The second essay in Ballantine Adult Fantasy: A Reading Series, which looks at E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922): a complex, challenging, rewarding, hero-obsessed novel.
Tag: Genre: Fantasy
Reading “Land of Precious Snow” by Thaddeus Tuleja
Thaddeus Tuleja's Land of Precious Snow (1977) is a fantasy-adjacent historical fiction novel about religious and spiritual experience, disaffection with modernity, and an American adventurer seeking new meaning in 1890s Tibet—a novel that captures counterculture's dissident feelings toward life in postwar America.
Reading “The Fairy of Ku-She” by M. Lucie Chin
M. Lucie Chin's The Fairy of Ku-She (1988) is an expert work of historical fantasy, a fascinating, achingly beautiful, and brilliantly conceived novel that intermixes Chinese history, mythology, and fairy tale in an impressive tapestry that offers a wide range of critiques of genre, gender, power, and social order.
Ballantine Adult Fantasy: Reading “The Last Unicorn” by Peter S. Beagle
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.
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 “The Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales” by Nicholas Jubber
Nicholas Jubber’s The Fairy Tellers steps into the world of fairy tales that are well-known across the West to recover the stories behind those tales’ tellers, but in doing so obscures the scholarship that made this book possible.
Reading “Black Powder War” by Naomi Novik (Temeraire 3)
Naomi Novik's third book in the Temeraire series, Black Powder War, takes readers to the Ottoman and German empires during the Napoleonic wars, but fails to explore its subject in interesting ways and leans heavily into Orientalist tropes.
Reading “Shadowdale” by Richard Awlinson [Scott Ciencin] (Forgotten Realms / Avatar 1)
The Forgotten Realms novel Shadowdale marks the beginning of a major event in the franchise's storyworld and, despite it being somewhat of an eye-rolling chore to read, it offers some promising elements for the rest of the series.
Reading “Juniper” by Monica Furlong (Doran 1)
Monica Furlong's Juniper is a beautiful, powerful novel of girlhood and community in ancient Cornwall that transcends its position as middle-grade fiction and demonstrates why Furlong's magical fictions of the ancient Celtic world, told from the perspective of women's experiences, deserve another look.
Reading “Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey” by Gordon Doherty
Gordon Doherty's novelization of the Assassin's Creed: Odyssey video game wonderfully demonstrates everything aesthetically and narratively wrong with so much franchise fiction.
Genre Fantasies 