Skip to content
Answering Your Questions About Reactor: Right here.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Everything in one handy email.
When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

The Los Angeles Times published an interesting piece a few days ago by a writer named David Ulin entitled Letter from New York: St. Mark’s Bookshop.

If anyone has any doubt that genre fiction has crossed over—not just into the mainstream but also into more alternative corners of the culture—New York’s St. Mark’s Bookshop offers indisputable proof. I made a quick visit there this morning, and a good half of the featured new and noteworthy titles were mystery and science fiction: Walter Mosley’s Blonde Faith, the anthologies Manhattan Noir 2 and Steampunk—all on the shelves where volumes of Lacan and Derrida used to preside.

Ulin concludes with

This, it seems to me, is the real draw of books—not escapism but real (if temporary) escape. If the scene at St. Mark’s this morning is any indication, I’m not the only one who needs that in the midst of these confusing days.

Ulin makes me want to drop everything and head for the nearest excellent old bookstore to look for a door into a better world.

The LA Times also has a piece by Geoff Boucher on the reissue of Christopher Priest’s Inverted World.

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Kathryn Cramer

Author

Kathryn Cramer is a writer, critic, and anthologist presently co-editing the Year's Best Fantasy and Year's Best SF series with her husband David G. Hartwell.

Kathryn Cramer is editor or co-editor of over two dozen science fiction and fantasy anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award-winning The Architecture of Fear (1987, with Peter D. Pautz). With David G. Hartwell, she also co-edited many volumes of the annual Year's Best SF and Year's Best Fantasy annuals. She is also a co-founder of the New York Review of Science Fiction, and the author of a small but distinguished body of short SF and fantasy fiction.

Learn More About Kathryn
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
4 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments