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I view Ford as a writer who has perhaps strung together the most enviable body of work in the last couple of years when regarding both novels and short fiction. This is my favorite of his novels. Fantasy authors (authors in general) have an understandable attraction to artisan characters and Piambo is the most memorable in recent years for me. At the heart of it, it’s really applying fantasy to survey fantasy - and that’s damn cool. |
A quintessential example of a book that if one completes their reading of it, it’s very difficult not to admire on some level. It’s different, which doesn’t necessitate quality, but for me this is how horror (and that is an extreme over simplification of what this book is) should be. Demanding, not cheap; indeed it feel like an accomplishment after reading it like it did when I finished Eco’s Focault’s Pendulum in high school. It feels oddly like Borges and Joyce at the same time, and that’s a combination that merits a read. Has become the standard I gauge subsequent horror against. |
What do you get when you have a book with Sherlock Holmes, Archimedes, Arthur Conan Doyle, Nikola Tesl and Stephen Hawking among others in alternate worlds with Buddhist temples and feminist, self-aware computers? One of the best SF novels in recent years. |
This is not a comprehensive collection but it does have 90+ stories by an author who gets slighted (along with Moorcock) by being called among the best SF writers of the all time - they are in fact among the best writers of fiction of the second half of the 20th century. |
The loose sequel to one of the best novels I have read (Mother London), it doesn’t reach near the heights of its predecessor. It probably suffers from being episodic, perhaps too real in this regard but this is an idea book Moorcock is known to write every decade or so to show us what will be standard a decade or later by the best young writers. |
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This is a collection that until recently I was unaware of. Surreal, absurd, and most importantly he knows when a story is done. Vukcevich plays with the entire emotional spectrum with a collection that I wish I had lauded when it came out - as I could probably claim brilliance now. |
On the Road and Lovecraftian Cthullu. No, no, no! This is Kerouac and Lovecraftian Cthullu - a much more admirable accomplishment, and as the Kerouac title suggest these elements are just the means not the goal, something other Cthullu inspired writers should take note of. |
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Anytime a guy (or a girl) writes a book about comic book creators and it wins the Pulitzer we owe it to our ourselves to talk about it as much as possible. So I did. Everybody knows about this book already so next… |
One can almost pick any Joyce novel written in the allotted time period (and perhaps I did), this one happens to be one of my favorites. Something one would think would be standard in a skill set for a writer is to be able to write characters of both sexes with some degree of diversity and believability. This isn’t the case (particularly in Fantasy), but Joyce is an absolute master at this and shown so in several novels. If you slapped some frames on this bad boy you would have an acute picture of life on the wall. Joyce never disappoints. When I was in high school we called people like this fiends. |
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