Review: “Lost Objects: Stories” by Marian Womack: Endings and Beginnings in Womack’s "Lost Objects"

These days it is timely to be in mourning. So many people feel adrift and confused as if they have lost something intangible but precious. And perhaps they have. Jobs, relationships, even hope for the future — today, all of these shimmer and flash with the dangerous light of precarity. As so many of the characters in […]

Review: “Monster Portraits” by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar

This review is for Monster Portraits written by Sofia Samatar and illustrated by Del Samatar, which is out this week from Rose Metal Press. We’re also featuring an excerpt from Monster Portraits that readers can check out. — The Editors Monster Portraits, by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar, explores the monster as a symbol of otherness. Through haunting, evocative […]

Hyenas, Horses, and Rabbits, Oh My!: A Read Along Journey through the Leonora Carrington Century

Fans of Leonora Carrington’s weird and fantastic fiction had their wishes met last April. In celebration of the Surrealist’s centennial (she would have been 100 on April 6th), the literary world has come together to bring most of her catalog back in print, alongside a new evaluation of her life. In the U.S., Dorothy, A Publishing Project […]

Review: “A Natural History of Hell” by Jeffrey Ford

A demon is exorcised from a toe, a recovering addict takes on an ancient magus, an author is exposed to the strange totemic power of words, and a ruthless industrialist reaps what he sows during his foray into an unusual form of engineering.  These are some of the ludicrous and unsettling delights to be found in Jeffrey Ford’s […]

Portals, Labyrinths, Seeds: A Review of “The Deep Zoo” by Rikki Ducornet

Within a writer’s life, words, just as things, acquire powers,” writes Rikki Ducornet in the opening pages of The Deep Zoo, and the book itself unfolds as an exquisite exploration of such words, such things, such powers. It contains fifteen lucid and erudite essays on a kaleidoscopic array of subjects: natural history, fairy tales, the madness of […]

B. Catling’s “The Vorrh”

Catling’s The Vorrh, previously published in England and released in the U.S. from Vintage this month, is not shy about announcing its ambitions. Before we reach the first chapter, we have been greeted by epigraphs from Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Rudyard Kipling’s “Gertrude’s Prayer,” as well as two […]