The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth, which won the South East Asian Writers Award for the original Thai edition, is also lush with characters — and foliage and fauna. In Veeraporn’s telling, the Thai capital doesn’t unfold, as in Pitchaya’s plaited tale, but explode. –The New York Times Goodreads Reviews […]
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The Migration, Helen Marshall
Marshall is painting on a large canvas here and her style is unabashedly baroque: the novel is characterized by a high level of drama, intensity, and movement, including a repeated motif of flooding, raging waters that claim (or threaten to claim) various characters over the course of the narrative. Climate change […]
Read MoreCompulsory Games, Robert Aikman
Aickman’s superbly written tales terrify not with standard thrills and gore but through a radical overturning of the laws of nature and everyday life. His territory of the strange, of the “void behind the face of order,” is a surreal region that grotesquely mimics the quotidian: Is that river the […]
Read MoreThe Vorrh Trilogy, Brian Catling
Click here for all, including The Vorrh and The Erstwhile. The richly grotesque Vorrh trilogy describes a quest to rescue the tree of knowledge and return Creation to a state of primal innocence. –The Guardian In the stunning conclusion to Brian Catling’s Vorrh trilogy, the colonial city of Essenwald gives […]
Read MoreThe Merry Spinster, Mallory Ortberg
Unfalteringly faithful to its beloved source material, The Merry Spinster also illuminates the unsuspected, and frequently, alarming emotional complexities at play in the stories we tell ourselves, and each other, as we tuck ourselves in for the night. Goodreads Review Back to GoodReads
Read MoreThe Strange Bird, Jeff VanderMeer
Pretty much anything Jeff VanderMeer writes is strange, fascinating, and creates a sense of wonder that many of us adults have lost since we were kids. I sure have felt a big revival of spirit and wonder when reading his stories–and it’s really refreshing and fun, yet also seriously exploratory […]
Read MoreThe End We Start From, Megan Hunter
This novel, published on May 18, 2017, will also be made into a movie by actor Benedict Cumberbatch. Benedict is now excited to turn the book, about a mother and her newborn child who are forced to become refugees after London is flooded due to climate change, into a movie. […]
Read MoreFever Dream, Samanta Schweblin
Translated into English, January 2017–(originally Distancia de rescate), Fever Dream is shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. With virtuoso skill, well served in Megan McDowell’s finely textured translation, Ms Schweblin fuses a study in maternal anxiety with an ecological horror story. –The Economist Fever Dream is a nightmare […]
Read MoreThe Willows, Algernon Blackwood
Discover The Willows Back to the Dragonfly Library I asked the WeirdLit subreddit about their recommendations for ecological weird fiction and received a great number of suggestions. Many of the recs were more like short stories or novellas, rather than novels; to whit, one of them, The Willows, by Algernon […]
Read MoreBorne, Jeff VanderMeer
In Borne, the epic new novel from Jeff VanderMeer, author of the acclaimed, bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy, a young woman named Rachel survives as a scavenger in a ruined, dangerous city of the near future. The city is littered with discarded experiments from the Company—a bio-tech firm now seemingly derelict—and […]
Read MoreJagannath, Karin Tidbeck
Enter the strange and wonderful world of Swedish sensation Karin Tidbeck with this feast of darkly fantastical stories. Whether through the falsified historical record of the uniquely weird Swedish creature known as the “Pyret” or the title story, “Jagannath,” about a biological ark in the far future, Tidbeck’s unique imagination […]
Read MoreThe Other Side of the Mountain, Michael Bernanos
Michael Bernanos’s The Other Side of the Mountain is an awesome book, which I ordered used. The genre is weird fiction–I learned of the book from author Jeff VanderMeer whose Southern Reach trilogy I’m enjoying. He and his wife Ann edited an anthology called Weird, which included The Other Side […]
Read MoreMaya Greenwood Series, Starhawk
The Fifth Sacred Thing (part 1) An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads Walking to Mercury […]
Read MoreLady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 33, Michael J. DeLuca (editor)
Thanks to Michael J. DeLuca for the heads-up on Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 33, which he guest-edited. LCRW #33 approaches its theme of humanity’s relationship with the earth with a little humor, a touch of horror, and seventeen different kinds of understanding. Includes multiple award winner Sofia Samatar, Nebula […]
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