Fantastic news, months have returned! I read a finite, yet manageable, number of short stories in April, and I am here to tell you about the best of them. Because I am predictable, each story is about some combination of the following themes: the nature of truth flora and fauna living and dying fraught familial relationships Aliette de Bodard’s “The Dragon that Flew Out of the Sun” (3780 words, Uncanny) is one of the first short stories I read in the month of April, and it reminded me of all the reasons I love short fiction. We begin with a…
Leave a CommentTag: Aliette de Bodard
Despite what I may say about the Millions Book Preview (and I do love the Millions Book Preview), the NPR Book Concierge is the true most happiest time of my bookish year. They’ve produced another good one this year, with more books by native authors than maybe I’ve ever seen before. Good job, NPR! Disney princesses reimagined as cement mixers. Here’s what’s going on at Tumblr. Period-tracking apps benefit men, and marketers, and medical companies–not women. What it’s like hearing Anne Carson lecture. This journalist went to a Scholastic book fair and didn’t find it as magical as she remembered…
Leave a CommentI am not trying to antagonize Robert Silverberg or anything, but there are no men in my best-of-October-and-November column. Which is a good reminder of why I am getting so heavily back into speculative fiction after some time spent canoodling with literary fiction: Though the black spec fic and publishing diversity numbers make it very clear that we have a long way to go yet, it is much much easier to find SFF by people who aren’t white or male than when I was a kid trying to discover if SFF wanted me there. And that’s what I’m grateful for,…
Leave a CommentFriends, I am very, very choosy about my “Beauty and the Beast” retellings. To the best of my recollection, the only one that I have ever loved is Robin McKinley’s Beauty.1 I liked Uprooted, but I loved it best when it was doing things other than retelling “Beauty and the Beast.” I hear good things about W. R. Gingell’s Masque, but I am not pinning my hopes on it. So when I tell you that I was blown away by Aliette de Bodard’s novella In the Vanishers’ Palace, a queer retelling of “Beauty and the Beast,” I want you to…
Leave a CommentFor the past few years, I’ve been working on making my reading less white. As Aarti keeps pointing out, this doesn’t require any shift in my book-reading habits, but only my book-finding habits. And one thing I have found is that if you follow more authors of color (on whatever social media platforms you wish), you’ll find more authors of color. I discovered Aliette de Bodard because I followed Zen Cho (author of Sorcerer to the Crown); since following Aliette de Bodard, I’ve added several more specfic books by authors of color to my TBR list. Because of signal-boosting. THAT…
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