the jazz clubs where music, magic, and madness haunt the shadows...
Book: Heroes by Alan Gratz
Welcome to the first FanFare post for the Middle Grade and YA Metafilter Book Club. [more inside]
September 9
Book: Authority by Jeff Vandermeer
In Authority, the second volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, John Rodrigues (aka "Control") is the Southern Reach's newly appointed head. Working with a distrustful but desperate team, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, Control begins to penetrate the secrets of Area X. [more inside]
September 2
Book: Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks
The factory town of Swine Hill is full of the dead. Most of the living residents are haunted by ghosts as the town's hopes have died generation after generation. Two young haunted residents of the town, a brother and sister, must find a way to survive as the town teeters on the edge of extinction and violence. [more inside]
August 28
Book: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle
Misha knows that chasing success in Hollywood can be hell.
But finally, after years of trying to make it, his big moment is here: an Oscar nomination! And the executives at the studio for his long-running streaming series know just the thing to kick his career to the next level: kill off the gay characters, "for the algorithm," in the upcoming season finale. [more inside]
August 27
Book: An Immense World
In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.
Book: Set For Life by Andrew Ewell
A creative writing professor at a third-tier college in upstate New York is on his way home from a summer fellowship in France, where he’s spent the last three months loafing around Bordeaux, tasting the many varieties of French wine at his disposal, and doing just about anything but actually working on his long overdue novel. A stopover in Brooklyn to see his and his wife’s closest friends—John, a jaded poet-turned-lawyer with a dubious moral compass, and Sophie, a once-promising fiction writer with a complicated past and a mysterious allure—causes further trouble when he and Sophie wind up sleeping together while John is out serenading Brooklyn coeds with poems instead of preparing legal briefs. But instead of succumbing to his failures as a teacher, writer, and husband, an odd freedom begins to bubble up. Could a love affair be the answer he’s been searching for? Could it offer the escape he needs from the department chair, Chet Bland, who’s been breathing down his neck? Relief from the gossip of colleagues and generational tension with students? Respite from embarrassment with his wife, Debra Crawford, and her meteoric rise as a novelist? His escapades might even make the perfect raw material for an absolutely devastating novel, which would earn him tenure, wealth, and celebrity—everything he needs to be set for life. If only he could be the one to write it. A brilliant case of art imitating life, Andrew Ewell’s “sharp, witty” (Richard Russo, author of Straight Man) debut is a poignant tour de force that asks who owns whose story, skewers the fictions created from our lives and others’, and brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “publish or perish.” [Publisher's Blurb]
Book: We Are Too Many by Hannah Pittard
In this wryly humorous and innovative look at a marriage gone wrong, Hannah Pittard recalls a decade’s worth of unforgettable conversations, beginning with the one in which she discovers her husband has been having sex with her charismatic best friend, Trish. These time-jumping exchanges are fast-paced, intimate, and often jaw-dropping in their willingness to reveal the vulnerabilities inherent in any friendship or marriage. Blending fact and fiction, sometimes re-creating exchanges with extreme accuracy and sometimes diving headlong into pure speculation, Pittard takes stock not only of her own past and future but also of the larger, more universal experiences they connect with—from the depths of female rage to the heartbreaking ways we inevitably outgrow certain people. Clever and bold and radically honest to an unthinkable degree, We Are Too Many examines the ugly, unfiltered parts of the female experience, as well as the many (happier) possibilities in starting any life over after a major personal catastrophe. [Publisher's blurb]
August 26
Book: The Ministry of Time
The Ministry of Time is a fun, sexy, action-packed yet emotional novel. Time travel! Spies! Romance! Mystery Plus some good ol' bureaucracy and workplace comedy with some of the most charmingly endearing characters you’ll ever meet. (Staff Review) [more inside]
Book: All Fours
A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey. [more inside]