The virtues of Karen Russell’s novel Swamplandia! have already been extolled in this column, and I am happy to report that her new short story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, is tailor-made for fans of both magical realism and horror. Employing intensely awkward humor (think The Office) and melding it with dark sensibilities (think Poe), she’s written a book that belongs on your shelf next to Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and Bas-Lag-era China Mieville. Russell’s subjects have grown up a bit—there are teenagers, but there are also dead presidents, ancient vampires, a middle-aged divorcé. And while Swamplandia! had plenty of darkness, the creepy factor has been dialed up here to the point where you might consider not reading certain stories after dusk.
May 22, 2013
Super Bass
Is Gian’s love for the Summer King stronger than his hate?
May 15, 2013
The Button Man and the Murder Tree
An all-new Wild Cards story
May 14, 2013
Shall We Gather
When one world brushes another, asking the right question can be magic…
May 8, 2013
Fire Above, Fire Below
The dragon below our city has died. What is to be done?
Feb 12 2013 12:00pm
Oct 9 2012 2:00pm
Every now and then you discover a new author just before their first book comes out. You read their work and are bowled over by it. And then you get to be the first one to tell everyone about it! At least, if you’re lucky.
Keeping this in mind, you’ll understand that I could not be more pleased to introduce you to Marie-Helene Bertino’s debut short story collection, Safe as Houses. In its pages, characters catch glimpses of their younger selves at stoplights and go on dates with idealized versions of their exes. Robbers steal macaroni valentines, and salesmen peddle beating human hearts. Flocks of hummingbirds manifest in the middle of shopping malls. An alien faxes notes on humanity back home. Bob Dylan comes to Thanksgiving dinner.
Taking the surreal as a given, these stories spin the world around and make the familiar new again.
Sep 11 2012 1:00pm
Victor LaValle is no stranger to the supernatural, disturbed minds, or the borough of Queens! His first two novels, Big Machine and The Ecstatic, are set in Queens and include cult-survivors, paranormal investigations, and schizophrenia. But it would be a mistake to think that his new novel The Devil in Silver and companion novella Lucretia and the Kroons are covering the same ground. With these, LaValle leaves the plausible dark comedy behind and dives deep into the modern gothic novel.
Jul 24 2012 1:00pm
Politics and fiction can be a powerful combination; classics like Wells’ The Time Machine, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Brin’s Uplift series, all orbit around recognizable political quandaries. You can even see it on television (Battlestar Galactica, I am looking at you). But few authors chose to set these stories in the present, in our own world — a little distance, a new galaxy, a future time, these are almost de riguer.
In her debut novel (she’s written graphic novels before) Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson has chosen to buck the trend, meshing the world of information technology with the mystical aspects of Islam and contemporary life to weird and captivating effect. I spent half the book thinking, “Where can this possibly go now?”, only to find out in the next chapter. Alif the Unseen is a true chimera, combining magic and technology, fantasy and sci-fi, the secular and the mystical, literature and genre.
Jun 26 2012 1:00pm
Julia—the narrator of The Age of Miracles—is 11 years old when the world changes forever. It’s October, and time suddenly becomes elastic. One day, for no apparent reason, a day is suddenly 25 hours long. Three days later, 25:37 — and they continue to stretch. The Age of Miracles has the feel of an apocalyptic To Kill a Mockingbird or a more sober True Grit, with a knowing, worldly voice-over guiding the reader through the moment in her childhood that everything changed. Author Karen Thompson Walker takes the traditional literary trope of nostalgia for the timelessness of youth and makes of it a weird, subtly creepy, and engrossing novel in which time itself is a thing to fear.
Apr 10 2012 1:00pm
It’s probably only recently that a novel as stuffed with genre conceits as Ryan Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife could be shelved in the literature section. Quantum computers, neurological hacking, time loops, commercialized cloning, all are solidly on the SF side of the fence. But Boudinot’s author background — McSweeney’s, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Rumpus — and his first novel, Misconception (a coming-of-age story set during the first dot-com boom) swing him back toward the literary world. This combination is what makes Blueprints such a fantastic crossover book. At its heart it is the story of Luke Piper and Nick Fedderly, two brilliant and troubled young men, and how they changed the world — and you couldn’t pull it off without the genre elements.
Mar 8 2012 10:37am
WORD is an independent neighborhood bookstore in Greenpoint, the northernmost neighborhood of Brooklyn, celebrating its fifth anniversary this month. Our goal is to be whatever our community needs us to be, which currently includes hosting events and carrying a carefully curated selection of kids books, nonfiction, and fiction—from all genres.
We also host an old-fashioned dating corkboard called Between the Covers, as well as a Basketball League of which Lev Grossman was once a member! Here are our March picks for science fiction and fantasy titles.
