Growing up in Los Angeles, I am well familiar with strange, grotesque, illogical, and wonderful cities. My love of fantasy has always been for the odd ones out, less the bucolic farmlands and forest, more for those that present a twisted mirror of modern urban life. As an amateur lover of history, I love to study the evolution, mutation, and decay of cities. I find most interesting cities, in both real life and fantasy, to be those shaped by not one single culture, but by many over history and space.
What if a city… but with bugs? Okay on paper a city full of giant sentient bugs seems weird, and well, it is, but once you accept the premise, it’s easy to get immersed in the dreamlike world Krohn paints.
Tainaron: Mail From Another City is an epistolary novel, that is, told only in letters by a human traveler to the city, and if you cut out the references to giant flowers and bug parades, it could be mistaken for non-fiction.
Unlike most fantasy novels, Tainaron is not plot focused, there’s no big villain to stop, no magical artifacts to destroy, just the tale of a woman out of place, and her musing on life, death, sorrow, and philosophy, as she spends a year trying to fit in a city literally not built for her.
TAINARON: Mail From Another City is the first American publication by the internationally acclaimed Finnish author, Leena Krohn. TAINARON consists of a series of letters sent beyond the sea from a city of insects. TAINARON is a book of changes. It speaks of metamorphoses that test all of nature from a flea to a star, from stone and grass to a human. The same irresistible force that gives us birth, also kills us. Nominated for the prestigious Finlandia prize, this is the perfect introduction to the work of a modern fabulist.
After reading The Enormous Egg as a child, I’ve been devoted to stories where the strange, the uncanny, and the magical are all elements of the worlds characters must negotiate. I’m most drawn to fiction containing seemingly unreal elements because, in my experience, that is reality. Those moments when the past suddenly feels present, or when you glimpse something at the edge of your vision that feels significant, but you can’t quite catch it. Moments when anything is possible. No surprise that I write fiction that explores those moments of uncertainty and leaves the reader unmoored, thinking about the people and their experiences long after they’ve left the book.
I wish publishers translated more fantastical fiction from around the world. This collection by Mexican authors offers a buffet of the weird, fabulist, and otherworldly.
The translated prose is masterful. Many stories draw the distant, decaying realm lying between life and death, directly and viscerally, into the homes and lives of the characters.
Anthologies can often suffer from an unevenness between authors, but this collection is consistently surprising and offers something for any reader of fabulist fiction.
A huge, energetic, and ambitious groundbreaking anthology from emerging and established Mexican authors which showcases all-new supernatural folktales, alien incursions, ghost stories, apocalyptic narratives, and more. Stereotypes of Mexican identities and fictions are identified and transcended. Traditional tales rub shoulders with mindbending new worlds. Welcome to the new Mexican fantastic. Eduardo Jimenez Mayo's translations include books by Bruno Estanol, Rafael Perez Gay, and Jose Maria Perez Gay. Chris N. Brown lives in Austin, Texas. He is a contributor to the blog No Fear of the Future. Bruce Sterling lives in Turin, Italy, and blogs at Wired's Beyond the Beyond.
I enjoy stories with morals & adventure! The animal kingdom has always been a favourite of children around the world, and a perfect way of conveying these fables without boring the reader. My particular love for foxes has always been there but also extends to other forest creatures. They are always my first choice when picking a book that kids will love and also for my video game designs.
The theme of this book is universal. Many of us have always desired more and find little solace in what we have, when what we have is truly all we need. The Whale Who Wanted More reflects a society that needs too much of everything and never has enough. The book tells the story of not living the life one should and depriving ourselves of real happiness only because we think we need more. Humphrey the whale wonders in the deep blue too busy and stressed to think about what he really wants in life.
A stunning undersea tale of friendship, community and discovery from the bestselling creators of The Lion Inside.
Under glittering waves of a vast ocean blue, a beautiful world is hidden from view. And there, in the cool and the quiet of the deep, a great, gentle giant was stirring from sleep . . .
Humphrey the whale is on a quest: to find the one perfect object that will make him feel complete. He roams far and wide, gathering endless undersea treasure as he goes. Yet, no matter how many goodies he accumulates, Humphrey still doesn't feel content. Could it…
As an author/illustrator of 26 books for children and a full-time teacher of 3 year old’s in a nursery school. I read 1-2 books to a classroom of little critics every day. I’m also a lover of adventure although most of my adventures take place in my mind, the library or museum! As a storyteller, I love seeing the adventures books can take young readers on.
A little piece wonders if he belongs to one of the bigger pieces. His adventure of self-discovery leads him to the island of Wham! With abstract ideas and characters like one-who- runs, strong-one, and swimming-one, children usually identify with the characters, especially Pezzettino being little. I often hear children “playing” this story during recess after I read it to my class.
A classic fable about the search for identity, from Caldecott Honor winning picture book creator Leo Lionni.
Pezzettino lives in a world in which everyone is big and does daring and wonderful things. But he is small, just a “little piece,” which is the meaning of pezzettino in Italian. “I must be a piece of somebody. I must belong to someone else,” he thinks. How Pezzettino learns that he belongs to no one but himself is the joyous and satisfying conclusion to this beautiful mosaic style picture book.
Like Matasha, my eleven-year-old heroine, I am the product of a big-city Midwestern 1970s childhood. I was a rabid reader who always felt that books made the world make more sense. Now as then, I am drawn to characters who are allowed to be complicated and to endings that don’t tie things up with a tidy bow. I believe “unlikeability” in fiction is a myth. I love children’s books that show kids thinking and feeling deeply.
An elderly man goes in search of a cat to make him and his wife less lonely. He comes home with not one but millions of them: how to choose which to keep? The cats solve the problem by fighting among themselves until “they must have eaten each other all up.” But one unexpected little kitten is left….
I couldn’t have articulated this when I first sat raptly turning its pages, but Ga’g’s fable, with its handwritten text and charming 1928 black-and-white drawings, acknowledges both the ferocious and the vulnerable in children’s natures.
An American classic with a refrain that millions of kids love to chant: Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats.
Once upon a time there was an old man and an old woman who were very lonely. They decided to get a cat, but when the old man went out searching, he found not one cat, but millions and billions and trillions of cats! Unable to decide which one would be the best pet, he brought them all home.
How the old couple came to have just one cat to call their own is…
I’ve always been a child of the woods. I preferred to leave my home and wade a creek or explore a hillside. Nothing compared to the sight of a black snake or the feel of a mud puppy. School was a torture until an English teacher introduced me to Richard Brautigan and then read my first serious story to the class. Since then, this dyslexic nature lover has become a dream fisher and history miner with a Ph.D. in English Literature and Cultural Studies. Retired from forty-one years of teaching, I now write and publish cultural fiction.
I love Tom Robbins. I love his preposterous plots. I love his audacious metaphors. I love the never-ending details of one world crashing into another.
Like an 8th C King as well as a 20th C “genius waitress,” an aging “Queen of Good Smells,” and the skyscraper-housed “LeFever Parfumarie.” Spanning 13 centuries, bouncing from Bohemia to India to Paris to Seattle to New Orleans, Jitterbug Perfume wonders if Christianity will kill Pan and whether immortality is all it’s cracked up to be.
But, you ask, what about the beets? Yes, through all this Tomfoolery, Mr. Robbins loves him some natural world, and it is through the humble yet enigmatic beet that we learn to “hold onto your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end brown.” I, for one, want to stay rosy, and you, for one, should read Jitterbug Perfume.
Jitterbug Perfume is an epic. Which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn't conclude until nine o'clock tonight [Paris time]. It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle is actually the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon because it is leaking and there is…
I’m a writer and a lifelong baseball fan with a weakness for baseball-ish fiction. For a lot of folks, this means reading the usual suspects: Kinsella, Malamud, Coover, Roth, DeLillo... But I especially enjoy stumbling across under-the-radar novels that can’t help but surprise in their own ways. I enjoy this so much, in fact, I went out and wrote one of my own – inspired by the life and career of an all-but-forgotten ballplayer from the 1880s named Fred “Sure Shot” Dunlap, one of the greats of the game in his time. In the stuff of his life there was the stuff of meaning and moment… of the sort you’ll find in the books I’m recommending here.
I was working as a flak at Simon & Schuster when this book came out, and I helped to write the flap copy, so it feels to me like I had a hand in it. As an aspiring writer, I remember admiring the hell out of this novel. On a recent re-read, as a grizzled, wizened veteran writer, I still do. Hays gives us a collection of memorable characters, and a wild, vagabonding tale that offers a glimpse at minor league life in the deep South. There’s humor and heartache and all that good stuff.
An account of a season with baseball team, the Arkansas Reds. Their line-up includes an ex-con first baseman, a couple of real Reds on loan from Castro, young bucks on the way up and old-timers on the way down, all led by a one-armed Marxist and ex-major leaguer named Lefty.
Horror is my passion and most things I read and everything I write fits neatly into the genre. But I am also passionate about telling stories from a unique perspective, or if not entirely unique then at least one that is underused. My novella A Man in Winter is told from the perspective of an elderly chap with dementia for instance. I have also found that many people think books with child protagonists must be children’s books and it makes me sad to think of all the wonderful work is being missed out on, I hope that my list has convinced you to try one of the above books.
My mum read this book to me when I was little, so I think it will always hold a special place in my heart for that reason.
But even re-reading it as an adult I can say that it is a marvellous story. The imagery is spectacular, Harvey’s night as a vampire especially stays with me due to the vivid imagery. As well as the ‘creatures in the pond’ (trying to not spoil anything too badly here). Overall, it’s a well written, imaginative story that sucks you in and holds you tightly right up to the end.
I’m a practical, straight-talking New Zealander who has lived in the UK since 2007. I’ve coached managers for over a decade, and one thing they all have in common is that they want to develop and empower their teams. What I love the most about my work is seeing the ‘aha’ moments unfold when they work out a path that is right for them. I’ve chosen these books for the ‘aha’ moments they sparked in me, and I hope they do the same for you.
I love the big message in this book, which is to focus more on finding the right question instead of the right answer.
I read the intro before going into a coaching session and used the idea of question-thinking with the person I was coaching. We looked at the questions she was asking herself as she went into a meeting with her maternity cover and together we turned those into positive and curious ones. She later came back and told me it worked, and the meeting went much better than she thought it would. Personally, I’ve gotten a lot of benefits from noticing when I’m asking myself judger questions and turning those into learner ones instead. Read the book to find out what I mean.
Discover how the questions we ask ourselves and others can either expand our mindsets and open us up to exciting new possibilities or constrict our mindsets and limit our choices for successful change.
Change Your Questions, Change Your Life is an international bestseller that has sold over 400,000 copies in twenty-two languages. People have discovered that, when we’re looking for answers, we often forget to take the time to ask the right questions. But, as Dr. Marilee Adams shows, intentionally using questions helps us make wiser choices, find solutions, and transform our personal and professional lives.
I'm a poet and creative mentor, and it’s the intensity of poetic language – its expansiveness and limitations – that shows up in my fiction and in the novels I love. Quinnis an exploration of male violence, incarceration, and radical forgiveness. I’ve spent a decade working with long-term prisoners in Scotland, trying to understand and come to terms with notions of justice and responsibility: does guilt begin and end with the perpetrator of a violent act or are we all in some way culpable? How can literary form dig into this question aslant? Can the unsettled mind be a space for innovative thinking?
Repila (b.1978) is a Spanish writer, whose work was recommended to me by a UK publisher: “The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse is a work of mythic genius that portrays tragic inevitability in a quite terrifyingly awesome way (I mean awesome in the archaic sense)."
The book tells the story of two brothers – Big and Small – trapped in a deep well and slowly starving to death. The language is precise and gut-wrenching, but the narrative reaches beyond its own particulars – compelling as they are – to work as a furious allegory of inequality and injustice.
What I love about the book is precisely this combination: one visceral scene in a well becomes a global commentary on the shadow side of the human.
'It looks impossible to get out,' he says. And also: 'But we'll get out.'
Two brothers, Big and Small, are trapped at the bottom of a well. They have no food and little chance of rescue. Only the tempting spectre of insanity offers a way out. As Small's wits fail, Big formulates a desperate plan.
With the authority of the darkest fables, and the horrifying inevitability of all-too-real life, Repila's unique allegory explores the depths of human desperation and, ultimately, our almost unending capacity for hope.
