I love fantasy novels because they highlight the disparities between reality and individual perception, whether between the reader and the text or among the characters within it. All the books I listed pull the reader from the actual into the fantastic world I prefer! This is probably why I spent my time as an author, editor, and professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, teaching courses in comparative mythology, medieval literature, and the works of J. R. R. Tolkien.
I loved Mary Norton’s book for its narrative hook: size. This is Gulliver’s Lilliput without the satiric political overtones. The main characters are a miniature Edwardian family called the Clocks because they live underneath one. The father, Pod, his wife, Homily, and their daughter, Arietty, are so small they fit under the floorboards of a human-sized house.
All their ingenuity is devoted to adapting their smallness to the world of Big People while preventing them from being “seen” by them. Everything they use must be “borrowed” from the bigger world and adapted to their circumstances. Matchboxes become dressers and chests of drawers; postage stamps serve as wall hangings and pictures; a thimble does duty as a soup tureen, while an actual tureen becomes a bathtub.
The discovery of a fully furnished doll’s house has become an occasion for wholesale redecoration. A crisis comes when Arietty is “seen” by the human Boy who lives above them, and they must make a decision.
Puffin Classics: the definitive collection of timeless stories, for every child.
'Don't move!' said a voice, and the voice, like the eye, was enormous but somehow, hushed - and hoarse like a surge of wind through the grating on a stormy night in March. Arrietty froze. 'So this is it,' she thought, 'the worst and most terrible thing of all: I have been "seen"!
The Borrowers live in the secret places of quiet old houses; behind the mantelpiece, inside the harpsichord, under the kitchen clock. They own nothing, borrow everything, and never forget their most important rule: you must never,…
With E.R. Eddison’s book, the hook is identity. I love that the major characters are all avatars, manifestations of each other, and that they don’t know it is the underlying mystery Eddison wants the reader to discover without being told.
All of his men derive from the godlike Mezentius, and all his women derive from the Goddess. Their lives and characters intertwine the real and imaginary worlds of Earth and Zimizmvia. The human Lady Mary is the real-world avatar of the Zimiamvian goddess Fiorinda, who is the lover of Duke Barganax, who is the otherworld personification of the real-world Lessingham, widower of Lady Mary and lover of the Zimizmvian princess Antiope.
If you start to get confused, you are on the right track! Eddison aims to confuse, mystify, and enter you all simultaneously.
In this second book of the Zimiamvian Trilogy, the royal guests at A Fish Dinner in Memison amuse themselves with the creation of a sadly flawed world … and in an instant spend a lifetime in it.
Ursula Le Guin’s book uses gender identity to address reader estrangement. I love that Le Guin ruthlessly runssacks all our preconceptions, interrogates the assumptions we mistake for laws, and deconstructs conventional notions of what makes a viable society.
The locale is the planet of Winter, where it is always either cold or colder. There is sex but no gender, and individuals can father a child or give birth to one. This circumstance becomes endlessly confusing to Genly Ai, the male visitor from planet Earth, who doesn’t know how to respond to his guide and benefactor Estraven or even what pronoun to use.
It isn’t that he gets the signals wrong, it’s that there are no signals and he doesn’t know how to navigate without them—learning how to respond to people as individuals instead of gendered types.
50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION-WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELL AND A NEW AFTERWORD BY CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
Ursula K. Le Guin's groundbreaking work of science fiction-winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants' gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters...
Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an…
Russell Hoban’s slim (c. 250 pp) novel is a unique futuristic dystopian science fiction political satire fantasy about the re-discovery of gunpowder in a post-nuclear Holocaust England, where disaster has regressed to the Stone Age.
I know no other book like it, and as a reading experience, it can’t be beaten. There are discoveries on every page. Its characters are hunter-gatherers controlled by a shadow government of Punch and Judy puppeteers who are trying to promote another nuclear war. Its hero is Riddley Walker, a 12-year-old 22nd-century Huck Finn. Its hook is language as miscommunication.
The art of writing has been lost and re-invented. Riddley’s phonetic misspellings of ordinary words in his journal/diary produce unintended puns and ominous misspellings and thus misreadings) of words like Parment (“Parliament”) and Hi Mincery (“High Ministry”) that portend ill for the current society’s ignorant misuse of them.
"A hero with Huck Finn's heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy...Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and-this matters most-intensely ponderable." -Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review "This is what literature is meant to be." -Anthony Burgess "Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style...The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." -Anthony Thwaite, Observer "Extraordinary...Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time." -Michael Dirda,…
When I first read this book in 1957, I had the now-impossible experience of reading a book I had never heard of by an unknown author. It was an unforgettable and unrepeatable experience, and I’ve never lost the sheer wonder of that discovery, even though it has now become the unintended inspiration for all of the sword-and-sorcery fantasies and little-guy-with-a-big-mission sagas that weigh down the shelves of today’s bookstores.
Several things distinguish it from its hapless descendants. 1. It's writing: Tolkien’s ability to change the tone from down-to-earth vernacular to the language of high medieval romance cannot be matched by his successor. 2. Its integrity: the book draws on his own previously created and entirely consistent Silmarillion legendarium mythology to create a different yet familiar world the reader can enter. 3. Its range moves seamlessly from low comedy to high tragedy and effortlessly mixes the mundane with the mysterious.
Readers who entered Tolkien’s Middle-earth in the mid-fifties didn’t know what they were getting into. The fact that we now know doesn’t change the book. It just gives us more reasons to read it.
This brand-new unabridged audio book of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of J. R. R. Tolkien's epic adventure, The Lord of the Rings, is read by the BAFTA award-winning actor, director and author, Andy Serkis.
In a sleepy village in the Shire, a young hobbit is entrusted with an immense task. He must make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ruling Ring of Power - the only thing that prevents the Dark Lord Sauron's evil dominion.
Thus begins J. R. R. Tolkien's classic tale of adventure, which continues in…
When a professional folklorist and his girlfriend venture into the remote seacoast countryside in pursuit of elusive storytellers, guarding an oral tradition untouched by the modern world, they are about to discover a place where the tales they seek are not just legends––they are real, and so are the perils.
My book seamlessly blends the boundary between imagination and reality, calling readers into a spell-bound tapestry of fantastical creatures, enchanted forests, and age-old secrets. Every step taken reveals deeper layers of magic and danger as the couple becomes entwined in a web of ancient prophecies and timeless mysteries.
Bold, funny, and shockingly honest, Ambidextrous is like no other memoir of 1950s urban childhood.
Picano appears to his parents and siblings to be a happy, cheerful eleven-year-old possessed of the remarkable talent of being able to draw beautifully and write fluently with either hand. But then he runs into the mindless bigotry of a middle school teacher who insists that left-handedness is "wrong," and his idyllic world falls apart.
He uncovers the insatiable appetites of a trio of neighboring sisters, falls for another boy with a glue-sniffing habit, and discovers the hidden world of adult desire and hypocrisy. Picano…
Bold, funny, and shockingly honest, Ambidextrous is like no other memoir of 1950s urban childhood. Picano appears to his parents and siblings to be a happy, cheerful eleven-year-old, possessed of the remarkable talent of being able to draw beautifully and write fluently with either hand. But then he runs into the mindless bigotry of a middle school teacher who insists that left-handedness is "wrong," and his idyllic world falls apart. He uncovers the insatiable appetites of a trio of neighboring sisters, falls for another boy with a glue-sniffing habit, and discovers the hidden world of adult desire and hypocrisy. Picano…