The first essay in Ballantine Adult Fantasy: A Reading Series, which looks at Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968): a supremely beautiful, memorable, and critically energizing masterwork of fantasy.
Category: Genre Fantasies
Ballantine Adult Fantasy: A Reading Series
This is the landing page and index for my Ballantine Adult Fantasy (BAF) essay series, a lengthy quest to (re)read all of the novels published by Ballantine Books as part of their effort to court readers and create a market for fantasy in the wake of Tolkien’s mass market success in the mid-1960s.
Reading “SeeSaw Girl” by Linda Sue Park
Linda Sue Park's 1999 first novel SeeSaw Girl is a melancholy study of gender and coming-of-age in seventeenth-century Joseon Korea, with glimpses of European travelers, elite life, painting, embroidery, and how we make do with what we can—oh, and just how awesome Korean seesaws are!
Reading “A Single Shard” by Linda Sue Park
Linda Sue Park's Newbery Medal-winning 2001 novel A Single Shard is mundane, quiet, cerebral, and touching. One of the few novels from my childhood I regularly return to, it is a brilliant, emotional examination of pottery, poverty, and community in 13th century Korea.
Playing “Black Book” (2021)
Developer Morteshka's masterpiece Black Book is a Russian folk horror fantasy game thick with culture and history, with memory and belief; beautiful, heart-breaking, entrancing, and more, it is at once intoxicatingly real and hauntingly fantastical.
Reading “I AM AI” by Ai Jiang
Ai Jiang's I AM AI is a powerful, multi-award-nominated novelette that reawakens the cyberpunk ethos of an earlier sff generation and makes readable a whole host of issues composing our polycrisis, not the least of which is generative AI and its impact on (and abuse of) human creative labor.
Reading “Capitalism: A Horror Story: Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side of the Radical Imagination” by Jon Greenaway
John Greenaway's Capitalism: A Horror Story is a careful, clever, and thorough work of Marxist and especially Marxist utopian theory, offering a history of the Gothic Marxist intellectual tradition and careful readings of circa two dozens horror films and novels that raises questions about the politics of genre.
Reading “The Hittites” by Damien Stone and “Nubia” by Sarah M. Schellinger (Lost Civilizations)
This essay responds to two recent introductory histories of two fascinating, and very different, ancient civilizations: Damien Stone's The Hittites and Sarah M. Schellinger's Nubia, which published by Reaktion in the Lost Civilizations series. The essay makes the case for why genre studies needs to read ancient history.
Reading “Empire of Ivory” by Naomi Novik (Temeraire 4)
Naomi Noviks’s Empire of Ivory (2007), the fourth novel in the Temeraire series, leads to some reflections on narrative and worldbuilding strategies in alternate history, some concerns about the series's politics (or lack thereof), and prompts the question: when do you give up on a series?
Reading “African History for Beginners” by Herb Boyd
Herb Boyd’s African History for Beginners (1991) may not be an African history worth reading for African history, but it is an important, illustrative, and eccentrically illustrated example of an attempt to create a popular history textbook in the Afrocentric mold for a mass audience.
Genre Fantasies 