Borne Jeff VanderMeer Farrar, Straus and Giroux Release Date: April 25, 2017 ISBN 978-0-3741-1524-1 Jeff VanderMeer is an author who defies easy categorization. His fiction is easier to describe by adjective rather than genre: strange, complex, unsettling, and yet familiar, affecting, literate. Of Annihilation, the first book in his Southern […]
Idle Ingredients A Sin du Jour Affair- Book 4 Matt Wallace Tor.com Release Date: February 7, 2017 ISBN 978-0-7653-9003-5 Idle Ingredients is the fourth book in the Sin du Jour series, which follows the exploits of a premiere paranormal catering company based in Long Island. These quick, witty novellas by […]
The Last Days of New Paris China Miéville Del Rey Release Date: August 9, 2016 ISBN 978-0-34554-399-8 I adore China Miéville’s writing; it delights and confounds me in equal measure. For some reason, he can get away with making me feel absolutely lost and yet firmly tucked into wherever he […]
Envy of Angels Matt Wallace Tor.com Release Date: October 20, 2015 ISBN 978-0-7653-8528-4 What a strange, perverse, hilarious and utterly entertaining little book this is! Sin du Jour is a private catering and events company based in Long Island City. Run by Chef Byron “Bronko” Luck, a former purveyor of […]
The Brotherhood of the Wheel R. S. Belcher Tor Books Release Date: March 1, 2016 ISBN 978-0-7653-8028-9 I grew up in the 1970s, mostly in small towns in the Midwest. The truckers that would go rumbling down the highways that invariably transected our tiny burgs were legendary in their mystique. […]
Fellside M. R. Carey Orbit Release Date: April 5, 2016 ISBN 978-0-316-30028-5 Just what is Fellside, the newest novel from The Girl With All the Gifts author M. R. Carey? Is it a horror story set inside a women’s penitentiary? A ghost story of elusive redemption? A legal thriller where […]
Witches of Lychford Paul Cornell Tor.com Release Date: September 8, 2015 ISBN 978-0-7653-8523-9 The first look might throw you. Witches of Lychford is not a large book – only 133 reading pages – but author Paul Cornell, a veteran of writing for comic books and Doctor Who novels, knows how […]
Slade House David Mitchell Random House Release Date: October 27, 2015 ISBN 978-0-8129-9868-9 David Mitchell is an amazing novelist (NPR reviewer Jason Sheehan calls his writing “beautifully twisty.” I like that.) With unique works such as Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks under his belt, the question is, what does […]
Doctor Sleep Stephen King Scribner Release Date: September 24, 2013 ISBN 978-1-4767-2765-3 Another encore review of one of our favorite horror novels! Happy Halloween! I think I’ve said a number of times that horror stories simply aren’t my genre of choice, in books or movies, or what have you. I’m […]
The Coldest Girl in Coldtown Holly Black Little, Brown Books Release Date: September 3, 2013 ISBN: 978-0-31621-310-3 In honor of the upcoming Halloween holiday, here is a slightly updated review of one of our favorite spooky novels. Enjoy! Now THIS is what a vampire tale should be like. […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.