Articles by Mary Woodbury

Indie Corner – Aleksandar Nedeljkovic

Back to the Indie Corner series I’m happy to reboot our Indie Corner this month with a spotlight on Aleksandar Nedeljkovic and his novel ALT (Atmosphere Press, 2022). ALT offers a glimpse into a perilous near-future version of our world—one we feared would come for us but desperately tried to […]

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Backyard Wildlife – Smelling like Dirt

Back to Series “In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” ― Margaret Atwood I’ve begun my most recent newsletters with a quote. This one by Margaret Atwood is so true. It’s not just dirt we smell like at the end of the day. […]

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The Devil’s Dictionary, Steven Kotler

Click here to return to the series About the Book I’m always excited to talk with authors living in and writing about different places around the world. Steven Kotler’s newest novel, The Devil’s Dictionary (St. Martin’s Press, November; hardcover in April), takes place in an abundance of locales, including London, […]

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Wind, Ellen Dee Davidson

Wind Book Review Reviewed by Mary Woodbury Book information Author: Ellen Dee Davidson Publication date: February 1, 2022 Wind, by Ellen Dee Davidson, is a wonderful novel for children and adults alike. Starting with an adventurous and colorful book cover and getting right into the main character Katie’s whimsical daydreaming […]

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The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, Octavia Cade

A chilling novella about extinction, grief, and what we hold onto when the world falls apart. With the collapse of ecosystems and the extinction of species comes the Grief: an unstoppable melancholia that ends in suicide. When Ruby’s friend, mourning the loss of the Great Barrier Reef, succumbs to the […]

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Mad Honey, Katie Welch

Katie Welch reminds us that we are a very small part of a massive and complex non-human world and that, where we heed the lessons of non-centrality, we can also truly love. Mad Honey is a beautiful novel. –Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of Perfecting and All the Broken Things When Beck Wise vanished, his […]

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The House of Drought, Dennis Mombauer

I’m eagerly awaiting The House of Drought, which comes this summer of 2022 from one of my favorite publishing houses, Stelliform Press: The House of Drought is a weird horror novella which Mombauer pitched during December 2020’s #PitMad Twitter pitch contest. The story delves deep into the destabilizations of climate […]

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A House Between Earth and the Moon, Rebecca Scherm

A novel born out of speculation about climate change, this tale has the richest billionaire’s going to live on the moon while the rest suffer on an ecologically burnt Earth. Prescient and insightful, A House Between Earth and the Moon is at once a captivating epic about the machinations of big […]

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Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada

Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to […]

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Hovering, Rhett Davis

The Guardian calls Hovering a climate-collapse novel. A spectacular debut novel from one of Australia’s most exciting new writers. Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award, Hovering crosses genres, literary styles and conventions to create a powerful and kaleidoscopic story about three people struggling to find connection in a chaotic and […]

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Pure Colour, Sheila Heti

Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has […]

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Backyard Wildlife – Back to the Garden

Back to Series Actually, it’s not quite back to the garden yet. It’s too early to even order soil yet. I’ve done some mint and jasmine shopping lately but haven’t found what I wanted and will probably wait until more plants are at the local nursery around Mother’s Day weekend. […]

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The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

Click here to return to the series About the Book Occasionally, the world eco-fiction series explores anthologies and interviews editors who produce them; today we’re talking with author Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, editor of The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction. The description of the book from the publisher, Jembefola, is: The […]

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Strange Fire, Joel Burcat – Book Review

Strange Fire Book Review Reviewed by Mary Woodbury Book information Author: Joel Burcat Publisher: Headline Books Publication date: February 2, 2022 Who better to write an ecologically based legal thriller than environmental lawyer Joel Burcat? As with his newest book Strange Fire, two of his previous novels, Drink to Every […]

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Grey Bees, Andrey Kurkov

Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine’s Grey Zone, the no-man’s-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda that has been dragging on for years, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, […]

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