August 1, 2014
Reviews: August 1st 2014
Summer’s a busy time, especially if you’ve bought your first first house, moved, thrown three consecutive birthday parties and gone for a 10-day at the cottage…. but there is always time for flash fiction! Here’s a review of a handful of them over at Apex Magazine.
July 17, 2014
Reviews July 17th 2014
My enthusiasm for these stories sometimes doesn’t come through as strongly as I’d like, but I swear to you, the three stories I analyzed this week all made me VERY enthusiastic! One of these days I will write some reviews with a lot more hyperbole and exclamation marks – I will.
Anyway, read my reviews this week at Apex Magazine, and then read the stories! Or the other way around, if you choose. You won’t regret it!
July 3, 2014
Reviews, July 3rd 2014!
Sometimes your world ends, but life goes on… a little essay in the form of reviews up at Apex Magazine!
June 19, 2014
Reviews June 19th 2014
Is this just an excuse to embed a YouTube video? No! I reviewed some great works about love, loss & memory over at Apex Magazine. Check ’em!
June 13, 2014
“Fold” Free Online!
My story “Fold” from Lucky or Unlucky? 13 Stories of Fate has been made available for free online at SFFWorld as of this morning! If you’ve always wondered what kind of fiction I write but didn’t want to spend $0.99 to find out, here’s your chance!
Or you could buy the whole anthology, with proceeds going to the UK Children’s Hospice…
June 6, 2014
Reviews, June 6th 2014
Once again, catch my reviews over at Apex Magazine! Highlights: World’s Creepiest Unicorn, plagues of birds, the existentialism of bunkers.
May 8, 2014
Reviews May 8th 2014
My short story reviews are up at Apex Magazine. This week, some exploration of what really makes a “hopeless situation” and how a protagonist reacts. Read here!
March 13, 2014
In which I change place, talk about place
With ChiZine.com refocussing to feature their own publications, the folks at Apex Magazine have been good enough to host my short story review column, Clavis Aurea. The first installment is out today – check it out! Every second Thursday from now on.
February 6, 2014
Want to be a Bookseller for a Day?
There is some excellent discussion over at E. Catherine Tobler’s blog about reading women, something we should all be doing more. There is nothing new under the sun: this issue comes up all the time (as it should), and in particular I remember the furor that followed this article in the Guardian three years ago. We all swore up and down to read more women, and some excellent people swore to read only women to make up for it.
Do we? Well. A cursory look at my most recent reads on Goodreads reveals I’m sitting at about 50%, which is good, but I still feel disconnected. I force myself to read a lot of women when I am reading “good for me” books. Capital-L Literature. I need to read George Eliot just as badly as I need to read Thomas Hardy. But when people ask me who I love best? Those writers I will reach for each and every time I can? All men. Eco, Dumas, Stephenson, Chabon, Murakami. My favourite books are all written by men. Tolstoy, Peake, Herbert, Heller. I am a terrible cheerleader for women’s writing.
But this wasn’t always the case. When I was deep into reading fantasy and mythic fiction in the late 90s and early ’00s, every single book I loved was by a woman.
Every. Single. One.
What happened? How did I fail to keep up? Now, ten, fifteen years later, I don’t know who else came up to join the women whose writing I once loved. A lot of the women I used to read have retired, vanished, or died. The new generation seems to be writing YA. I am tired of reading about teenagers.
So I put this to the crowd. I have made a list below of the books I loved as a young woman. Can you recommend anything to me that I might love now? I hardly remember the books, aside from that I loved them – and it is possible that my tastes have matured and changed. That might explain why, for example, I feel such a strong attraction to alt historical novels, and yet I hated Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon. Maybe I have moved on? Or maybe not. Try me.
The Mabinogion Tetralogy by Evangeline Walton
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
The Wood Wife by Terri Windling
Tam Lin by Pamela Dean
The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson
The Innamorati by Midori Snyder
The Stars Dispose by Michaela Roessner
The Moon and the Sun by Vonda McIntyre
The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells
The Shadow of Albion by Andre Norton & Rosemary Edghill