The year is 1915, and a young man hired to shout the words on title cards for silent films experiences the magic of movies. This spurs him to edit some of the worst dialog, leading him in a weird direction that utterly changes his life.
Sarah Pinsker
Fiction and Excerpts [2]
Two Truths and a Lie
Stella thought she’d made up a lie on the spot, asking her childhood friend if he remembered the strange public broadcast TV show with the unsettling host she and all the neighborhood kids appeared on years ago. But he does remember. And so does her mom. Why doesn’t Stella? The more she investigates the show and the grip it has on her hometown, the eerier the mystery grows.
A Better Way of Saying
Five SFF Books That Showcase Siblings at Their Core
Where do all the siblings go? One of my earliest book memories was of Ida in Maurice Sendak’s Outside Over There taking matters into her own hands to rescue her baby sister, who has been replaced with a changeling (and, in the movies, the well-named Sarah similarly setting off to save her little brother from the clutches of the Goblin King). The Pevensies ruled Narnia together. Meg Murry and her brother Charles Wallace traveled the universe to get their father back in A Wrinkle in Time, their brothers Sandy and Dennys traveled back to biblical times, and all sorts of other adventures befell their family, as well as the other assorted O’Keefes and Austins and their acquaintances. And I adored William Sleator’s Singularity, in which teenage Harry figured out a way to get out from under the shadow of his twin.
All of that drove home what I knew from my own experience: siblings could be maddening, but they were important.
[Here are 5 SFF books built around a rich, gooey, sibling core.]
Series: Five Books About…
Two Truths and a Lie
Stella thought she’d made up a lie on the spot, asking her childhood friend if he remembered the strange public broadcast TV show with the unsettling host she and all the neighborhood kids appeared on years ago. But he does remember. And so does her mom. Why doesn’t Stella? The more she investigates the show and the grip it has on her hometown, the eerier the mystery grows.
How One Book Convinced Me Tomatoes Weren’t Actually My Mortal Enemies (As Previously Thought)
Photo: Heavybluesman
We first need to establish the degree of my childhood aversion to tomatoes. It was fear, not dislike, since I’d never actually tasted one. There wasn’t a single form in which they weren’t scary: I rejected them as ketchup, gazpacho, soup, salsa, sauce, and in their natural form. White pizza only, please, and cream sauce on pasta. My sisters could chase me with a tomato and I would flee in terror—though granted, it was always safer to run if they were chasing me.
I’ve lied to you already. I said it was a childhood aversion, but it lasted until I was thirty.
Five Books That Gave Me Unreasonable Expectations for Post-High School Life
My family moved to Toronto when I was fourteen. At the time, there was still a fifth year of high school required, a series of courses that involved lengthy essays and independent projects. The idea that I’d be graduating a year after my friends back in New York bothered me, and I determined that I would cram the fifth year into the fourth. I’d somewhere absorbed the idea that high school was hell and college (as well as anything else that came after) was better, and I should do everything I could to hasten the change.
Where had I gotten that idea? Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti wasn’t around yet, nor Diana Wynne Jones’ Year of the Griffin, nor Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, nor Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals. Here are five of the books that may have contributed to my rush to leave high school behind.