“When you sell people a dream, he thought, they don’t want to know how the dream works.” Sometimes lifting the veil back from the lesser known and unseen parts of our world offers an escape in to other realities. This is true for Dead Letters as [...]
“They’ve already made waking life a dream and the dreamers into a mushy mass-mind where everyone shares the same dream of being the only one who matters.” Sixteen tales with a Lovecraftian focus explore the otherworldly in bizarre and wonderful [...]
High Dive is a fictionalized account of an actual bombing during the height of IRA activity in England during the mid ‘80s. What was interesting to this reviewer is the way it alternates between the narrative of a young IRA operative (Dan) and [...]
The Monstrous, edited by Ellen Datlow, is a collection of short stories that run the gamut of strange and otherworldly. There are certain stories that tend to stick out from the collection. Jeffrey Ford’s “A Natural History of Autumn” reminds [...]
From author Joy Williams, of such well-known novels as State of Grace, The Changeling, Breaking and Entering, and The Quick and the Dead, comes a collection of well-crafted short stories. These tales examine the human condition, from the [...]
Software engineer Kara Dunn creates a space fighter simulation game that garners a cult following, but not the commercial success that was hoped for. Kara and her friend Viviane are being tracked by government agents working under the direction [...]
Written in a journal-entry style, Coyote, tells the story of a couple’s struggle with their daughter’s disappearance and eventually discovery. The reader is only given the wife’s point of view. Perhaps offering the husband’s perspective as well [...]
The Grand Hotel holds a collection of stories told by interesting characters. Any supernatural elements are subtle as the stories are as important as the characters that tell them. The mysterious and cryptic night clerk guides this tour of the [...]
Christine Zimmerman delves into the daily struggles and triumphs of caring for a grandparent with Alzheimer’s in her book Beyond Forgetting. While young twenty-something Chrissy is struggling to establish her identity and life, her grandfather [...]
Come along on a perilous journey through the Florida Keys as young student activist Ty searches for his old school friend Brad. From the rum-fueled Conch Militia to the shotgun-wielding techno dance party radicals, Runft’s characters fill [...]
By Elaine Fantham Johns Hopkins University Press, $30.00, 338 pages Roman Literary Culture discusses the education of some of Rome’s most well-known and studied figures. Among them are Plautus, Terrence, Cato, Pliny, Hadrian, and Marcus [...]
Pulp Fiction Fun By Ben Langdon Amazon Digital Services, Inc., $2.99, 205 pages This Mutant Life is an interesting collection of twenty-one short stories concerning the lives of various fictionalized heroes and the lives of those people that [...]
Tales to Tickle Your Imagination By Colin Fleming Outpost19, $16.00, 166 pages Dark March holds a collection of tales that take the ordinary events of life and turns them on their heads. From an island that longs for adventure to a [...]
Rediscovering Old Legends By Eytan Halaban Inkwater Press, $15.95, 340 pages The Perfect Wish puts a contemporary spin on a few old legends. Jimmy is an atypical 16 year old boy looking for adventure. His inspiration and guide for this trek is [...]
Biology Uncovered Through Math By Ian Stewart Basic Books 27.99 358 pages “When you’ve made such a huge breakthrough, one that takes you so far in comparison with everything that has gone before, it’s [...]
By Arturo Sangalli Princeton University Press, 184 pages, $14.95 Math and Mystery “Numbers alone might not rule the world of nature created by God, as Pythagoras believed—and in that sense he has been proven wrong—but they increasingly [...]
By David Moody Thomas Dunne Books, $24.99, 336 pages In Them or Us, David Moody’s final book in his Hater trilogy is filled with violence and moment to moment survival. The human condition is seen at its extreme worst. Killing, the consolidation [...]
Character Development By Jon Sanetel What I find most interesting or important in stories, especially in fiction, are the relationships and insights that each character has. It makes for a more vivid and rich world to draw you into the book. A [...]
By Tracy Barrett Henry Holt & Company, $16.99, 261 pages “I had returned to the place that was not, on the day that was not, bearing the thing that was not, and I knew what defined a king.” Tracy Barrett’s King of Ithaka takes [...]
