K.J. Bishop’s 2003 debut The Etched City launched to an insane amount of praise from some of fantasy’s most prestigious authors and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. A decadent novel in the literal and literary sense, tinged with weird Western tropes, Bishop crafted a new world peopled with gunslingers, mad scientists, and exotic monsters. But none of the colorful killers residing in the city of Ashamoil—Bishop’s New Crobuzon, her Amber—were as dangerous as an artist shaping reality from dreams.
That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote, a collection of nineteen stories spanning the Australian writer’s career from her earliest sales to works published here for the first time, is a menagerie of marvels. (And at the time of this writing, it just won the Aurealis Award for Best Collection.) The prose is atmospheric, wry, and challenging. Fans of unconventional fantasy will be pleased if they are willing to trust in Bishop’s authorial vision and follow it down some very surreal avenues.
The Choice
You needed some Star Wars news today, didn’t you? Obviously you did!
Welcome to the 
As the movie adaptation of Max Brooks’s blockbuster novel approaches—it’s finally due out in U.S. theaters this Friday—I’m keeping an open mind. The movie might be great, or it might be just mediocre, and there’s a decent chance it’ll stink on ice. But the one thing I’m not expecting is for it to be very much like the book on which it’s based.
Have you always wanted to read a sequel to 
Georgette Heyer always claimed to dislike the mystery novels she had churned out on a regular basis prior to World War II. In part, this was thanks to ongoing struggles with that publisher—while also noting that her mystery publishers were doing a better job of promoting her works than her historical publishers were. In part, it may have been the ongoing tendency among literary critics to regard mysteries and other genre fiction as somehow lesser than mainstream literary fiction—a convenient way to place Georgette Heyer, who continued to long for literary acceptance, into that “lesser” category. In part it may also have been that at least some of her mystery novels were collaborated with her husband, who usually supplied murder methods and motives, which partly helps explain why some of these novels turn on obscure points of inheritance law—Rougier was a barrister.
“The Forsaken”
