This year’s Hugo Awards, debatably the most prestigious award in sci-fi literature, has crowned N.K. Jemisin a queen of the genre, awarding her Best Novel for her latest book, The Fifth Season. The book itself is a literary feat that capitalizes on the current socio-political climate – and literal climate – of today. It relays a world in which every five years the ‘Supercontinent’ sees cataclysmic violence against Earth in the form of apocalyptic climate change. Book Buttons Embed ISBN: 9780316229296 While publishers gloat and Jemisin is probably off somewhere celebrating in a champagne bubble bath and eating french fries, not everyone …
It brightens my day to see karmic order still in check and the goodness of humanity still hanging in there. Between the sweltering heat of summer, an apocalyptic election, and chaos around the globe, it’s all the more important to slow down and recognize good deeds. Todays’ heart-warming story comes to us from a postman named Ron in Utah. “Today while delivering mail to his apartment complex,” Ron wrote in a Facebook post. “I saw him reading ads, and then he asked me if I had any extra mail he could read. He told me his wish is to have …
It gives a whole new meaning to the term ghost writer. They aren’t publicly anonymous voices that pen a celebrity’s ‘masterpiece’, they aren’t living from invoice to invoice, and they aren’t even technically living. Spirit authors are more scribe that writer, taking the words of souls past and transcribing stories across the chasm of their world and ours. They bridge past and present, life and death and enlighten writing to a whole new caliber of transcendence. They aren’t just the ‘woo woo’ doctors or zany characters seen sitting storefront offering to read your palm with a grotesque painted index finger. There’s actually a pool …
This should begin with a disclaimer: I adore short stories. I’d pick a Joyce Carol Oates or Coover short over long form any day. They glut and gut at the same time; “concentrate without clotting” and bring the weight of something so much larger to a flimsy ten page read. Reading a short, there’s always the sense that something creeps just beyond the pages and something vital being pressed a gauzy closeness to the narrative skin. They aren’t just remarkable in their precision – less words, more punch – they pose an entirely different motive than that of the novel. They don’t …
Quite literally since its inception, “The Road Not Taken” (read here) has been a source of confusion and some hard head-scratching. After completion, Frost sent it over to his friend Edward Thomas, sealing the envelope without any comment or explanation. It was meant to be a light-hearted ruse, a poke at Thomas who, on their walks together, suffered a chronic regret at each turn in the road and every forsaken alternative route. Frost had hoped the tongue-in-cheek jab would be met with Edward’s laughing dismissal and, fingers crossed, some friendly ruffling of feathers. But, Thomas didn’t read the poem this way. He …
