Though I love many types of fiction and nonfiction, my
favorite stories involve time travel. The combination of exciting action and
emotional drama puts these stories at the top of my list, year in and year out.
When I read This Is
How You Lose the Time War, I was instantly sucked in. A sci-fi romance
about two combatants in a never-ending war who strike up an unlikely
correspondence, this book revolves around themes of suffering, redemption, and
the power of love to heal the deepest of wounds.
Not only that, but it’s also written
in gorgeous, lyrical language, with a phrase or a sentence I lingered over on
every page.
The ending caught me totally by surprise, and my guess is it’ll do
the same to you.
WINNER OF The Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella, the Reddit Stabby Award for Best Novella AND The British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novella
SHORTLISTED FOR 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award The Ray Bradbury Prize Kitschies Red Tentacle Award Kitschies Inky Tentacle Brave New Words Award
'A fireworks display from two very talented storytellers' Madeline Miller, author of Circe
Co-written by two award-winning writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It…
A
novel about the music industry might seem a strange choice for me. Though I
love music, I've never played an instrument (except air guitar), and I find stories
of rock stars' misbehavior tedious at best. But a friend urged me to read this
book, and I'm glad I listened.
Yes,
it's about the music industry, with a varied cast of characters (artists,
producers, and more). But it's also about issues I connected with instantly:
pursuing one's dreams, finding one's voice, making one's way in life, work, and
love.
Creative language use matters to me, and Egan's prose knocked me out, as
when she describes lifelong friends "staring at each
other's new faces, our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood." Who
would think to use "rinsed" here? Genius!
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2010
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.
We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in…
I’m
an English teacher, so in addition to reading lots of literature, I read lots
of books about literature. These are
frequently brilliant and important – but they’re also, for the most part,
deathly dull. Academic prose is engineered for analysis, not artistry; it often
strikes deep, but it seldom catches fire.
In
the case of Happy Neighborhood, it
does both. That’s because, in this 2023 book of essays, stories, and poems
about American literature, living in Florida, and adopting a son, Hallock
combines the academic with the personal in surprising and moving ways.
I’ll be
honest: some chapters might seem too specialized for some readers. But taken as
a whole, this book restored my faith in a creative artist’s ability to breathe
new life into tired, overused forms.
Happy Neighborhood explores through poetry and prose the cultivation of contented place. How must men in particular sift through the rewards, and belabored grudges, of their own childhoods in order to move productively forward? These thoughtful, carefully crafted meditations seek to define happiness at home. The poems begin with daily walks, often with a dog, to the waterfront park near the author's house in St. Petersburg, Florida. The essays, in dialog with the verse, explore the personal, literary, cultural, and historical questions that prompted the poems. Hallock's influences and reading are wide ranging, though he draws especially from seventeenth-century devotional…
Miriam
Randle works for LifeTime, a private law enforcement agency that uses
short-term time travel to prevent crimes from happening. Though a seasoned time
traveler, she is haunted by the death of her twin brother, whose murder remains
unsolved years later.
When
a routine assignment ends in a tragedy by Miriam’s hand, she finds herself
mixed up in a conspiracy involving the highest levels of LifeTime. Forced to
flee into the past with her partner, Miriam races to unravel the truth before
it’s too late.
But the past is filled with horrors Miriam would rather forget…
including her brother’s killer.
