Open the Line
A late-night Pittsburgh radio host has built an eleven-year career interviewing the dead on air, while everyone argues over whether he's a fraud. It's real, and one night the line opens for the one voice he's spent his whole career…
Tag: Fantasy Fiction (Page 2)
AugustRay Bradbury Day: The Illustrated Man Got Me for Life
Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and The Illustrated Man, the book that hooked me for life. On his birthday, a look at the lyrical, humane science fiction that took hold of me and never let go.
Character DevelopmentHobbit Day
Hobbit Day is September 22. What Tolkien's hobbits teach about character and worldbuilding, an honest take from a writer who never read The Hobbit.
AdaptationNational Tolkien Reading Day
National Tolkien Reading Day is March 25. The boxed set I saved for, the boring opening I almost quit, the eagles plot hole, and what Tolkien taught me.
Book ReviewsThe Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
The leper Thomas Covenant is pulled into a magical Land he refuses to believe is real, in one of epic fantasy's most ambitious and uncompromising works. A radical inversion of the genre built on a deliberately unlikable hero: brilliant and…
Book ReviewsA Game of Thrones
The fight for the Iron Throne, woven through many viewpoints in a world where no character is safe. Sprawling, morally complex, and ruthlessly unsentimental, the first of A Song of Ice and Fire and the book that redefined modern epic…
Book ReviewsThe Golden Compass
Young Lyra Belacqua crosses a parallel world of armored bears, witches, and soul-companion daemons toward the mystery of Dust. The first of His Dark Materials: intelligent, daring, and morally serious, a fantasy that respects its young readers and trusts them…
Book ReviewsHarry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
The phenomenon-launching first novel, introducing Harry, Hogwarts, and a wizarding world that captivated a generation. A masterclass in immersive world-building, warmth, and page-turning momentum, aimed at young readers but beloved by all ages. The book that got millions of children…
Book ReviewsThe Poppy War
An ambitious, powerful, genuinely disturbing grimdark fantasy debut, bold in its grounding in real twentieth-century Chinese history. Held back by a familiar academy-and-chosen-one structure and by content so extreme, including genocide and sexual violence drawn from real atrocities, that it…
Book ReviewsThe Dictionary of Imaginary Places
Over a thousand fictional lands, Middle-earth, Oz, Atlantis, described as if they were real geography, with genuine wit and scholarship. A pure pleasure for literature lovers and a real world-building study for writers at the same time. It does something…
AdaptationThe Art of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Tolkien did not just write Middle-earth; he drew it, mapped it, and lettered it, and this collects 180-plus of his own sketches, maps, and inscriptions. The writer's lesson is the cartography: he wrote against his maps to keep the world…
Book ReviewsThe Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth
A handbook to Tolkien's fourteen invented languages, built on a golden principle: languages first, world grown around them. The trouble is it is decades out of date and in places simply wrong on Elvish grammar. A useful doorway to how…