Eco-fiction is fiction that addresses the relationship between humans and their environment head-on rather than using it only as setting. …My upcoming dystopian fantasy novel, Monsters Born and Made, is set on an island stripped of resources surrounded by a vicious, unforgiving sea. The world burns with a hot sun, […]
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Two boys go hunting in a forest, shooting down bats and cooking them over an open fire. Within a month, they are dead, bodies ravaged by an insidious disease that decimates their village and quickly spreads beyond. In a series of moving snapshots, Tadjo illustrates the terrible extent of the […]
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Harvest Moon is an anthology of loves and lives, of stories that thrive where borders and edges meet and where fates merge and collide like bodies of water seeking oceans and tides encountering clouds and landfall, habitats and hives. This anthology of 30 images and over 30 poems, stories, and […]
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Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen Trouble at Turtle Pond by Diana Renn Middle-grade fiction Miles Kaplan, animal lover, moves to a new town with a terrible secret: Last year, he accidentally let the class rabbit escape and it was never seen again. The fallout was bad enough that Miles and his […]
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Click here to return to the series The global novel exists, not as a genre separated from and opposed to other kinds of fiction, but as a perspective that governs the interpretation of experience. In this way, it is faithful to the way the global is actually lived–not through the […]
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In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Hugo Award-winner Becky Chambers’s delightful new Monk and Robot series gives us hope for the future. See also the second part of the duology, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Read more at Tor Publishing.
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Back to the Indie Corner series This month’s Indie Corner is the first that features one of my relatives. W.R. Woodbury is my husband’s uncle. Though he’s now on the opposite coast of us in Canada, I still recall one of the few times we met, one of which was […]
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Rachel A. Rosen’s debut novel, Cascade, has been described as magic realism, climate fantasy and, as its publisher prefers, fantasy that feels like science fiction. Set in a terrifying but all-too believable near future and leavened with a dry wit, Cascade features a cast of fully realized characters drawn into […]
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The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday […]
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Illustrated by Tana Ford, LaGuardia is being republished as a deluxe edition in hardcover and Kindle formats. Boingboing states: Laguardia is a contemporary story of immigration, identity, and dignity in the context of not-so-futuristic conservative fascist forces. The art of speculative fiction can illuminate alternative paths out of the violence of […]
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Back to Series I got nervous around the end of July when I had not yet heard any crickets yet. I read an article in The Conversation about how insects are declining—some reasons being loss of habitat, increased wildfires, and farming. I asked my team at work one day about […]
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Click here to return to the series About the Book This month we head to Sri Lanka, where we explore a creepy old mansion at the edge of a creepy forest. I’m already getting in the mood for autumn and haunted places, can you tell? Reading Dennis Mombauer’s The House […]
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Translated by Bruce Humes, this novel, first published in 2005, is being re-released by Penguin Random House, re-categorized in the genre of eco-fiction. In The Last Quarter of the Moon, prize-winning novelist Chi Zijian, creates a dazzling epic about an extraordinary woman bearing witness not just to the stories of […]
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As fires devastate most of the United States, Lark and his family secure a place on a refugee boat headed to Ireland, the last country not yet overrun by extremists and rumored to be accepting American refugees.
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Back to the Indie Corner series Arlene Mark’s The Year Without a Summer (August 2022, SparkPress) is a heartwarming and relevant novel for middle-grade and YA readers. It’s certain to provoke thoughtfulness and discussion about the climate and empathy for those around us. For two eighth-graders, disasters erupt—natural, man-made, and […]
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