Monday, September 21st, 2009
The In-Between, by R. A. MacAvoy
About the only thing I know about R. A. MacAvoy is that she’s female. Apparently she was born in my (former) neck of the woods in 1949, and attended Case Western Reserve University. This, apparently, allows her to make Cleveland jokes. (It’s okay. The Browns are enough of a joke for most of us.) She [...]
No Comments » - Posted in book reviews,fantasy by Stephanie
Monday, May 18th, 2009
Angelic, by Kelley Armstrong
A little over a year ago, I decided to read everything that Kelley Armstrong had published at that point, being that I’d been recommended her works by so many different places so many times, and in general I quite enjoy the genre she writes (urban fantasy, whatever you’d like to call it). So I read [...]
No Comments » - Posted in book reviews,fantasy by Stephanie
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
The Skylark, by Peter Straub
Peter Straub is a Wisconsinite; he was born and raised in Milwaukee and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison for his undergraduate education. He has a master’s degree from Columbia University, and at least started a Ph.D. in Dublin. He’s apparently a famous writer of poetry and horror novels; the latter have won him several Bram [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in book reviews,fantasy,horror by Stephanie
Friday, April 10th, 2009
Collected Stories, by Lewis Shiner
Ahh, Lewis Shiner. The man who convinced me that I never want to move to Durham, NC (the same way that Slumdog Millionaire made me not want to visit India). Born in Eugene, OR in 1950, he moved around a lot as a kid, and read science fiction and adventure novels. One of Bob Dylan’s [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in alternate history,book reviews,contemporary,fantasy,historical fiction,horror,science fiction,suspense/thriller by Stephanie
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Woods and Waters Wild, by Charles de Lint
Charles de Lint — one of my favorite authors, if you hadn’t guessed, and one I’ve reviewed quite a few books by (here’s one) — has been slowly but steadily publishing his hard-to-find back catalog of short stories in four volumes, all wonderfully done by Subterranean Press. I pre-order these months in advance, and am [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in book reviews,fantasy by Stephanie
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
The Ladies of Nell Gwynne’s, by Kage Baker
I actually very much liked the first three or four Company books by Kage Baker. I remember most of her biography, too: she lives in California, knows more about Elizabethan England than is healthy, and has done a good deal of theatre in her day. Her Company series, which starts with In the Garden of [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in book reviews,science fiction by Stephanie
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
Skeleton in the Closet and Other Stories, by Robert Bloch
Robert Bloch is probably best known for writing the novel Psycho, that would eventually become the most famous Hitchcock thriller of all time, but he also wrote a lot of other novels, stories, essays, and other forms. He was a protege of H. P. Lovecraft, probably one of the greatest horror writers of the century, [...]
No Comments » - Posted in book reviews,fantasy,horror,science fiction by Stephanie
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
The Last Science Fiction Writer, by Allen Steele
[Happy birthday, Ben!] Subterranean Press has introduced me to quite a large amount of the science-fiction authors of the 1980s and 1990s that I missed the first time around, either due to youth or a predilection for fantasy over sci-fi. I’ve enjoyed every bit of it. This, which appears to be Allen Steele’s fifth collection [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in book reviews,science fiction by Stephanie
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
The Best of Michael Swanwick, by Michael Swanwick
Today’s short story collection, with a title like “The Best of,” represents another kind of short story collection: the retrospective, or career-spanning collection. These stories represent twenty-seven years’ worth of Michael Swanwick’s career, including five Hugo-Award-winning stories produced over the span of only six years. Mr. Swanwick is, according to his blurb, one of the [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in book reviews,fantasy,horror,science fiction by Stephanie
Friday, August 29th, 2008
Nick and the Glimmung, by Philip K. Dick
One of these days, I really need to read a ‘real’ book by PKD. I’ve read his screen treatment of one of his novels (reviewed here) and then this book, and the works of some of his friends, and of course I’ve seen Blade Runner and Minority Report, but I’ve never actually read any of [...]