by Sergei Lebedev I don’t think I can stress enough the importance of actually getting to the heart of your story in your synopsis. If that little summary on the back of your book sets people up for the wrong expectations, it can really affect the amount of enjoyment readers glean from your story. The…
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by James Alan Gardner I didn’t actually know who James Gardner was until attending the 2015 Ad Astra science fiction and fantasy writers’ convention, where I had the pleasure of sitting in on several author panels in which he participated. Despite the clear knowledge he displayed within the intelligent discussions I witnessed, nothing really made…
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by John Pringle Though it’s been some time since I’ve had the pleasure of reading one of Pringle’s short story collections, Spirals starts in a very familiar way, with his story, A Good Boy. Not only was this the only one in the collection that I’d read previously, it’s also a contest-winning story––the 2014 Northwestern…
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by Agatha Christie Given that the only other Agatha Christie mystery I’ve had the pleasure of reading was Murder on the Orient Express, I can’t really help but compare it to And Then There Were None. While I definitely enjoyed Orient Express, And Then There Were None was a very clear improvement over it, though…
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by Graham Greene Imagine it now: A virile, young man wanders around the book store. Having recently finished Greene’s marvelous Our Man in Havana, he casually glances to see what else the author may have for him to enjoy, only to find that he wrote Orient Express. Of course, it wasn’t until after purchasing it…
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by Sean Michaels It feels like I’ve recently been struggling quite a bit to write my reviews, but usually that has something to do with getting to the heart of what I feel about the books I’m reading and why. Oftentimes, I’ll have difficulties when there are objective problems with a story, but I still…
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by Madeleine Thien My first encounter with Do Not Say We Have Nothing was when I saw it on the Giller long list. Out of all the presumably great stories that made the list, the synopsis held my interest the most. Thien’s book follows a group of people as they struggle through the Chinese Cultural…
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by Cordelia Strube In my final review related to the International Festival of Authors, something that hasn’t happened since I think The Fault in Our Stars repeated itself. You see, all the characters in On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light have very clear voices, but one in particular had the wrong one initially….
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by Mike Barnes The Adjustment League follows The Super, our dangerous and somewhat mentally unbalanced narrator. While his condition leaves him catatonic every November, he fights for those who can’t defend themselves in his functional moments––“adjustments,” as he calls it. When a call for help sends him to investigate the mistreatment of a dementia patient,…
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by Michael Martineck You can see the influence of authors such as Ray Bradbury and George Orwell on a work like The Milkman, but I suppose most science fiction can probably trace back to both of these authors. (Speaking with Martineck at this year’s When Words Collide, he mentioned the influences of Philip K. Dick…
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